Caesura (seh-'zhur-uh) is a platform for art and criticism.

The alarm bells are ringing and catastrophe is at the door. As the last century begins its final exit from the stage, what will happen to the experience it gave humanity? Will this experience survive the world that bore it? Not only common sense but the stars themselves are realigning in an effort to forget the objects of our shattered dreams, shedding them as empty husks of strange, unpleasant times. What shines true today in light of yesterday will not be counted on tomorrow. Only those who learn to brush against the flow of time will have any chance of staying afloat. Thus the sun that we see setting is not the same that will be rising, and everything — all that is holy and all profane — shall be transfigured in the course of night. Art too must stake its place in the world that will dawn in the approaching epoch.

Contemporary art, which has dominated artistic practice for fifty years or more, adheres to a concept of the contemporary which obliterates the shape of history and demands the strictest currency as the criterion of art’s success. Like fashion, it has come to be distinguished by the marvelous arbitrary ascents and subsequent ridiculous falls that churn and cycle through art’s fortune, trend after trend, season after season. Each and every moment is compelled to find its style and is extinguished in a bright and empty glimmer that leaves one wondering, much like Gauguin long ago: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?  

The academic theory proffered in the schools, journals, galleries, and museums that educate young artists and critics today mistrusts — and oftentimes condemns! — such basic, searching questions about the meaning and purpose of art. More often than not, the theorists and critics of contemporary art regret the fact that artworks strive towards a freedom which seems unforgivably barbaric when so many continue to suffer. But such a ‘critical’ perspective gradually grows indifferent to those images of future happiness which permeate artworks that grasp towards something truly new and different in creation. Thus the history of art has come to give form to the history of the species — to the irresistible rhythm of self-creation and self-destruction that constantly drives humanity to a world beyond its own. 

Caesura is a modest project to collect the scattered fragments of art and criticism working to escape the aimlessness that plagues the present. What is necessary is a break, a pause, and some room to breathe. We are looking to publish visual art, poetry, prose, and music as well as fundamental criticism and commentary from artists and writers that recognize the task before us and the need for something new. We have no schemas or positive ideals to enshrine, nor do we endorse particular styles, techniques, or media. What we have to offer is a sense of history, of the dead-end of the present, and the disappointment of the past: “a total absence of illusion about the age and at the same time an unlimited commitment to it.” What we ask is simply that art prove its right to exist.  //

Please read our interview at The Arts Fuse for an elaboration of our vision.

“IT IS SELF-EVIDENT THAT NOTHING CONCERNING ART IS SELF-EVIDENT ANYMORE, NOT ITS INNER LIFE, NOT ITS RELATION TO THE WORLD, NOT EVEN ITS RIGHT TO EXIST.”

— Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory