SHIFTER

ABOUT

Shifter is a topical magazine that was founded in 2004 by Sreshta Premnath, who continues to edit the magazine in collaboration with guest editors. Originally concieved as an online magazine in order to create an inter-continential “commons,” Shifter introduced a print version with issue 10. This additional format allowed for an increased approachablity for longer articles as well as additional access to the content for an audience beyond those with high-speed internet.

The following is a discussion about Shifter between Premnath and Abhishek Hazra, the guest editor of Shifter 15:

Abhishek Hazra: Riffling through the Shifter archive recently, I spotted your old email account. Do delinquent email addresses evoke the same response as old street addresses? How do you now look back on the inception of Shifter? Did you have any idea then that it will have such a remarkable longevity? Also, while in some of the early issues of Shifter you do invoke the digital and the online as modalities that are not constrained by geography and the bureaucracy of nation states, do your think of your own changing geographical location while looking back at Shifter?

Sreshta Premnath: What started (and continues) as an organizational quandary has been posting contributor bio’s and contact information on the Shifter website. Every issue online has its corresponding list and as I track through previous issues I find regular contributors spanning several issues. Each entry has an updated bio and sometimes a new email. As I haven’t been able to keep updating old entries the result is an archive of changes – an archive of how the magazine has changed over time and its contributors as well. In earlier issues – perhaps up until “Surface Tension” all the contributors were people known to me and with whom I had already established an interest or dialog. However, as Shifter grew and established some semblance of legitimacy the roster of contributors began to include people I didn’t already know.
So in this sense, although the initial motivation of Shifter was to invite the democratic participation of all interested contributors as well as access to all interested readers, it turned out that these two groups were one and the same – people with whom I had already, through geographical proximity, established relations.

As the volume of submissions increased and as I realized that organizational legitimacy encouraged participation I created a fictitious coeditor and “critical advisor” for Shifter 8, 9 and 10. A group of people as an editorial board created the semblance of objective authority absent in an individual voice. However, fictitious coeditors don’t do any work, nor are they useful to discuss ideas with. So with Shifter 11 I began collaborating with friends who I respected and with whom felt I could have a productive and engaging working relationship. Of course the added advantage which I didn’t initially consider was that they also drew on their networks of interest to widen the group of participants. Each issue since 11 therefore also bears the trace of the “geographical location” of my coeditor.

AH: We are perhaps all aware of the ‘relational turn’ and how there has been a conscious valorization of ‘collaboration’ and ‘participation’ in some of the contemporary paradigms of reading art practice. I don’t want to get into the details of that complex context right now, but I have to say, that at various points in reading through Shifter, I did get the sense of “collaborative writing’ – that each issue, or perhaps the entire project, is at one level a sort of collective writing by all the contributors. And of course, in an issue like Indira Sylvia Belissop, that sense is all the more accentuated.
One of the fascinating aspects of ISB is that she is this Real-Fantasy figure while simultaneously being an uncanny composite of multiple personalities: artist, academic, philosopher – essentially, people whose intellectual production sets up a strong degree of resonance in you.

SP: Indira Sylvia Belissop was a late night creation of Avi Alpert and myself, both participants in the Whitney Independent Study Program. The program itself was interdisciplinary insofar as artists, theorists and curators joined together in discussion, and produced many collaborations as a result. In fact Shifter 12, “Unassigned” was an editorial collaboration with two other participants.

However, a distinction must be made between the coeditorial relationship and the relationship between an editor and a contributor (or further, the relationship between contributors). While coeditors have a bird’s eye view of the entire project, contributors respond to the call for submissions and the mission of the magazine, with the trust that they will be grouped with interesting and provocative enough company to make their contribution worthwhile. There is also the brief but pointed conversation that ensues between editor and contributor which I would hesitate to call collaboration. The editorial process of weaving together essays, images and poetry that were produced independently so that they respond to each other does sometimes produce the effect of collaboration.

For this reason I. S. Belissop, an anagram for “is possible,” serves as the ghost or specter that makes connections apparent where they were invisible. Which is to say that the ‘relational turn’ is only a reaction to the more prominent myth of the individual as genius. In fact all knowledge is produced and reproduced through social and collaborative processes.

AH : While I know that the conceptual terrain is quite carefully mapped in each issue, beginning with the selection of the theme, I also think that the larger, meta-level parallels and connections that cut across the boundaries of any specific issue is a very vital aspect of the Shifter project. I was wondering, what would happen if you were to announce an open call for submissions with an undisclosed theme. The potential participant then will have to submit work on his / her imagined idea of a possible theme for a Shifter issue? The very idea of Shifter would then become the thematic in that case.

SP: This is an interesting conundrum.

Many journals profit from aligning themselves with very specific thematic interests or identitarian affinities – whether this is based on gender, sexuality, ethnicity or political position. This defined self-identification creates a niche for them and allows both contributors and readers to quickly decide whether their interests are allied with this identification or not (this is also how consumerism works). Because of this structure of self-reification, thematics are secondary to such journals and contributors who identify themselves with the generalized politics of the journal are likely to contribute and whatever they produce will fit within the journal.

While I’m sure relationships can be drawn between themes dealt with in Shifter and the way they are handled, I would prefer deflecting Shifter’s focus from a fixed identity. For this very reason I would hope that a blind call would result in a very random selection of contributions that may or may not function together. In fact I hope that my collaboration with coeditors further disperses or disrupts the homogeneity that threatens any long-term project.

