EDITORIAl STATEMENT - Specialized Research AI at MIT

EDITORIAl STATEMENT

We think about contemporary art as an expanded field of practices
that engage current global sociopolitical transformations without
being either fully contained in or completely freed from them. Within
the fabric of a present moment characterized by different, and often
incompatible, temporalities and agendas, ARTMargins wants to locate
transnational commonalities and trajectories that connect, or divide,
different regions of the world, bringing together artistic practices from
(post)transitional zones, while at the same time questioning the logic of
transition itself: today the entire world is a margin in transition.1

ARTMargins invites researchers and practitioners who operate
under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism to critically reflect on
what we call the “thickened global margin,” encompassing historical,
geographical, as well as philosophical or theoretical postperipheries. A
far cry from the emphatic claims to homogeneity and universalism that
characterized postmodern globalism, such an agenda implies a shift in
the definition of what it means to speak to, or from, the margins: away
from the binary center/margin model (East/West, North/South) that
dominated modernism and postmodernism alike to one that conceives
of the periphery as a nomadic zone of contact in which the possibilities
for a different future may be explored. Marginality, we submit, is less a
condition or geographical given than a tactic that intervenes in domi-
nant theoretical, historical, and interpretative models and methodolo-
gies. The margin, we argue, interferes surgically in a core text the way
in which words scribbled into the margins of a written or printed page
may intervene in a central scripture. It is in this spirit, and not with a
view to correcting history, that ARTMargins hopes to offer a forum to
those who are currently trying to pry open and reclaim the archives,
historical legacies, and artistic and political traditions that for decades
have been kept, or continue to be kept, under official lock and key. To
freely paraphrase Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, we aim not
merely to supply existing political and cultural institutions and frame-
works with material, we also hope to assist those who think creatively,
and critically, about possibilities for changing them.

ARTMargins evolves from ARTMargins Online, which continues to investigate art practice in
the postsocialist countries of Eastern Europe.

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Editors | Editorial statEmEnt

ARTMargins is interested in studying the migration of initia-

tives, ideas, and artistic practices across continents now and in the
past, investigating, for instance, the establishment of artist networks
in South America and Eastern Europe from the 1960s to the present;
radical propositions for establishing autonomous art practices in the
aftermath of the collapse of the social welfare state in the West, and of
state socialism in Eastern Europe; or concurrent takes on global migra-
tion by photographers from Central Asia and the Middle East. Again,
the point is not to objectify the perceived or real similarities between
heterogeneous regions of the world, or to promote a new transnational
exoticism, but rather to argue that there may be such a thing as an
ever-widening, yet nonhomogeneous, worldwide periphery animated by
artistic practices whose description and analysis cannot rely on estab-
lished paradigms and methods.

THE EDITORS