[artinfo] [transform] Scorched Earth.....

[by way of Adele Eisenstein <adele at c3.hu>]

Below is a description of our ongoing journal 
project. We are actively seeking contributions 
which we hope to have by September. Please contact for more info...


Drawing as notation, as proof of artisanal skill, as
incomplete thoughts, as touch, as mark, as transitive
verb, as reportage, drawing as a name in fragments 

the list grows longer and strangely less intelligible
as we try to limit the definition of drawing practice
to traditional aesthetic typologies. What started
perhaps with a dog pissing on a tree has developed
into complex social practices that have at times
mobilized armies and at others inspired an aesthetic
of interiority so rich that it could claim to offer an
alternative to the facts of lived experience. However,
it seems to us that drawing’s ability to territorialize
the world, as with capitalism, has led increasingly to
a deterritorialization of drawing itself, thus
foreclosing the medium’s capability to claim
self-sufficiency through its traditional regulating
disciplinary protocols. The term „drawing“ has become
so abstract within the discourses of aesthetic
production that it becomes tempting to say that
„drawing“ as such is little more than an alibi for an
ever-fungible array of objects to be circulated within
the art-market. What the $10 knock-off Louise Vuitton
purse and the $400 original share in common is not
merely appearance, but the sketch which organized the
knowledge needed to produce them. If this is the case
and drawing’s function was not cynically relegated to
the realm of luxury commodities, would it not be
possible, with a modicum of historical competence, to
situate drawing within the trajectory of a critical
and contestatory project? The crucial question which
haunts us here at Scorched Earth is: Can drawing make
a claim to radical and alternative forms of knowledge
production?

Scorched Earth is a twelve issue Magazine in which the
question of drawing‘s place in theory and practice is
addressed in dialogue with artists for whom drawing is
not just a viable option, but a crucial procedure.
Each issue will also include a number of critical
essays, interviews and panel discussions with leading
as well as up and coming critics, art historians and
writers. Participants include, to name but a few in no
particular order: Yve-Alain Bois, George Baker, Jutta
Koether, Michael Krebber, John Miller, Reena Spaulings,
Scott Lyall, Christopher Williams, Melanie Gilligan,
Pamela M. Lee, Allan McCollum, Hal Foster, Mary Kelly,
Lucy Mckenzie, Thomas Zummer, Mark Dion, Nils Norman,
Rhea Anastas, Bennett Simpson and Isabelle Graw

Each issue of Scorched Earth will revolve around a
central topic or procedure to which our dialogue will
be addressed. Each of the twelve issues are
thematically organized without crystallizing into
instrumental typologies; For instance: "I saw this and
other fairy tales" will address Communicative regimes
and enlightenment aspirations in drawing (from
political satire to bearing witness), "Object and Eye"
will take-up Pedagogical programs and their
relationship to the aesthetic: drawing as discipline vs.
the aesthetic and the non-conceptual. "Trace and
Illegibility" will be modeled on speculative wagers on
the potentiality of the trace in the split between
drawing and writing: the illegibility within the
transmissible as non-integrated rupture.

All twelve issues of Scorched Earth will be printed
and published in approximately one year (April 2007)
in its full Twelve-issue cycle. Since October 2005
Scorched Earth has maintained a storefront at 41
Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The
storefront is used for panel discussions,
lectures, occasional exhibitions, and more generally
as an editorial center, The Editors of Scorched Earth
are Gareth James, Sam Lewitt and Cheyney Thompson.

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