The isolation was very real, and was certainly geographical, but it was also... how should I put it? Spiritual, I guess. And in the long run, very much self-imposed. Now, when I think about it... hmmm... let's say that instead of either bemoaning, or even celebrating some sort of “marginality”, we wanted to really reject the whole thing... art history, and all that... if you reject the centre as being a centre, then there can't be any margin, really... the page isn't really there, it's invented by people who like to see their names typed out, black on white, in some book.1 Geographic isolation is only one measure of cultural distancing from metropolitan centers. It is inescapably obvious that most artists the world over live in art communities that are formed by a relentless provincialism. Their worlds are replete with tensions between two antithetical terms: a defiant urge to localism (a claim for the possibility and validity of “making good, original art right here”) and a reluctant recognition that the generative innovations in art, and the criteria for standards of “quality,” “originality,” “interest,” “ forcefulness,” etc., are determined externally. Far from encouraging innocent art of naive purity, untainted by “too much history and too much thinking,” provincialism, in fact, produces highly self-conscious art “obsessed with the problem of what its identity ought to be.” 2 (Art) has retained its freedom from the reality principle at the price of being ineffective in reality.3
In 1975, after several years of working together, a group of unknown artists in rural southwestern New Brunswick realized one of their last collective artworks, Inside Joke Piece. It consisted of "an undocumented series of communications from participant to participant of a single joke, the 'content' of which is unknown to all those except for the participants."4 The function and reception of Inside Joke Piece, which given its hermetic nature was practically non-existent, mirror to a certain extent, the function and reception of the movement that produced it, which I will be calling at the risk of oversimplifying, "Charlotte County conceptualism." The fact that, until recently, no-one had ever heard of this ultra-peripheral movement is perhaps evident, but nevertheless bears expounding upon, not least because the desire to remedy this state of extreme peripherality constitutes the initial raison d'être of my project.5 64
In recent years and in many areas, both inside of the academy and out, there has been a resurgence of interest in movements and events previously forgotten about or simply not deemed interesting enough to merit study and reflection. Of course this fixation with the "marginal" is nothing new, and is in some sense the felicitous progeniture of Marxism, feminism, gender studies and psychoanalysis being integrated into art history and comparative literature programmes over the past few decades. And so with this in mind, I throw my own worn towel onto the heap of already closely picked-apart details of past events and actions in the world. However, a slight qualification is in order. As you may have noticed in the title of this article, I have eschewed the term "marginal" for that of "para-marginal". The word "marginal" is first attested in the late 19th century, unsurprisingly from "margin," as in the margin of a page, itself from the Latin "margo," meaning edge or boundary.6 So, when we speak of things that find themselves at the margins of art history, we are evoking phenomena that are essentially as far from the centre of the page as possible. But they still are, of course, inscribed somewhere on the page. The reason that I chose "para-marginality" is that my subject was not to be found on any page and could not therefore, to my mind, be deemed marginal. Until recently, it had been quite far from the page, though in the past year, I might optimistically say that Charlotte County conceptualism is beside the page, or perhaps in a nearby drawer. Hence: para-marginality. But even something far from the page can have its own paratext—and though the para-marginal is outside of the page, its paratext might be found on it, which is I suppose, what I am trying to reify here. It must be said that in researching the past activities of this milieu, I am in some sense, de-paramarginalizing them, or at least beginning a process of possible de-paramarginalization. Certain questions come to mind: What effect will this have? How will it change things said and done in the (relatively) distant past? Can the fact of recounting this history become part of the history recounted, and if so, how? These are some of the questions I hope to address in this article. Improbably (or not), a key might be found in the ideas of Harold Marcuse. Improbably because he is the grandson of Herbert Marcuse, member of the Frankfurt school and celebrated "Father of the New Left," whose ideas had considerable currency among the members of the Charlotte County group (as was the case with many young idealists at the time). The younger Marcuse, a history professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, offers on his quite attractive website a definition of reception history, that is, "the history of the meanings that have been imputed to historical events, (tracing) the different ways in which par-