This issue I began with the title: see-through. see-through is a windscreen, eyeglasses, the gallery window: especially from outside, especially at night. see-through, I hoped, would be a step-back for some perspective, a second glance with another pair of eyes. Framework is our UNSW A&D uni publication. I wanted to start here: deliberately and with immediacy to address, communicate and share with each other as peers. Consider: in a first year class curated by the inimitable Nic Foo, I begin developing a discursive practice with my best friend and fake boyfriend Levent Kaya. Without the guise of art-lexic, this would appear to be a conversation where, over years, we return again and again to Hito Steyerl: beginning with How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, and continuing with The Wretched of the Screen.



I started thinking about see-through in the screen, because images and visual culture are so deeply embedded in the way we talk about art in this institution. This piece of glass, and what Steyerl calls liquid crystal fantasy.



In this issue of Framework our contributors consider the vitrine, the display case, the phone and its Bluetooth receiver, the car windshield and the silver screen. My painter friend Drew Connor Holland says it’s like Anne Carson in The Glass Essay

            It is as if we have all been lowered into an atmosphere of glass.

            Now and then a remark trails through the glass.



As artists and writers we use words in a very particular way: Lachie and Astrid consider the textures of glass – richly couched in structures of vocabulary to explicate something deeply felt: making new ways of seeing from abstracted materials. When I first got to art school I was very confused to learn what could be “speculative” or “affective” or “fetish”. I’ll never forget in a studio art practice class when someone used the wrong word to describe their work. The word was “existential” to which Fernando do Campo said, “go read a Whitechapel book.”



Like a pilgrim, at my most depressed, I found myself in London with a self-imposed chemical imbalance from taking the most ecstasy anyone had ever taken at the 50th anniversary of London Pride. I dutifully visited the Whitechapel gallery and bought the book.

As you explore the issue I invite you to pay attention to the ways the contributors have explored writing and perspective. If you want to get in touch please email framework@arc.unsw.edu.au