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