Editorial Foreword: Pandemia, Materiality and the Wind in the Trees

Abstract

The cover of Issue 21.2 of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art (ANZJA) features a still from the short film, Left, Right & Centre (2017) by British contemporary artist, Cornelia Parker. Parker’s film follows on from her role as an ‘Official Artist’ commissioned to produce creative responses to the 2017 United Kingdom general election. All the tragedy, tedium and dismay of that phenomenally divisive period is here reduced to a series of long shots showing a mysteriously empty chamber of the dispatch box of the House of Commons. Midway through the film, a drone flies into view, scattering hundreds of sheets of British press commentary in the process, each highlighting the chaos and acrimony of those inflammably toxic pre-Brexit days. So the editors thought that this image might constitute an appropriate cover. Not because of its heavily imperialist associations. But rather by virtue of its ability to capture the current mood: viz, the hopeless mess that we’re all in at the moment (or so at least, one of the editors cheerfully suggested). The image also chimed with us on a more prosaic level as we struggled with one of the last duties on the customary list of the journal’s editorial tasks: to arrange the articles into an ordered sequence of numbered contributions. While recognising the necessity of this job, it did nonetheless strike us as a somewhat irrelevant undertaking. Who, after all, reads journals in sequence anymore? And who will ever access this journal as a hard copy, paper-bound artefact stretching from cover to cover? Our piecemeal engagement with journals is especially prevalent nowadays given the pandemic’s tendency to hasten the widespread shutting down of libraries as physical spaces, and thus to refocus our attention onto the atomised process of downloading individual pdfs from a wide array of digital libraries and journal aggregators. So, as we wistfully beheld all that physical newsprint wafting through the House of Commons, the idea of exerting editorial control over the order and experience of reading this journal did strike us as a rather quaint notion. If it is still nonetheless considered helpful for us to proffer an at least notional order to the sequence of articles in this open issue of ANZJA, then here’s what we