Re-introducing ourselves, slowly

All the pieces in this issue of Visual Arts Research were written, reviewed, and revised while most of us were holed up in our homes trying to simultaneously teach our students remotely and our own kids at the dining room table. Somehow, we found time to assemble our thoughts and write through them in between the blurred gestures of disinfecting our groceries and answering work e-mails in our pajamas. We cooked and baked; researched and made art; walked and binged TV; administered all sorts of business and Zoomed ourselves into an altered state of consciousness.

As I was nearing the final touch-ups of this issue, I was sitting in my university office for the first time in over 18 months. I received a text message from a graduate student asking if I had printed out the posters they needed for the outdoor children’s art school we host at the university during the summer. I replied by telling the student that I happened to be in my office and suggested that if they, too, were on campus, we could print them together. As it happens, this student was right down the hall from where I was and said they could easily come over. What fortune! It had been a long time since an administrative task could be completed simply by someone poking their head into my office and me saying, “Let’s take care of this right now.” But here we were—both fully vaccinated—talking in person in my office, going over the logistics and easily deciding what the next step would be. At one point, the student looked around my office and, pointing out books on my shelves, said, “Wow. I’ll have to come back some other time!” At this moment, I incredulously asked this student (whom I have known for a year and a half, and have taught for two consecutive semesters): “Is this the first time we’re meeting in person?” Astonished and half-laughing at the absurdity of what I was asking, we both exclaimed, “Yes, it is!” Yes, this was the very first time—after almost 2 years of their graduate program—that I was seeing how tall this person was, how they expressed themselves with their hands, how they moved, and what their non-video-mediated aura was.

It was more than a little mind-blowing.

I do not actually know if we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

I certainly know that the emergence of hope—about the global pandemic of 2020/2021 being over—is uneven at best, depending on what part of the world one happens to be standing in. So I have no pronouncements to make about us getting back to our usual business in terms of the professoriate and the customs of pedagogy that we have crescendoed ourselves into over the last couple of centuries. I think we will remain unsettled for a long time, and when we finally do settle, what we have settled on might not be recognizable.

I recognize that we are forever changed and still, at least one thing has stayed the same. Before the internet, the production of an academic journal was already being done remotely and slowly. Visual Arts Research has only been putting out two issues a year since way before e-mail existed. I suppose somethings need slowness. Maybe even—as one of my teachers, Matthew Goulish (2000, p. 82) once wrote—some things only exist, are visible, or potentially magical through slowness. Shareable, generalizable, knowledge still takes a bit of time—and back and forth—to get to the level of being archivable. Even though the pandemic has pushed many of our practices to take on a different tempo or a different texture, or to even come to a halt, the production of this, and many other scholarly journals, kept the beat. I’m grateful for this, not because it is a semblance of our pre-pandemic “normality,” but because it is as odd as it has ever been. The practice of producing slow, peer-reviewed scholarship is a strange thing because it...