Issue 6

From this issue onwards Afterall has a new joint editor, a new base in Los Angeles and a new set of ambitions to take the ideas of the journal forward. In broadening our editorial collaboration, we are seeking to secure the existing qualities of the journal as a critical voice steering a line between presenting artists and their work and providing theoretical contexts that add possibility and engagement to our encounters with art.

We also want to test the fashionable ideas of global sameness against the reality of a bi-polar publication that will have to take account of both an Anglo-Saxon and continental European view of art, and even of society as a whole. The extent to which these outlooks and expectations differ is arguably one of the most crucial cultural questions of the moment. At a time when the United States appears uneasy with its imperial role, and continental Europe seeks and repeatedly fails to define itself as a collective interest, the room for misunderstandings, creative and destructive, has rarely been larger since 1945. In the field of visual culture, this state of affairs might represent itself in mutually separate development, or in the rather piecemeal adoption of theories from ‘the other side’ that marked the appearance of post-1968 French theory in the United States or the understanding of the New York journal October‘s position in 1980s Germany. Neither process produced much in the way of stimulating art nor illuminating writing in their adopted homes, and there is no need to relive such histories. Nevertheless, the attempt to find ways in which the different trans-Atlantic positions can be expressed, critiqued and maybe even negotiated without seeking a banal synthesis is vitally important. Having been founded in the transit-lounge space of the United Kingdom gives us one perhaps ideal location to do so. Los Angeles is another, relating less to Europe than its Pacific Rim counterparts further west.