open letter to new city reader
this text was originally written for common circular 5 – new city reader politics section.
dear new city reader,
thank you for the invitation to guest edit a section of the new city reader.
as we understand it, the role of the guest editorial team is to provide ideas and content for a specified section of the new city reader. each week a new guest editorial team joins the fixed editorial staff within the gallery space of the new museum. based on the duration of the project and the large format of the broadsheet, a sizable amount of content will flow from outside into the museum, where the guest editors find themselves in a marginal position, adding critical support to the paper and the museum.
we’ve been exchanging services, art and energy in this economy long enough, to understand how this all works. but somewhere in the course of working on this project we decided to draw the line.
we are sure you will understand, still it’s probably best to clarify our position relative to this project.
space is civilized, but is it public? the new city reader is a newspaper of public space, but the public are a difficult group to identify, and most of the time the public needs to be produced instead of found. becoming barbaric is a more effective approach in relating to the public. forget about civility. disrupt public order, where everyone does what they are ‘supposed to do’.
guest editors for the new city reader are lost in a dimension between participation and fair play. for temporary workers in a collective project, dialog is essential in order to create an inclusive voice. without interaction and exchange, ambivalence develops.
“everything which does or does not have political in its name.” contemporary culture locates the political in every aspect of daily life. as far as a newspaper is concerned, there is more political content in sections of the daily newspaper not titled politics. for instance, the arts section of the new york times last weekend: “toys for boys with an american accent.”
collective negotiation. aesthetics, form and content and politics can’t be separated. our forms of communication must find a way to negotiate with the conventions of a larger project. we are providing a foreign insert into the given form of the new city reader, establishing a point of focus and contention.
our contribution is organized as common circular 5 and includes notes, anecdotes, shared reference images and other traces of collective refusal.
as we have acknowledged, the implicit agreement between artist and the institution is that the intangible labor that contributors provide for these types of projects will be unpaid. we agreed to this contract at some point in the becoming-of-who-we-are-today, but still believe that, as guest editors, we should benefit from this exchange. the printed broadsheet serves this purpose in addition to other issues it might address as it circulates beyond the confines of the museum.
we hope that common circular 5 is a useful contribution to the politics of publishing and, in the spirit of the new city reader, to architecture, information and public space in the city today.
with kind regards,
common room