E D I T O R I A L S T A T E M E N T

FrOM tHE EDItOrs

Ten years ago, the printed version of ARTMargins joined its sister publi-
cation, ARTMargins Online. The idea of the three founding editors—
Sven Spieker, Angela Harutyunyan, and Octavian Esanu—was to create
an innovative art historical journal with a broad remit that would offer
some measure of correction to the euphoria surrounding globalized art
at the time, and that would include contributions from the perspectives
of artists, scholars, and critics. Would this hybrid publication model,
which was somewhat unusual for an academic journal, be acceptable
to its future publisher and readers? More importantly, would it fi nd a
place among already-existing publications that covered related ground
in different ways, and often from angles we felt were close to our own?
We have been fi nding or (re)formulating answers to these questions
ever since, in ten rewarding years of collaboration, encounter, and con-
versation, both within the evolving editors’ collective—which currently
comprises Karen Benezra, Pedro Erber, Elizabeth Harney, and Saloni
Mathur, in addition to the three founding editors1—and outside it, with
the artists, art historians, curators, and critics who have generously

Joan Kee and Anthony Gardner were part of the editors’ collective from 2013 to 2014 and
from 2013 to 2019, respectively. Andrew Weiner was a member of the group between 2016
and 2019. We also salute and thank our past and present managing editors for their dedi-
cated service: Abbie Hinsman, Nick Pici, Hannah Yohalem, and, currently, Lee Colón and
Marv Recinto.

https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_e_00300

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opted to publish their work in the journal or who have collaborated with
us in other ways. ARTMargins could not have launched or thrived with-
out the help and encouragement of all these colleagues and friends, sev-
eral of whom subsequently agreed to join the journal’s editorial board.
We are also deeply grateful to the MIT Press and its dedicated staff, for
being receptive to our initial ideas and for steadfastly nurturing the pub-
lication from the beginning. We also happily acknowledge financial and
logistical support from the University of California, Santa Barbara and,
for a period of four years, from the American University in Beirut.

Sometime in the 2000s, the ARTMargins project was born from
our intuition that the time had come to immerse Eastern European con-
temporary art—which had first attracted the attention of Western mar-
kets in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the decade after the end
of the communist experiment—within a transnational framework.
Crucially, it was clear that such a “dissolving” of art from behind the
Iron Curtain on a global level needed to abandon, or at a minimum
to weaken, the binary logic of the Cold War, and to adopt a perspective
focused on connection, contact, and exchange rather than on division
and isolation. Such a shift—closely linked to the extended period of
transition experienced by Eastern European countries after 1989—
could not be successfully realized without careful attention to the
specific local contexts and the diverse conditions of marginality under
which nonofficial art practices had developed in these countries during
the Cold War. Several articles published in the journal over the past
decade have devoted themselves to developing adequate methodologies
for addressing this issue. Indeed, as ARTMargins broadened its geo-
graphic scope beyond Eastern Europe, the critique of global art from
the perspective of its active margins—local, translocal, regional—
became one of the journal’s core commitments.

What is the margin? In our initial editors’ statement, published in
2012 in the print journal’s first issue, we defined marginality as “less a
condition or geographical given than a tactic that intervenes in dominant
theoretical, historical, and interpretative models and methodologies,”
implying a type of reflection that is relational rather than ontological and
that aims to move beyond the hegemony of what has congealed into a
recognizable object or become otherwise canonized. While such think-
ing was informed by postmodern critiques that understood, and often
privileged, the margins—viewed as the limits of a text, the “off-modern,”
and so forth—as the area from which centrally dominant narratives

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artmargins 10:3

could be effectively challenged, we have recently been reminded that to
celebrate marginality, often from a position of real or perceived central-
ity, may not be sufficient when it comes to endowing the margins with
real political agency and influence. Meanwhile, in art historical scholar-
ship, it has similarly become clear that acknowledgment of the existence
of local art worlds and of their dependency on real or imagined centers
is crucial for understanding the dynamics of art’s development after
World War II. As Terry Smith put it in an article we published in 2017,
“the panorama itself, and artistic possibility within it, looks very different
depending on where you are—your location, your viewpoint, your sense
of agency, and your actual effectiveness.”2 However, the question is how
to calibrate and adequately address the imbalances, inequities, and asyn-
chronies that result from such relationships, a problem confronting any-
one who has tried to grapple with the notion of global or world art.

Over the last decade, what John Champagne some time ago called

an “ethics of marginality” has repeatedly echoed within the journal’s
pages, sometimes acquiring a methodological thickness that took
us by surprise. Thus, the print journal’s first issue featured an article
by Anthony Gardner that examined a series of material installations
by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn designed to confront the idea of
Western liberal democracy through the prism of civilian torture in Iraq;
an essay by Octavian Esanu tracing the development of contemporary
art in Eastern Europe in the wake of the introduction of a liberal market
economy there; an article by Vardan Azatyan that analyzed the rise of
a national form of modernism in Armenia in the 1960s as the gradual
disintegration of the Bolshevik Revolution’s progressive temporality
after the Stalinist takeover; and finally, an essay by Angela Harutyunyan,
in which she examined the 1990s’ transition from modernism to post-
modernism in post-Soviet Armenia, signaled by a newfound belief in
the promised “real” of the media images of global consumerism.

