“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.”

— Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

“Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life.”

— John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic”

EDITORIAL

September 2025

Against Smoothness

We live in a culture that insists everything be finished and smooth. We race to produce the most spectacular, seamless reels and the crisper photographs. We polish until meaning slips off the surface. The spectacle lasts a breath and an exhale. We forget. We do not learn. We do not change.

We inhabit a world that finds friction distasteful. Everything ought to be smooth. This issue chooses the seam, the splinter is our lens, as Adorno warns with rough mercy and Ruskin reminds us that imperfection, the lack of smoothness, is not failure. It is a condition of life.

Sarah Sze sets the tone. Her works do not present a finished picture. They expose the scaffolding of seeing. Paper rips. Pigment scatters. Projected light crosses steel. You can trace the join with your eyes. The splinter stays where you can feel it. Looking stings, then sharpens. Time does not move like a smooth river. It eddies, leaps, forgets, returns. The work asks for patience and then rewards it. You are not consuming an image. You are watching an image learn to become itself. The splice is part of the image: keep it in frame.

Tracy Tse ties that stance to the hand. Red string, tough and ordinary, is braided, knotted, crocheted, and sewn until it climbs the wall like a living line. Every loop holds a decision. Every knot keeps a memory. The sculptures honor the labor hidden inside the objects we touch every day. We say “machine” and forget “operator.” Tse will not let us forget. Her red is ceremony and pulse. It refuses the fantasy that speed replaces skill. Behind every object is a hand. Repetition becomes memory. Memory becomes form.

Eliza Shiva brings the splinter into witness. A boy studies a rifle. A deer hangs. A small bird rests in a palm bright with afterlight. Nothing is posed and nothing is cleaned for comfort. The frame arrives with dirt and tenderness intact. Shiva knows a photograph can become a lie the moment it turns sleek. She stays with the rough edge where care and harm share air. The seam is not decoration. It is evidence. The hush before a verdict is the honest place to look.

Frank Diamond writes the same ethic in a different register. His story holds a son at the threshold of a sentence he wants to mean. I forgive you. He cannot say it clean. He tries. He backs away. He tries again. The attempt is the point. Moral polish prefers quick resolution. This is not that. This is the sound of repair while it is still work.

Why this stance now. Because smoothness is not neutral. It erases history. It hides labor. It sells certainty where attention is needed. These artists and writers choose friction as a method of truth. They keep the seam visible. They let the splinter teach scale.

So we propose a way of looking: slow down. Let the surface resist you. Ask what has been covered to achieve this shine. Ask who. Value the visible join. It is where care holds. It is where time gathers. It is where repair begins.

Adorno gives us courage to keep the mote in sight, and Ruskin gives us the dignity to name imperfection as life. Between the two, this issue takes a position. We prefer edges that speak. We prefer textures that remember. We prefer the unfinished now.

If you feel a tug while you read and look, follow it. That is the seam. That is the hand. That is the splinter doing its work.

-Jorge R. G. Sagastume

Editor-in-Chief