Paul Blanchard,
“Letter 'S' Road: Remarks on Site, ART OMI, Omi, NY,” Tema Celeste (Autumn, 1992)

To have an order of any kinds, the world must first be articulated into more or less clearly distinguishable units that can be put in systematic relation to one another. And naming is the primary and highly elaborate means for doing so. Duped by this fundamental activity of the mind, one tends to believe one is living in a meaningful world that is ordered from the very beginning, inherently and objectively structured in a definite way, with things, attributes, states and processes definitely determined by their essences. In truth, however, this seemingly intrinsic order of the world is a subjective fabrication. Immediate reality, what is initially given, is a welter of sense impressions, a tremendous tangle of incoherent and elusive sense-data. Left in this original state, experience of the world “makes no sense.” Indeed the word “world” makes no sense, for “world” just means a meaningful whole of all things.

This exhibition, curated by Barry Schwabsky in the context of the first annual Art/Omi International Artist’s Workshop, and featuring works by L.C. Armstrong, Jill Baroff, Gretchen Faust and Kevin Warren, Rainer Ganahl, Joan Jonas, Alain Kirili, Suzanne McClelland, Mike Metz, and Carol Szymanski, draws attention to this essential bond between language and perception. The show takes its inspiration from an observation by Zizek to the effect that any series of marks contains at least one that functions as “empty” or “asemic”, which re-marks the differential space of the inscription of marks. All the works in the show, some more successfully than others (Faust and Warren’s trodden cicular path, particularly, comes to mind), succeed in the endeavor to combine landscape and non-landscape under the designation marked sites, compelling viewers to acknowledge the paradoxical relation between work and site.