The journey is the Omega

By The Editors

In his curious work entitled “Worstward Ho”, the Irish writer and playwright Samuel Beckett wrote what is a profoundly true declaration regarding any project which we try to undertake in our lives: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better”. Some would say that this quote is the first commandment of a loser, and no doubt the gurus of marketing would say that you cannot allow yourself to be guided by this kind of thinking; that you should hide your weaknesses and play up your strengths when projecting your image. But they are probably not aware of the power of negative methods, which have been recognised by philosophers as far back as antiquity as permitting a quicker understanding of the positive through an heuristic process of contrast: the measurement of more through less. We know that we only improve after not having achieved perfection, and thus we discover that we should never assume that something is finished: it should always be open to further development, and is therefore innately imperfect. For our part, we firmly believe that if we embark on this publishing venture, it is not in order to sell a product through the construction of a veiled image which overshadows the results, that is, valuing rhetoric over art. Our objective is that the publication should speak for itself. In the end, true art – and this is the fundamental theme which concerns us – aims to convince us by itself, either through its actual presence or because of its social signification, and not through what we may be able to say about it beyond the purely objective (even though words can also be an objective medium, and are powerful pragmatic tools).

We start from this basis, and we are pleased to present the first results of several months of work. The publication that you have in your hands, or that you are reading on your computer screen, is a synthesis of the possibilities we have envisaged, and contains the seeds of everything that might be developed from the basis of the theoretical and practical framework which is articulated throughout the pages of this initial issue. From the thematic structure of the sections, the design and lay out of the examples, to the strategic choice to produce a hybrid publication freely available on the net and on paper through “Publication on Demand”.

Art Signal Contemporary Art Magazine is a publishing project which accepts the challenge of global publishing. It is for this reason that it is bi-lingual in English, the international language of our times, and in Spanish, the World’s second language in terms of number of speakers, and the third on the net. Its name reflects the desire to communicate and reach out. Thus, Art Signal is at the same time a ‘signal’, emission, communication and indication of art. Under this title we embrace “art of the present”, which in many respects has outgrown the temporal framework of “contemporary art”, but we also consider it essential to include the art and culture of the previous century, given that it still exerts a strong influence. Without this reference, we would not be able to understand the present in which we live, nor the immediate future which is being constructed and which we ourselves are building around us.

Acknowledgements

We would like to add a special vote of thanks with respect to this issue, as the first steps taken, and the help received, is always especially valued. In the first place, we would like to thank our collaborators for the effort involved, and the confidence shown, in this project: Daniel Belasco, Laura Burlton, Brian Curtin, Jim Johnson and Vagner Whitehead. We are also grateful for the help that Maria Fresquet, Jouko Hautajärvi, Denise Phelps, Allen Tannenbaum and Nacho Vega have given us regarding various aspects of production of this publication.