September began on a three-hour drive from Brooklyn to Bard. The three of us, a friend, a dog, and a long argument about art and bodegas and Marxist feminism. Our friend, a performance artist, said, "I don't believe in objects," and fell asleep.
We kept talking. Somehow we got to spoons: how strange they are as objects, the way they hold whoever's holding them. We opened a shared folder and started filling it with screenshots of craigslist listings. Two thousand spoons in mere hours. As we gathered, we talked. Andrea on the absurdity of sellers trying so hard to stage spoons. Caleb on the labor and creativity of that staging itself. Rain on the bowl of each spoon, cradling the warped reflection of the person trying to sell it. By the end we arrived at the same fact from three directions: the spoon was producing its own portrait, its own seller, its own audience.
Then we asked the obvious questions. Why do we collect like this? Why do our phones hold thousands of images we will never sort, never name, never look at again, and why does the collecting feel compulsory anyway? We hoard without organizing. We preserve without remembering.
Someone brought up a Borges story: an empire so obsessed with precision that the cartographers found ordinary maps no longer suitable. They kept drawing larger and larger maps to fit more and more details, until eventually the map was the same size as the city, covering and consuming the territory it was meant to represent. The image becomes aggressive: representation overtaking the thing represented. The story gave us our title and the problem contained within it. The folder of two thousand spoons was a small map. The internet is a larger one. This issue is another. The archive has stopped serving memory and started producing reality, and we are mapping it from the inside.
By the time we got home the domain was bought. That day produced ten hours of conversation, and it wasn't nearly enough.
September is an annual anthology started by three cross-disciplinary artists who think the contemporary landscape of objects is too vast, too active, and too consequential to be left to institutions that have made peace with it. The thinking here is done by people still making the work, in public and close to it. Each issue gathers artists, writers, curators, architects, and designers around a single theme, and they are not expected to agree. The argument is the issue. This one is on archives. The next will be on utopia.
Our first issue, Map of Maps.
— Andrea Orejarena, Caleb Stein, Rain Chan