MATERIAL exists as a platform for the artist’s voice. Each issue brings together a different group of artists who write, as well as a new collaboration with a graphic designer. During the production of this third issue, our designer Zak Jensen put forth the idea of concatenation — the act of linking together, or the state of being joined (It was caused by an improbable concatenation of circumstances) (there was a connection between eating that pickle and having that nightmare)(the joining of hands around the table).

Concatenation (c.1600, from L.L. concatenatus, pp. of concatenare “to link together,” from com- “together”+ catenare, from catena “a chain”) seemed an appropriate word for our editorial method. An unlikely assemblage of texts becomes connected through this process; uncanny linkages emerge. Wyeth appears twice. Performances interact. In this issue: voices that duel, voices that parrot, voices that hypothesize, translate, and meditate, voices that speak simultaneously. As Roland Barthes writes, we have assembled these textual events, as “pleasure in pieces; language in pieces; culture in pieces,” to build upon one another into something new.*

*Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 51

CONTRIBUTORS
Farrah Karapetian, Paul Zelevansky, Renee Petropoulous, Nate Harrison, James Welling, Natalie Häusler, Harold Abramowitz, Shana Lutker Stephanie Taylor, Alice Könitz, Frank Chang, and Emily Mast.