Marginalia and Pliability
Rent from DeepDyve- Marginalia and Pliability
I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, nor firm place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no “sacred and primordial site.” I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength then “melt into the air.”
—Lebbeus Woods (1993/2011, pp. 411–412)
What is this issue about?
I started off thinking that I wanted to make a book that worked like a collage.
How so? What do you mean when you say collage?
When I think about collage I think very simply. I do not assume craft or rigor come into play. A collage is a mere juxtaposition: two disparate components placed near each other. I wanted to make a book that captured this type of “ease.” In some ways, I thought that it would be interesting for the book to be a mere folio, ideally with interchangeable pages or sections so the reader could make his or her own sequencing and pairings.
So how does this issue of Visual Arts Research (VAR) do that?
Well, I put out a call for something that I thought was somewhat unserious. I asked contributors to submit short works that had been either forgotten or did not cleanly fit into their research portfolios—marginalia, if you will. Of course, this became a very serious proposal almost immediately because it turned out that this type of “call” was intriguing to many practitioners and [End Page vii] researchers in the visual arts and its education. The response to the call—which was originally meant as irreverent—made its eventual manifestation much more important. The issue accomplishes the collage mode-of-opera-tion—not through its content—but rather through the attitude I took in its construction.
You say that it is much more important now that it exists. Can you explain that a bit?
Well, I think that this happens mostly because the process of making this compilation of short pieces (what I have been calling “tidbits”) evolved into a curatorial process and that raised the challenge of finding out how pliable an academic journal could be. At some point—once all 110 had been examined—I was presented with an unusual task, which was to find some sort of synthesis (however loose) between the variety of works that had been accepted.
Did it work? I mean, did you find that synthesis?
Actually I decided not to make it “work” in any conventional sense. I do think that it carries some synthesis, but I have taken it out of my hands by placing the articles in alphabetical order according to the first author’s last name. When I first laid out all the submissions, I was attracted to some more than others. I found that there was a high incidence of a certain kind of ABER (Arts Based Educational Research) submission, and it made me wonder what circumstances led to that. I started to look for the submissions where it appeared that the author really took the spirit of the call to heart. By this I mean that the authors were sensitive to the nuance, as well as the arbitrariness, of the call and they responded to its freedom. Submissions that were playing with the possibilities of the call to make an “easy” submission were first. But then in the end, there were not enough of those “marginalia-type” of submissions, so I had to redirect. I started asking myself, How many of these pieces are testing the pliability of our collective publishing practice as artists, researchers, and educators? Some contributors tested the pliability of these things through form, others through content, but many did it through both. Ultimately “testing the pliability” of a journal entry became the marker for which pieces made...
