editor’s note
The first issue of Unendurable could only ever have been about punishment. Duress Press’s chop depicts Sisyphus, the mythic figure forced to roll a huge boulder up a steep hill in the underworld forever. In so doing, the image references the often punishing and unrewarding nature of working in the arts. But it also references Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus,” an essay which concludes with the line “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” In curating this issue, I looked for work that strove to eke some kind of beauty or dignity out of the deeply punishing circumstances that define our present moment.
Some of the poems in Issue 1 provide spaces where punishment blends with the aesthetic act: In Discussions with the Historian, Eileen R. Tabios writes “Audubon searched for truths, for which he killed birds before stuffing them into poses that he judged more appropriate than life,” while Elle J. Snyder’s Art Gallery Features Exploding Heads uses the titular image to examine the often grotesque, embodied experience of creating art. Aubrey “Bee” Case’s writing emblematizes the role of art in metabolizing and making sense of physical suffering; Z. T. Corley’s The Fall of America engages the work of sculptor Wangechi Mutu through a genre fiction lens and imagines a future outside the degradations of the crumbling United States (and Earth).
The images of fragmentary clay tablets that separate the poems in this issue are examples of okstraka; leftover pieces of damaged pots that were used to vote for the banishment of Greek citizens (it’s where we get our word ostracism). If you search “ostrakon” or “ostracon” on The Met’s online catalogues, they’ve got hundreds of open access, high-quality images you can download and use for free.
I want to thank all of the amazing artists that are featured in this issue; and I want to thank you, reader, for taking the time to read their work. As you finish reading this issue, having pushed the huge boulder of Unendurable to its apex, remember: You’re gonna have to do it all over again when “Issue 2: Repetition” comes out.
Sloane
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