Pleasure

When we asked painter and writer Margaux Williamson to suggest an image pairing for her Keynote text on this issue’s theme of pleasure (“This Work around Me,” page 41), she emailed us more than 30 images, most of them culled from the archiving she had done as image researcher for the literary magazine n+1. These emails began to function for me as weird, graphic subtext for our editorial focus. There was so much to choose from, so many different visual iterations of pleasure—so many artworks that seemed so peculiar, so individual, that we struggled to see what they even had to do with pleasure. One of Williamson’s emails had an embedded JPEG captioned “too bad this one is too on the money,” and attributed to “anonymous canadian”; it appeared to be a painting in a cheap silver frame, a naive depiction of a shipwreck, with a figure of a woman clinging desperately to a stone cross, dragging herself out of a roiling sea that has visibly claimed the lives of all of her shipmates, one of whom reaches pathetically out of the water as if to wave goodbye to the viewer before dying. “I got it at [gallerist] Katharine Mulherin’s brief vintage shop,” Williamson told me over text. “I think she found it at a flea market or garage sale, probably near Crystal Beach. It is my favourite.”

It is a given that pleasure is subjective. Indeed, we faced bigger challenges when compiling this issue: how to speak of pleasure in a time when contemporary conversations tend to focus on how fundamentally complicated it is? Is to write about pleasure to make it instantly not pleasurable? Admittedly, you will not find much unqualified pleasure here, but rather defiant assertions of pleasure after (important) qualifications have been made. In Aruna D’Souza’s “A Feminist Diary” (page 58), she recounts her formative experiences with feminist theory and its suspicions of pleasure: “not a terrible lesson to learn,” she writes, “given how many people in the world seem to derive their greatest enjoyment from the unhappiness of others.” Later in the piece, she explains the lesson’s maturation, for her: to claim and assert pleasure—to take ownership of it, to share it—can be as radically political as outright critique. Paraphrasing artist Howardena Pindell, D’Souza writes, “aesthetic pleasure [is] important now, not just for its own sake, but to revive us, to give us the wherewithal to fight another day.”—David Balzer, Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher