Editor’s Letter

The inheritance issue

WE LAUNCHED THE FIRST ISSUE of this journal shortly after the current U.S. president first took office in 2017. In our introductory letter, we noted several causes for worry then attracting headlines: “budgetary assaults on the poor, the dismantling of climate change policies, the deportation of law-abiding immigrants, proliferating reports of hate crimes.” This litany could be recited verbatim today—and amended at such length as to fill all the space reserved for this letter. If we faced a crisis then, today we labor in its fast-moving aftermath, amid the din of collapsing structures, the sucking sound of vanishing resources and assumptions.

Yet our work began in 2017 as it continues, with the stated belief that “aesthetic experience—those intuitive stirrings, intimacies, and insights engendered by concentrated encounters with works of art and literature—is favorable to the cause of human dignity, within individual lives and within our politics.” This conviction remains intact. However frail the thread, we hope you’ll find it woven through the pages of this, our ninth issue.

We chose to dedicate Full Bleed 9 to the theme of inheritance in recognition of two milestones: the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the bicentennial of the Maryland Institute College of Art, where we are based. At a time when many cultural institutions are teetering, a college achieving such longevity merits celebration. It provides, too, an opportunity for reflection. In our roundtable at the back of the issue, several former and current members of MICA’s faculty discuss the past, present, and future of those idiosyncratic and idealistic hives of cultural striving, experimentation, and play known as “art schools.” Our conversation often returned to the question of traditions—how they are experienced, reworked, or resisted through the labor of teaching and learning.

Through inheritance, the past exerts influence over the present. This remains true even as the past seems to recede ever more swiftly from view. The ghosts of history may be undesired; they may be spiteful and burdensome; still, they are ignored at our peril. They have a way of resurfacing—as in Jill Haslam’s story “The Ghosts of Lake Junaluska”—or of working their way out, in new forms and styles, through the artistry of the next generation, as “In the Imaginary Dialogue between Thelonious Monk and the Shade of James P. Johnson” by Benjamin Goluboff and Mark Luebbers. Elsewhere, Lisa Mullenneaux reveals how cultural inheritance, as distilled through postwar German poetry, haunts Anselm Kiefer's work. The theme of indebtedness emerges repeatedly in this issue—in Julie Reneé Benda’s historically-informed sculpture, in “A Letter to Persephone” by Safa Hijazi, and in David Anson Lee's poem “Grass that Remembers,” among other works featured here.

The threads that connect us to the past are tenuous, however. Conor Hogan’s poignant story “Exodus” underscores their vulnerability. In a culture as fanatically devoted to innovation as ours, it’s easy to lose sight of our own coordinates. In truth, we are all swimming through a welter of cultural inheritances, as John Saul’s “Swimmers” so elegantly implies. Much of education hinges on elucidating this fact, and on learning to live as if it matters. It does. As long as you insist on it, it does.

So, insist. Read. Make new work. Keep swimming.

-Paul Jaskunas