Art & Scholarship
New Archives, issue 1
This issue starts with a question that has been a lifelong obsession:
Where does history go when it is unremembered?
Things happen, people live, art publications begin. Then, an inevitability: these things end, people die. And if no one had the time or resources to write it down, where do these things go?
If the first law of thermodynamics dictates that energy cannot be created or destroyed, where does the energy that starts and sustains projects live when the projects are over — especially the frenetic, electric kind of energy it takes to begin under-resourced arts projects by already over-committed people? Does it just float in the air around us, drifting in the breeze, waiting for the right person to go by so that it can attach itself to them — like a snowflake on a peacoat — inspiring them to do something so similar to what was done before?
How else to explain the cyclical nature of our work? Siloed by time and geographies, we replicate and build on one another’s ideas without knowing, entering the river midstream, and leaving in the same way. In a recent conversation with artist Monyee Chau, local artist and arts writer Alan Lau said:
“We don’t start from where we are;
there’s always been someone before us.”
It is in honor of this observation that we dedicate our first issue to the exploration of Art & Scholarship, both being defined loosely by our contributors, while paying special attention to the things that seem not to change, generation to generation, and the large gaps that remain in the systems that decide what histories are valuable enough to document, record, and remember.
In this issue:
- A short essay and four audio clips from Negarra A. Kudumu explore the benefits and precarity of being a scholar outside of an institution.
- A drawing from Meshell Sturgis thinks through institutional praxis as a tesseract, inviting you to fall off the dimensions of space and time and into a black hole.
- Four reviews of Hanako O’Leary’s show Yomi reveal the inherent subjectivity of an arts writer, and how that impacts the way a work is viewed and processed.
- An intergenerational conversation between Monyee Chau and Alan Lau delves into what it means to build a life’s practice around community-centered ethics, and
- A still in-progress essay from Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud delves into the differences between arts scholarship, journalism, and criticism — as well as a brief regional history of these mediums.
True collectivity doesn’t seem possible in a society that predicates our survival on working alone, pitted against one another, under the weight of a responsibility we have been conditioned to believe we must bear alone. The myth of our individual exceptionalism and originality is one that was made to isolate us from one another, because it encourages us to look at the world ahistorically (as we must if we are to believe ourselves original), and to see those with similar skills and ideas as threats rather than collaborators.
But what if take all of that out of the question? What if Matt and I moved forward with the notion that New Archives isn’t exceptional or brilliant, but just admit what we are: a solid idea, done relatively well, but not any more or less special than the dozens (hundreds?) of regional arts publications that have existed before us and exist now.
What then?
Then we are not two people starting a new, industry-changing venture that we must do perfectly or not at all. We are two people amongst dozens who are all having a broad, nuanced, and much more interesting conversation than we could ever have alone — and we are just a cute and silly little part of it. And when we fold, we fold knowing that the work goes on, with or without us, and what a relief.
In the meantime, we are here. Working late nights and early mornings to get our little project to you. An archive that is only new in the sense that, even if all these ideas have lived numerous lives before, we have forgotten them. And I want nothing more than to try to remember.
–Satpreet Kahlon, editor
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If you read this issue and think of something you would like to contribute that is missing from our exploration of Art & Scholarship, please reach out to us at . We are thinking of our issues as living documents that new viewpoints and thoughts are added to over time.
background: Hanako O'Leary, Venus Jar 12: I Accept (Izanami Series), clay, 24 x 15 x 20", 2019. Photo: Sarah D King Photography.