Another David Talks about Slinging another Giant
It’s nearly regrettable—beginning a manifesto. So many have been carved out and written with either incredible detachment or untenable speed. No focus. Even beginning this as an ‘editor’s note,’ I cannot stop thinking about the one furious piece of straw that broke the camel’s back.
But with the launch of any venture is this not the aim? No matter how small or out of favor to provide a journal of substance that stirs just enough to make that reputable review or established quarterly call in for the scaffolding and reassess the value of their own base.
At Floor Plan, we are committed to providing a journal with a unique flavor and style; one designed to complement and underpin the poetry which we find worthy of publication. (See submission guidelines.)
If we fail to support (through our own design) the work which we’ve asked to bottle and distribute, we diminish for our audience what that work might have become. Just as a swig of Coca-Cola from a glass bottle gives more pleasure than the same product sipped from a paper or plastic cup, it is our belief that our readers will be affected in the same light.
It is worth mentioning the three-year period during which I worked as a docent at MoMA-PS1, where, alone in galleries, I spent a remarkable amount of time (how to put this) being widened. I was given many absurd privileges such as guarding a lime-green cube of confetti while breathing in a heavy dust—a product of the corresponding room in which five gigantic carwash brushes whirled and wore themselves down against thick metal plates. As the exhibition weathered on (with the cube less a cube & the white-washed rooms coated in something between a grey and black), my admiration for the work widened—certain social and political forces not initially apparent were brought out.
As the years passed, I was struck by the brick-school building’s unique story and arrangement, how this singular environ gave patrons permission to sit longer with, to absorb and come back to work such as Lara Favaretto’s Just Knocked Out, which—in a more customary environment—would have been passed over. Floor Plan then is committed to providing an arrangement of rooms that, like PS1, pulls readers back into the work that, like anything of quality, requires more than a second glance.
Best,
Eric Helms
