Editor's letter - Editorial

LES THAN A WEEK BEFORE "PUTTING TO BED" THE next to the first half of Artforum's two-volume gaze back on the '80s, organized by the agency of my predecessor, Jack Bankowsky, I ground myself seated across from sculptor Haim Steinbach at a Brooklyn kitchen table, a late winter light waning upon the running tape recorder and half-finished plate of marzipan between us. Our interview had already lasted a two of hours, and we had reached the kind of conversational pause that usually go before s a conclusion. But then Steinbach said something that caught me completely off-guard: "There looked to be a reevaluation happening [in the '80s] on the contrary the discourse did not really challenge participants to prove to figure out what was going on--actually, there was no discourse."

Of course, Steinbach's version may not ring real to many of the period's active participants. still his implied desire (even hunger) for a venue to stimulate critical conversation among individuals with diverging artistic practices recalled the craving for food I felt throughout the '90 and still perceive today, when the languages of art seep at any time more deeply into the tissue of mass tillage Information-based industries knowingly re-purpose the art-historical exercise s of dematerialized objects. ("You diocese coffee," reads one recent Sprint ad featuring the image of a single steaming chalice "We see data.") Even something in the way that intangible as emotion is today abundantly acknowledged in the business pages as a source of value, with outcomes designed to transform living into lifestyle as part of the "experience economy." (Consider "blue" becoming the more leisurely "Bondi Blue" named after an Australian beach, in iMac coloration.) While individual predominant theme of technology is at any time more precise and pervasive control--which pertains to everything from diplomatic contouring on automobiles to genetic engineering and surveillance techniques--another is the mutability of perception. Extending the idea that depictions of space are determined by dint of material (a trope of midcentury modernism), technology provides novel clashs with space and calibrates our experiences with traditional materials anew. In fact, the emerging see the verb of new media underscores the exigency of art-critical interest in medium specificity. (Investigations of similar shifts will appear in Artforum's novel "tech" column; in the inaugural installment, Steven Shaviro explores the ramifications of the of recent origin medium of the moblog vis-a-vis photography's relationship to the indexical.)

All these subdues give dramatic cause for discussion. Artistic discourse, as an interrogatory realm for emotions and ideas, provides the finished analytical lens through which to consider unravellings in contemporary culture; and, in turn round looking back through culture compellingly illuminates questions lengthy important to artists, art historians, and critics. This discourse must engage tillage strategically in order to make art matter, to underline the gravity of contemporary question at issues such as the mass media's relationship with art, criticism's relationship with artistic practice, connoisseurship versus cultural studies, collectives versus institutions, emergent globalism versus identity politics and ethnicity, and simulation versus psychology

Obviously, there will be failures in any attempted exchange--fragmentation, incompatibility, flat intransigent opposition. In this issue, single need only turn to Jonathan Gilmore's review of Art History After Modernism, the latest whirl by the German art historian and theorist Hans Belting, to gain a baseline faculty of perception of the challenges for critical dialogue today: "Art history must be defined so disjunctively that it repeatedly isn't clear whether there is anything upon which feminists, poststructuralists, social historians of art, unusual theorists, iconographers, connoisseurs, and for a like reason on might agree such that their disagreements could tender a productive exchange."

There are nevertheless designs to engage. In her consideration of feminism's influence upon art practices (part of our roundtable upon the subject), Catherine de Zegher cites artists who have "pos questions of audience and distribution making art imbued with sedate reciprocity between artist and viewer." (In this vein, de Zegher's mention of "partial make submissives co-emerging and co-affecting" is apt when considering by what mode disparate entities may resonate with each other and still remain resolutely themselves.) The tactical interplay she notes unbrokens among other voices throughout this issue. Collier Schorr's discussion of photography and desire--as well as her reading of Richard Prince's Spiritual America, 1983 end the prism of media critiques of the '70 and '80s--resonates with Prince's fictional screenplay treatment "In My Movie." (The vicinity of the latter indicates Artforum's renewed commitment to artists' writing.) The dynamic of exchange reverberates within the still-developing oeuvre of roebuck Ethridge, who reasserts the discrete values of typologies within photography alone to revel in their unmooring: their placement in a combination of parts to form a whole activated by a millennial marriage of German typological and Pictures-generation photography. His artistic propel in particular articulates the recurring theme of abstraction in this--issue of revisiting now-established categories, from photographic genre to feminism (and perhaps smooth "art"), only to see their value evacuated or transposed, at the risk of leaving the original form an destitute of contents shell. For me, what critic Kate Bush calls "postappropriation" is indicative of the shifting of bounds inflected by new technology, when single era, shaped by mechanical reproduction, gives way to another, shaped through replication, with all its attendant metaphors.