The simple act of seeing, or being seen, says as much about the viewer as it does about the object of our sight, proposed the late critic John Berger in his 1972 BBC series Ways of Seeing. Berger’s simple flip struck a chord, and his television series was crystallized in a book of the same name, which is a foundational text for anyone studying visual culture today.
This attention to perception was the starting point for Document’s Fall/Winter 2024–25 edition—a cultural pivot in approaching media, from the 1970s, that gave a fresh critical apparatus for the examination of art and visual culture since the beginning of time.
“But where does the creative impulse come from?” we asked ourselves next. Of course, the 20th and 21st centuries have been defined by thinkers, artists, and activists attempting to break from traditional modes of making and to fracture extant ideologies in answer to that question.
Psychologists, art historians, political theorists, and neurologists have confronted the questions and wonders of creativity, and how, from our present vantage, we can still be affected by works made even tens of thousands of years ago. Some commentators laud the turn to the so-called eternal. Others praise the ability to speak to some version of a shared now. Others still herald the visionary—ideas that seem to come from beyond any known time and place. The question unifying these disparate frames is whether the creative act is something entirely without precedent or if it represents a synthesis of, and, we hope, a rise from the reality of the present. Even the most materialist of thinkers acknowledge the need for something else: a poiesis that allows one to exceed the present and to conceive new conditions for reality.
For the surrealists—influenced by the invention of psychoanalysis—automatism became one method of breaking away from the confines of tradition. In her interview for an exclusive portfolio of new sculptural silk-on-paper drawings, the artist Barbara Chase-Riboud explains her multimedia poems: “They emerge from the paper automatically because I am not thinking of poetry when I’m doing them.” While she channels her subconscious, the historian of religions Jeffrey J. Kripal explores artists who are tapped into the unknown in his essay on the Super Story, where he declares, “We have believed backward long enough. Perhaps now it is time to believe forward, maybe even from the future.”
“For Document’s Fall/Winter 2024-2025 issue, we look to the past, present, and future to investigate the nature of perception and creativity to share the unprecedented thought that has impacted us and will impact us, not only in this generation but generations to come.”
In the 1960s, gurus dropped acid to tap into something beyond received ideas, but in the 2020s, the productivity-minded microdose shrooms. We are told, in one breath, to welcome “flow state” as the path to create, and in the next, to avoid the distracting “flow” of infinity-content spooled out across our devices. Angie Sijun Lou explores the history of these modes of altered consciousness, tracing trajectories of psychedelic healing and political activism in California’s Bay Area. “To attribute the political activity of the ’60s to a drug would be to diminish the revolutionary dreams that spread organically across the globe, dreams I feel recommitted toward crystallizing every time I trip,” she writes.
For critic Boris Groys, “the flow” is a condition of contemporary art, which “does not predict the future, but rather demonstrates the transitory character of the present—and thus opens the way for the new.” While this is especially true post-internet, he traces this presentism back to Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti, the Italian poet who authored both the Futurist and Fascist manifestos. As Sophia Goodfriend reports through deep research and interviews with IDF reservists, the militaristic legacy of technology endures in Israel’s war on Palestine, “where seeking a target to kill remotely feels little different than scrolling through profiles of high school friends on Facebook.” Stateside, we again confront the aestheticization of politics, as reactionaries misremember past transgressive avant-gardes while equally fetishizing new technologies and old faiths. As Document’s Associate Editor Maya Kotomori writes in her essay on political post-irony, we’re approaching a media dissolve where “the real world adopts all the absurdity of a comedic play yet with all the consequences of real life.”
If we are at an inflection point in narrativity, perhaps we can write new stories by embracing the broken and strange, as poet Eileen Myles suggests to actor and director Chloë Sevigny: “I expected things to be scarred, and written on, and funky, and oddly shaped. The vision of beauty was just an offness.” Or perhaps we can accept the form-bending meld of contemporary life by thinking of language meeting body, as actor Jake Gyllenhaal explains of his process to curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, wherein acting is “writing an essay with your behavior.” To build new narratives, we’d do well to follow Chris Kraus’s idea, as she explains to Whitney Mallett in a reflection on legendary independent press Semiotext(e), not to “separate personal experience from structural awareness and analysis.”
So how do we rise to these contradictions unveiled by these analyses to craft more liberated worlds? Just because we are coping with an “existential crisis of an ecology agitated past the point of no return,” as Journey Streams writes in her discussion of Ambera Wellmann’s recent paintings, doesn’t mean we cannot go “excavating the collisions between calamity and pleasure for new means of survival.” And critic Ananda Yin suggests that intuition as a practice could free us and serve as a “blueprint for utopia”: “Intuitive intelligence endows us with a capacity to retrieve our collective and individual purpose and bend our own destiny,” she says. The word “utopia,” by sheer coincidence, appears in several stories across this issue. In our portfolio of never-before-seen paintings by Mike Kelley, Executive Editor Drew Zeiba examines how the artist’s transgressive fiction films were born out of his fascination with failed “modernist utopian architecture.” So what if dystopia was the answer? In his deep dive into global queer communities carving out new means of material support, Kyle Carrero Lopez suggests that “queering dystopia could mean striving to make our current reality not only survivable, but also joyous for—and celebratory of—queer and trans people.” And in Bali, art historian Harry Burke likewise counters Western utopian theories with the Indonesian concept rwa bhineda, which advocates the power of a worldview where “good and evil coexist, with the role of humans being to balance these forces,” during his visit to the art-centric Desa Potato Head resort.
Liberatory practices could begin in one’s immediate community: In Document’s special portfolio on New York nightlife, we delve behind the scenes, talking not only with the DJs but the bookers, lighting designers, safety monitors, and others who create what Geoffrey Mak calls “quasi-autonomous zones” where “you can examine each of the rules you obey in your life and decide which can be violated.”
What does this anarchic attitude mean for fashion? Quite a lot, as Document’s fashion critic-at-large Katharine K. Zarrella discovers in her profile of Hermès creative director of womenswear Nadège Vanhée, who admits she is through and through a “punk.” Even in elegant gray suits, independence reigns, according to Thom Browne, who declares “True luxury is just living your life in specifically the way you want to live it.”
Given the focus on new perspectives, it is only fitting that we invite a plurality of luminaries across cinema, theater, literature, sound, art, and athletics, who join us as cover stars. Colin Dodgson, with stylist Alice Goddard, spent time with Cate Blanchett in London. Meanwhile, Philip-Daniel Ducasse and Edward Bowleg III visualize Venus Williams’s universe, Casper Sejersen and Beat Bolliger give us a surreal take on Jake Gyllenhaal’s layered realities, and Michael Bailey-Gates and Paul Sinclaire head to Provincetown to depict Chloë Sevigny with friends and family. We also debut artist Mickalene Thomas’s supermodel alter ego Mickey in a fashion portfolio shot by Joshua Woods. For Document’s Fall/Winter 2024-2025 issue, we look to the past, present, and future to investigate the nature of perception and creativity to share the unprecedented thought that has impacted us and will impact us, not only in this generation but generations to come.
