Preface
The features in this issue, edited collaboratively by Felix Bernstein and myself, point towards updated modes of textuality at work. If by the 1980s, signifiers were understood to have been fully loosed by forces of societal atomization, they were also being reterritorialized in the form of non-semantic digital code. Now, text and image are everywhere, multitasking (as data) and functioning in newly optimized, automatic ways; and so are we. Within this activated slop, what is auto- and what is bio-? What critical methods emerge for writing and art-making? Contributors to
May no. 23 follow various routes, in poetry, talking, psychoanalysis, synesthetics, navigating neural pathways, and walking in the city.
Ed Ruscha’s 1962 painting OOF, enlarged and overlooking the intersection of Houston and Essex Streets in fall 2023, seemed addressed to the conversations that Felix and I had recently begun about textuality and the pervasive operationality of text-as-image. Repurposed as a marketing campaign for MoMA’s Ruscha retrospective, OOF found itself living out the supposedly inevitable—a painting recruited as advertisement, the linguistic sign propped up in reified form, both art and language embedded in a cityscape that tells of the dominance of commodities. The museum’s ad campaign was banking on the initial humor of the early ‘60s Pop painting, and its self-aware gestalt now read as meme-like. But in the face of any number of twisted and harsh realities of today’s world, OOF’s sentiment had become quaint, defeatist, or safely weary. As a billboard, it was in many ways a farce. But as an artwork, it spoke to me.