It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image & Text Work by Women Artists & Writers

A marvelously bold interdisciplinary anthology, It Is Almost That collects works by women artists and writers who have constructed hybrid environments that merge image and text. The works in this collection are supremely imaginative in both form and content: from the semi-autobiographical novel painted by a young artist who died in the Holocaust (Charlotte Salomon) to Alison Knowles' computer-generated chance operation for "imagining" houses and their inhabitants; from the pseudo-scientific examination of a conversation between a mother and a daughter (Eleanor Antin) to the dark, comic interrogation of violence against women (Sue Williams); from the transformations of newspaper headlines (Suzanne Treister) to the probing of animal consciousness (Cole Swensen & Shari De Graw); from the body maps drawn by South African women with AIDS (Bambanani Women's Group) to the alchemical transformation of the pregnant body into an evolving landscape and philosophical meditation (Susan Hiller). Other contributors to It Is Almost That include Fiona Banner, Louise Bourgeois, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cozette de Charmoy, Ann Hamilton, Jane Hammond, Dorothy Iannone, Bhanu and Rohini Kapil, Helen Kim, Ketty La Rocca, Bernadette Mayer, Adrian Piper, Charlotte Salomon, Geneviève Seillé, Molly Springfield, Erica Van Horn & Laurie Clark, Carrie Mae Weems, Hannah Weiner and Unica Zürn.

Intuitively and practically speaking, This Is Almost That is, in effect, a handbook. It, by presenting female art history, shows us how to be an artist. Each career here, whether its arc is short or long, presents a new kind of way. (Eileen Miles Poetry Foundation)

The title of this surprising collection of image/text works by twenty-five female visual artists and writers is a phrase borrowed from a 1977 artwork by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. As Lisa Pearson writes in her afterword, It Is Almost That describes "the humming state of the not-quite this and not quite that," namely, "what familiar taxonomies cannot order." Hak Kyung Cha's piece-composed of faltering phrases projected on black-and-white slides-points to the provisional nature of language and speech. While Pearson's penchant for this open, indeterminate state might seem at first to evoke categories like ecriture feminine, twentieth-century Language-school poetry, or non-diegetic experimental filmmaking, her selections, works produced over a span of seventy-one years from Charlotte Salomon's 1940 visual novel Life? Or Theater? A Song Play to Bhanu & Rohini Kapil's 2011 India Notebooks, defy easy classification.
Chris Kraus - Bookforum, Jun. 6, 2011 (Chris Kraus Bookforum)

Pearson outlines her own gender philosophies in art, along with the criteria for her self-confessed "surprising selection," omitting "obvious choices," to create an introspective, free-flowing collection that "will incite more questions than answers." Such is the nature of art, and a testament to this fine anthology. (Publisher's Weekly)