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Almost Close to Nearly Nothing





The question of Nothing in this issue is not figured with a claim to absence. Rather, its figuration, how Nothing is figured, is the trouble at hand. A painting by Mou In Yao reads, “AH-...” and then “STOP IT,” atop a surface of hot wax drippings. “AH-...STOP IT” embodies an attitude towards the techniques and thematics explored in this issue and over the last 3/4 century or so, ad nauseum. Preoccupations such as post-painterly abstraction, concrete poetry, bricolage and themes such as weakness, holes, barriers etcetera et et etcetera, etcetera were approached with equal measures of repulsion and attraction, looking for contemporary work that builds on historical avant gardes and questions them, works to which we say, and which say back to us, “AH-...STOP IT”: a rebuke that is just as much a groan of pleasure. 

Take, for example, Gaia Del Santo’s black essie series (after Frank Stella), not paintings but which recall paintings, are almost painting, or almost close to paint, but also just as equally almost close to an empty room. Work like this, or Simon Risi’s images, reproduced products of his installation where he programmed five printers to print out the average color palettes of art gallery websites worldwide, occupy the 70# Accent Opaque Text Block Paper as a sequence of pages as much as it is also a sequence of spaces. 

The question of Almost is as necessary as the question of Nothing in the issue. Friedrich Shlegel writes in Critical Fragments that he is “disappointed in not finding in Kant’s concepts the category ‘almost,’ a category that has accomplished, and spoiled, as much in the world and in literature as any other.” Nothingness is figured in almosts—Julia Petrocelli’s Drawings on napkins that are almost paper, made of debris and ephemera that are nearly trash, or Matt Town’s Biminis, which only nearly shelter their content. 

To use a line from one of Jenkin Benson’s poems, perhaps the works in this issue execute “a trick that/nobody has ever seen or will/ever invent… it’s fucking rad.”

Almost close to very nearly absolutely and entirely a lot more but maybe a little less but really probably lots of love,

Ivy, Adrian, Lili and Julian