Writing with or from the margins, these scholars argue, presupposes

a willingness to think art in reference to another place and another form
of practice, putting pressure on the legitimizing ideas and discourses
that undergird our neoliberal world order and its central pillars (the
market, progress, capital, the contemporary). Such thinking has also
informed the journal’s sustained commitment, over the last decade, to the
practice of translation, a project whose ramifications, as many scholars

Terry Smith, “The Provincialism Problem: Then and Now,” ARTMargins 6, no. 1 (2017): 8.

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editors | editorial statement

have noted, go well beyond the mechanical transfer of meaning between
different languages. ARTMargins’ first issue included the initial install-
ment of its by-now-familiar Document section, in the form of an article
by Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg regarding the 1970s phenomenon
of Los Grupos, translated into English for the first time (by Elizabeth L.
Hochberg), and introduced by Karen Benezra. It was the first in a now-
long series of translated documents that have presented significant stand-
alone texts from local postwar art histories in English for the first time.

We are painfully aware that ours is not a moment for giddy self-
congratulation. At the time of writing, the COVID-19 pandemic is still
raging in much of the world, especially in its poorer countries and
regions; in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian civilians are still facing attack
and intimidation, in what has been a decades-long history of oppres-
sion and occupation. So instead of merely casting our glance backward,
we present this 10th-anniversary issue in the form of a series of round-
tables organized around questions we think pertinent to a conversation
about the relevance of art in our fractured historical moment. At the
center is a discussion about what it might mean to be radical today,
flanked by three more roundtables organized by the ARTMargins edi-
tors, focusing on neoliberalism and its radical restructuring of social
relations, including art; on the relationship between art and class strug-
gle, in theoretical, art historical, and intellectual-historical terms; and on
the notion of historical danger, theorized by Walter Benjamin in “On
the Concept of History” (1940), which has acquired new urgency today
as we confront moments of danger in our own recent past, moments
that also inevitably raise the question of the exigency of art, scholarship,
and pedagogy. Two specially commissioned Artist Projects conclude the
issue: Anna Boghiguian’s cycle The Ghosts of Past Events in the Hall of
Mirrors, and ICEbox Collective’s Taxonomy of Breathing.

The question posed by the central roundtable, “What Is Radical?,”

is variously woven into the other conversations as well. “Radical” is
derived from radix, the Latin for “root”—in botany, a radical leaf grows
from the base of a (rootlike) stem—which explains the word’s associa-
tion with a type of behavior or action that can be judged to be thorough-
going or extreme and that acquired its political inflection in the late
18th century. By most accounts, radicalism is associated with a type of
thinking or acting that seeks to rebuild everything from the ground up,
an approach epitomized in the history of 20th-century art by Kazimir
Malevich’s effort, in his 1913/14 Black Square, to base a new practice of

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artmargins 10:3

painting on a single act that would eradicate with one stroke the entire
history of Western painting. Today we are witnessing different forms of
radicality, less focused on charismatic agents and lone radical gestures
(such as the Black Square) than on connectivity and solidarity, turning
radicalism away from associations with exceptional individuals and
toward challenges to the status quo that are posed by mass movements,
often operating from positions of marginality. How can academic,
including art historical, scholarship respond to this shift, which cannot
be understood adequately without the pivot, since the 1960s, to post-art
positions that combine art production with radical political and social
activism, in a way that makes “radical art” ever harder to define in isola-
tion? As the responses we publish in this anniversary issue demon-
strate, there is no single, let alone simple, answer to this question,
much as there is no simple answer to the question of how we can think
about radicalism from within the totality of our neoliberal reality—
where certain kinds of social and political radicalism are institutionally
embraced, even promoted, for as long as they do not tamper with exist-
ing class relations and security regimes, or begin to substantially affect
the existing social and economic status quo. There is perhaps no better
example of this than our universities, where radically progressive social
agendas are quickly embraced and even institutionalized, while at the
same time the idea of the university as a service-oriented business con-
tinues to gain ground and remains, all too often, uncontested.

Apart from the word’s social and political overtones, radical has
another meaning that is evoked less often. Here the term refers to what
is vital and necessary to life, implying a commitment to the present and
its exigencies over ideology, and to real rather than imagined histories.
Decades ago, Edward Said identified the project of a Palestinian patrie
as building a homeland whose political destiny would not be based
on racist exclusion and division, but on the idea of “human contact . . .
between people for whom differences animate more exchange rather
than more hostility.”3 In this ultimately optimistic spirit, we have invited
our friends and colleagues to address what it might mean, for a scholar
in the humanities today, to be radical.

We dedicate this anniversary issue to the late Svetlana Boym, to whom
ARTMargins owes its name.

Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992), 176.

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editors | editorial statement E D I T O R I A L S T A T E M E N T image

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