AH: I think I have a sense of where you are coming from – your apprehension at the homilies of identity politics and the way it stifles discourse – but at the same time I am aware that irrespective of our attempted resistance, we are nonetheless caught up in larger typological regimes. Consider, for example a publication like McSweeneys which is not based on any overt identity politics. Yet, on spotting issues of McSweeneys on a stranger’s bookshelf, don’t you feel a sudden burst of readerly camaraderie? Or wouldn’t you be surprised if you heard that a major seminar dedicated to Guattari was being held at the Royal College of Art rather than at Goldsmiths? Yes, I tool flinch at the coarseness of these typologies, but the reality of their presence is inescapable, even in critically enlightened circles.

SP: I totally agree: In fact the most preliminary editorial activity of inviting a coeditor and then deciding what to include and what not to, defines the perimeters of the identity (or as you say typology) of the magazine and consequently its readership. The challenge perhaps is to attempt to resist the construction of a tautological practice – one that merely reifies its pre-defined objectives – even if over time a cloud of associations will naturally articulate the practice as being singular and separate from other practices. Although it is inevitable that Shifter will build a set of expectations in its contributors over time, perhaps it is ones criticality towards this process that is essential, which is then articulated as a negativity that resides within the project.

AH: I think we had spoken about how at a conceptual level the roles of ‘contributor’ and ‘editor’ could be potentially seen as interchangeable. Similarly, in today’s context of contemporary art practice, would you say that the curator can also be seen as a certain kind of artist? Also, what according to you, are the intersections and differences between the activities of curating and editing?

SP: I would disagree with the idea that the “curator is also an artist.” While it is true that the curatorial intervention and re-contextualization of an artist’s work informs the way in which it is received, in most cases the trajectory of an artistic process is quite different from that of a curator’s. A curator’s role lies often in thematizing the work of artists in relation to each other, in order to articulate a position within a cultural discourse. While an artist is very conscious of both contemporary and historical relations to other artists and discourses, there is also a personal trajectory of exploration which only touches or intersects with particular curatorial agendas at one time or another. Editing is definitely very similar to a curatorial structure, however, there is the seriality of the journal which introduces its own teleology.

In the case of Shifter I hope that this trajectory is closer to that of the artist’s in that there is a relatedness between issues, which results from a natural process of engaging with philosophical and formal quandaries, but, simultaneously a diffuseness, or deviation resulting from a subject-position which changes as a result, precisely, of that very process of engagement.

AH: Well, I was being a bit rhetorical in apparently trying to collapse the artistic and the curatorial positions. While the question of artistic autonomy is always a vexed one, let us assume that perhaps we do agree on some fuzzy definition of the artistic position and process. However, would you say, that in the context of curators like Harald Szeemann, the distinctions between these two positions are consciously blurred? (I apologize for selecting a figure who has already been canonized as the ‘shamanistic curator’) Or that when an artist engages in works that are highly inter-textual the tensions between artistic citation and curatorial contextualisation get significan’tly amplified?

SP: Perhaps one way to look at it is that people like Fred Wilson are considered artists – people who re-organize collections in order to draw out certain hidden narratives that the museological structure inherently hides. Whereas, Szeemann is considered a curator. Of course their agendas and practices are quite different, but we can see how in this particular case there is a similarity between two practices that are understood to be of different disciplines. If we compare these two practices we have to assume one to be an equivalent form and the other to be a relative form. That is to say, the statements “this artist is a curator” or “this curator is an artist” arise from this comparison. The problem with this form of comparison is that neither expression reveals to us what the terms mean by themselves. These statements become especially confusing when we begin to generalize what we mean by the constituent terms, when in fact the comparison was initially based on a specific case.

Perhaps one reason that these questions are being asked more and more often today is that the curatorial position as a privileged one is a very recent development. In our world the curator has risen to the very worrying position of contextualizer, critic, networker, businessman, and soon to be purveyor of artistic knowledge par excellence. In order for the curator to occupy this central position of genius that was traditionally distributed betwen the artist, the gallery and the critic, the curator depends on this artist/ curator dialectic. These questions, in other words, seem to arise from a power struggle that has resulted from the professionalization of curatorial practice.

AH: Now, another interesting aspect of Shifter is its lightness, its capacity for movement. Being online already gives it momentum, and then in your rendering of the final PDF file you ensure that each issue stays lean and steers clear from the corpulence of large megabytes. Now, if we could potentially consider each issue of Shifter as a curated group show (or a group show in the making) then how do you reflect on the stark difference between the ‘lightness’ of a zine and the material weight (is ‘weight’ here an euphemism for ‘encumbrance’ ? ) of a physical art exhibition? Don’t you sometimes desire for artwork and exhibitions that also have this quality of lightness?

SP: I think the central issue here is that of the material object and physical space that becomes necessary for an art exhibition. Certainly, one of the factors that prompted Shifter was the fact that internet based projects can quickly be accessed from anywhere and the amorphous space of a server is only materialized in your browser, “within” your personal computer. However, as mentioned in response to your first question, I have found that the vitality of the magazine has been kept alive in its intersection between this phantom lightness of the internet, and the social proximity I share with friends and acquaintances in geographical space. In this sense there is always a play between the weightless intangibility of a .pdf and the materialization of that file as either an object or a community that produces its momentum.

Take “On Certainty” for instance – a project I curated and one which you participated in: The kinds of labor involved in curating and installing the show, producing Shifter 14 (released along with the show), and organizing and producing the weekly lecture series were very different. However tightly I tried to tie the three activities together conceptually, their material forms pushed against each other creating productive intersections but never a coherent whole. Different participants focused more on different nodes of activity, but as the organizer of the project I had to be actively involved in every activity. Perhaps formal or conceptual coherence that viewers perceive in such fragmented organizational structures is the central will that drives the project and (once again invoking Belissop) makes the possible possible.