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  • Foreword:Visual Arts Research's Ignored Sibling
  • Jorge Lucero

Dear longtime reader of Visual Arts Research,

This may be the strangest issue of Visual Arts Research that you have ever seen. We publish twice a year, and those two issues usually include a guest-edited special topic issue and—what we call—an open issue. This is that open issue, although after looking at it, you might surmise that someone brought these authors together under a specific theme.

This issue of VAR is supposed to be a theme-less issue, a mere example of the fine work being done at this moment in visual arts and visual arts education research. But something has happened, serendipitously, I suppose, that makes it appear as if this open issue's theme is form, the frequently ignored sibling of content in academic journals. The authors included in this issue have taken on the form of research and the form of the presentation (or reporting) of that research and—for lack of a better way to put it—messed with it. There are some real experiments in the form(s) of the final papers that might leave readers scratching their heads.

One piece in particular (Powell, Ballengee-Morris, Garoian, & Cornwall) is an extraordinary exercise in testing the pliability of the academic journal. I have to call this "paper" a "piece" because—although it is constructed of words and "written" by extraordinary art education scholars—it functions much more like an artwork than an academic paper. The authors have taken on the challenge of scholarship when it is confronted with the materiality of the page, and the subsequent publishing of those pages. That piece will demand your patience, but I promise that if you study it, the payoff will be truly phenomenological. You will [End Page v] not only have understood what is being presented, but you'll have experienced it, and therefore you will understand it in a manner that is unique to the moment when you came across those pages.

Two other pieces in this issue work in a similar manner, although you might say that you understand them because you are familiar with the legibility of images. They are equally phenomenological. You need to "feel" them. Jeff Horwat's piece is almost exclusively made of images. I encourage the reader to give these pages time. Allow yourself the distinct experience of wading through the images. Yes, the pages have a linearity to them, but don't hesitate to go back and forth through the piece. Come back to the pages casually, seriously, with time, or when you don't have time. Horwat's images sit in this issue like they would in a gallery. Feel free to saunter through the space that they occupy.

Ebony Flowers created the other image-heavy piece. This piece makes a great bridge between forms. Perhaps this would be the piece that I would invite you to look at first, as a way to prime the pump and get you ready to look at the rest of the collection. Flowers presents us with a mode of consumption/study for her piece but also for the rest of this issue: "Pay attention to my work as you would a comic strip, zine, or picture book. … Look at my pictures until you notice something you may not have noticed right away."

You may have noticed that Daniel Smith's book review is placed first in the whole issue. I know this "type" of article is usually placed at the end of a journal, but we asked the speculative question: What if the book review was first? Perhaps you might think that the editors of VAR are paying attention to how "first" is seen as much more important than last, and we're attempting to—in an act of criticality—"flip the script." I think it's less easy than that. I think of Smith's piece as more on a par with this editorial, in terms of size. Smith's piece is the smallest piece in this issue and therefore formally goes better with this small introduction. You can see in other journals (e.g., Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy...

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