This issue of Caesura looks back on Surrealism not as an answer to the current crisis of art, but as one of the last movements to raise it as a question for life. The legacy of Surrealism is undoubtedly problematic: its novel techniques and strange effects have been repeatedly hypostatized and deployed in the production, both high and low, of culture industry kitsch. Still something remains of its original drive: to pierce the veil of appearance for a glimpse at the underlying forms that constitute subjective experience. For the concrete, as Marx says, “is concrete by virtue of being the concentration of many determinations.” Surrealism — more real than reality itself.
WORK BY:
Will Alexander, Gabriel Almeida, Dato Barbakadze, Roberta Boffo, Roberto Calasso, Austin Carder, Mary Ann Caws, Billie Chernicoff, Róbert Gál, Allison Hewitt Ward, Robert Kelly, Timothy Kelly, Carlos Lara, Juliette Neil, Joel Newberger, Tamas Panitz, Andrei Pokrovskii, Irakli Qolbaia, Alice Paalen Rahon, Laurie Rojas, Kira Scerbin, Bret Schneider, David Short, Rosmarie Waldrop, Madison Winston, Patrick Zapien, and Maggie Louisa Zavgren
COVER:
Kira Screbin, Triple Breather, 2019
DESIGN:
Renata Cruz Lara
ISSUE 0
COMMITMENT
We have made a selection in this issue of Caesura, a sampling of tendencies designed to rouse you, dear reader, from historical amnesia. These artworks and essays (a “trial” or “attempt”) show traces, however faint, of a deep-buried optimism: a suspicion that freedom lies dormant, that every path forward is blocked in some way. The authors of these works have performed small miracles in their creation. Amidst today’s atmosphere of incoherence, on the fringes of this bleak and dismal landscape — the insular world of contemporary art — they have managed to resist its anesthetizing effect, its lack of feeling for aesthetic form. The artists, writers, and critics gathered within this book have banded together to settle the ground on which a new future might one day be built. How good are these attempts? Will they do more than just occupy a void? Only time will tell; history will render its judgment. For now, for Caesura, they show promise — small glints from the light of redemption. We take them not as they are, but as they could be or should be, in the struggle for freedom that’s palpably absent.
WORK BY:
Haseeb Ahmed, Gabriel Almeida, Fred Camper, Austin Carder, Taylor Ervin, Santiago Evans Canales, Jared Daniel Fagen, Matthew Goulish, Andrew Christopher Green, Erin Hagood, Lin Hixson, Julian-Jakob Kneer, Chloe Julius, Jamie Keesling, Carlos Matul, Esther Neff, Joel Newberger, Pamela Nogales, Daniel Robles Lizano, Laurie Rojas, Marco Roth, Errol Sawyer, Kit Schluter, Bret Schneider, Lou Sterrett, Suzy Vogenthaler, Madison Winston, and Patrick Zapien.
COVER:
Adam Elkhadem, Andrew Holmquist, Marco Torres.
DESIGN:
Renata Cruz Lara