In This Issue: Art That Insists: Persistence with Urgency

Abstract

In This Issue: Art That Insists? Persistence with Urgency The Winter 2003 issue of Art Journal featured a thoughtful and alarming forum on the looting and destruction of historical objects from Iraqi museums and other institutions following the early stages of the United States-led invasion and the now legendary, blundering boast of a mission accomplished. Three years later, the lamentable conflict and cultural assault remain strikingly unresolved, increas ingly violent, and deeply unsettling. Interspersed throughout this issue are images from Perry Bard's project Status: Stolen. White silhou ettes?blanks or absences?placed on orange-alert backgrounds signify a handful of the many historical artifacts plundered from the Baghdad Museum during the first days of a seemingly inter minable occupation. This vivid physical evidence remains missing in action?an erasure of a past that renders the present and future vulnerable and incomplete.With so many others, I wish that Bards eloquently restrained project, introduced here in a text by Gregory Sholette, had become less relevant?no longer so urgently conse quential?but I am grateful for the vigilance it stimulates. Other features in this issue vividly extend a faceted and nuanced conversa tion on how and why art and artists communicate consequentially in the world. A number of the texts deploy a deliberately dialogic or dialectical structure to puzzle through the many roles of art and artists. Saloni Mathur's pursuit of ideas of collaboration, doubleness, and cultural and artistic identity in the work of Amrit and Rabindra Singh, identical twin sisters, analytically diagrams their introspective, twinned practice. Coauthors Chris Mills and Nick Muellner, by contrast, orchestrate a dialogical text?a speculative intellectual duet on repre sentations of thinking, learning, and pedagogy represented in the work of selected modern and contemporary photographers and filmmakers. And Doug Ashford, Wendy Ewald, and Nina Felshin join me in a discursive, deeply felt conversation on past and present practices, fruitful opportunities and formidable risks, and the inherent political and critical dimensions of artists' social collaborations. With dramatically different subjects in mind (sex in the museum and nor malizing, hegemonic art-historical practices), Kelly Dennis and Carolyn Dean examine how epistemological and disciplinary systems of naming and categor izing art often trouble our relationships and responses to objects and artifacts, Presenting another context that problematizes what and whom art is for, Natasha Goldman examines the intricate relationship of art, architecture, memory, and trauma atYad Vashem in Jerusalem. She examines the transitions and transforma tions of public representations of loss and memory, silence and observation that recognize not only victims but also survivors, and she traces this development in the evolving theories and spaces of contemporary memorialization. In the first of a series of thought pieces on graduate-level studio-art education ?the MFA and other postbaccalaureate programs and degrees?Timothy Emlyn Jones describes the studio-art doctorate in Europe and defends its application and viability for United States programs and curricula. Subsequent contributors will present contrasting perspectives on this field and its pedagogy in an unset tled time.