Issue 01: What Is This Foolish Desire?
Brit Barton
La Dame à la licorne: Mon seul désir (The Lady and the Unicorn: My Sole Desire/My Only Will) Postcard (backside)
La Dame à la licorne: Mon seul désir (The Lady and the Unicorn: My Sole Desire/My Only Will)
Of course, there is debate about the translation and no one can truly clarify if the text should mean to my sole desire, for my sole desire, or by my sole desire. Furthermore, among the other tapestries that intertwine virtue and experience—and surely commissioned by a nobleman—would a final meditation as ambiguously erotic as ‘desire’ be the enduring and unearthly sixth sense?
As it turns out, désir throughout literature, philosophical texts, and legal parlance in the early French Renaissance could conjure multiple meanings: volition, intention, free will, and choice. Thus, French medievalists would argue, À Mon Seul Désir might translate to one thing now but likely meant By My Only Will then. The woman remains but is no longer a vessel for sense-perception. The interpretive slippage between desire and will, self-control, or choice becomes the sixth, innate and autonomous sense.
Meaning-making is, in and of itself, its own desire.
She stands collectively with and individually against the other senses, attuned to her own determination.
***
Still on Tokyo time in September, I arrived in Berlin but was ready to return to Zurich almost immediately. Flights out to Puglia, Paris, and Chicago followed soon thereafter. Across six countries in as many weeks, I got stuck on the notion of relational forms of durational time—how the short-term informs the long, for instance.
The concept of a press had been in the works for a while; a small-scale, manageable publishing house that comments on the contemporary with permanent objects. It seemed fine and fair enough. But on the train back from Berlin, with all that urgency to leave (...despite the DB being delayed), it occurred to me that permanency is also so overrated. The temporary is just as necessary, just as valuable. Even if something doesn’t last so long, it still holds an account of meaning and momentum. Maybe it’s also that I tend to think more in sequential order. Things aren’t a means to an end, per se, but meant to be built upon one another.
I decided to start a journal that comments on the contemporary with more agility. Every two months, six texts and/or features, with writers committed to examining the collapsing architectures of art and order. Things, for now and forever probably, are tense: a war, a genocide, the fascist right, the fascist left, fake news, all the austerity measures, the constant threat to free speech or freedom of movement, not to mention the encircling pressures of make anything at all within suspicious market and institutional structures.
I tried to reason with myself about ability but kept coming back to the same ideology I’ve always held: the only antidote to despair is action.
This is what gets to the heart of contemporary art criticism—for me, anyway; that one might be able to distill a (visual) experience into varying opinions, not with a bravado of certainty but with a sensitivity to speculation. Naturally, this is as risky as it is ridiculous. There’s always a dialectic to be had and an argument to be made, but that doesn’t change the fact that a conclusion has to happen. How can you trust criticism without the critical air of conclusive certainty?
***
Issue 01:
What Is This Foolish Desire?
Five texts and one feature center on several abstract concepts of desire. The issue—like the title of the journal—is named after a line from The Piano Teacher, the film and novel, respectively. In order to expand on the exacting natures of both author Elfriede Jelinek’s masochistic prose or filmmaker Michael Haneke’s cold formalism, the artist Sanna Helena Berger joins me in a discursive exchange about translation, self-sabotage, and accidental self-diagnosis character analysis. To partner with this text, five excerpts from the late/great cultural theorist Lauren Berlant consider the affective hold of stranger intimacies, detachment, or everyday ordinary desires.
Elsewhere, three reviews consider the pitfalls of expectation: artist Max Guy reviews the enigmatic filmwork of Diego Marcon on the occasion of his U.S. debut at the Renaissance Society; cultural theorist Katharina Hausladen—with a penchant for the meta-narratives within road movies—examines Sirāt, the latest film by Óliver Laxe; finally, I navigate the nuances of the labor and silence within Niloufar Emamifar’s second solo exhibition at Progetto.
An image spread from Michael Ray-Von’s Casual Observation (2025) series of reflective, one-way mirror works closes out the issue on our issues. We are left with the persistent need to see and be seen, surveil, and hope—perhaps—for the slightest glimpse of something unexpected.
Thank you to the contributors and to designer and A&O Art Director Razi Hedström for seeing this through with me.
This coming February, Issue 02: Double Take and Déjà-Vu