I am face to face with a young woman sitting cross-legged on a couch. She has a book in her lap; I have a notebook in mine. She is in a sunlit room; I am in a darkened theater.

"Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” It is not only the images we create, but those we fail to create, what we fail to see, that will determine the course of histories to come.

There is no progress in art, only actualization. It is not that so-and-so’s work begat so-and-so’s, nor that without Pollock there would be no fill-in-the-blank. As Paul McCarthy says, it is not about influence; it is about opening.

Editors’ note: This is the first installment of a long-form essay to be published here over the next three issues. In it, artist, filmmaker, and teacher Madison Brookshire examines how art museums, and art history can be radically re-potentiated through strategies of cinematic montage.