Issue 15

We began publishing Afterall in the fall of 1998 – initially from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, and since 2002 as a co-publication with the School of Art at CalArts in Los Angeles. From the beginning we considered the journal a project committed to the work of artists, and took this as the starting point for a wide-ranging discussion about art. We wanted to affirm that art is important in and of itself, a discourse that plays a subtle but significant role in forming, within the broader culture, ideas of the world and its happenings. Throughout this time Afterall has been a place where art can be itself.

Nine years on that focus remains, and indeed feels more urgent and important than ever, particularly in light of the development of a global market for contemporary art and the apparent shortage in writing and publishing platforms that take art seriously. Changes in the art world at large and changes in our relationship to it have demanded that we regularly test our project against its initial ideals, to make sure that it is still a place where serious and passionate writing about art can be found. Last year we introduced Afterall Books, which allowed us to bring a renewed focus to our project through two different series: One Work, which has given writers the opportunity to produce extended reflections on single works of art; and Afterall Readers, which have brought historical depth and context to important developments in contemporary art that the journal itself has been tracking. More recently we have launched Afterall Online, as an archive of these past nine years and as a place where we can address the more immediate life of the studio and the exhibition space, posting reviews of current exhibitions and interviews with artists on their work processes.