October Journal

L'arte nell'era postmediale
Marcel Broodthaers, ad esempio
di Rosalind Krauss

Negli anni in cui l'arte si ritrova a fare i conti con la globalizzazione dell'immagine al servizio del capitale, Broodthaers ci insegna come la specificità mediale non serva più a caratterizzare l'opera, ma la sua reinvenzione e riarticolazione permette agli artisti di avere strumenti in grado di produrre delle differenze.
"Trascrizione della Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture del 1999, “L’arte nell’era postmediale” è uno di quei testi che sono entrati presto nella leggenda: tutti ne hanno sentito parlare, ma solo pochi fortunati finora ne hanno avuto una copia tra le mani. Il libro, nonostante la brevità, è un largo ed intricato spettro teorico fatto di osservazioni originali e provocatorie in cui Krauss, co-fondatore e co-direttore della rivista October, veterana di Artforum negli anni 60 e 70, esamina l’intersezione degli interessi artistici con la cultura visiva attuale." Segno, n.203 / 07-2005

In “The Haunting of a Modernism Conceived Differently,” Matthew Bowman reexamines some of Crimp’s groundbreaking essays published in October that established postmodernism as a crucial theoretical concept answerable to recent developments in art and its criticism. He discusses how categorial separations that are thought to be integral to modernism (e.g. medium specificity and teleology) are undercut in Crimp’s proposal of a “modernism conceived differently” that figuratively haunts his theorization of postmodernism. Bowman seeks to recover the relation of postmodernism to this alternative modernism in several examples of Crimp’s influential scholarship. He aims not to treat this other modernism as an intellectual aberration, a failure of argumentative consistency, but rather to spotlight its critical fecundity and its betokening of Crimp’s early interest in deconstruction.

This essay is part of a special issue of InVisible Culture dedicated to Douglas Crimp. See its contents here: https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/table-of-contents-issue-35-after-douglas-crimp/

If communication, reportage, description, and judgment are key elements of the receptive role played by art-critical publications, it’s important to acknowledge on specific occasions such journals also have a productive mediatory function, too. They don’t merely disseminate as if passively a pre-given situation, but may actively construct that situation, define its infrastructure and parameters, and do so whilst under the guise of reportage. In these cases art criticism becomes a dialectic of reception and production, both constituted by and constituting its objects of study.

This paper analyses the early years of the influential art journal October according to the thematic indicated above. Beginning in 1976, October established itself as  arguably the foremost art-critical voice of a burgeoning postmodernism. Significant essays published between 1976-1981 on the index, the expanded field of sculpture, allegory, and photography served as trajectories leading to a deeper understanding of postmodernism and an emergent generation of artists sceptical of their late-modernist inheritance. However, this paper contends that October didn’t merely report and analyse then-recent cultural developments, but actively contributed and constituted those developments through a dialogical relationship between critics and artists.

Therefore suggesting that any critical-historical reappraisal of postmodernism would be incomplete without apprehending October’s collaboration with artists in moving beyond late-modernism, this paper aims to demonstrate that much of our contemporary sense of what comprises postmodernism for the visual arts is fundamentally rooted in the intellectual positions advanced by October during 1976-1981. It shall, then, succinctly explicate key arguments vis-à-vis postmodernism established within the journal’s pages, thereby presenting the capability of the art press to intermingle the reception and production of emergent cultural hegemonies.

While most of Hubert Damisch’s major books have been made available in English since the publication of Yve-Alain Bois’ review essay ‘Painting as model’, it nonetheless remains a shame that Fenêtre Jaune Cadmium (Damisch 1984) – the subject of Bois’ review – has not been translated. Although best known as a specialist in Renaissance art, the essays of Fenêtre show how Damisch’s distinct art-theoretical project emerges from his early writings on modernist and post-war painting, phenomenology and structuralism. This paper argues that Damisch’s writings and Bois’ essay serves as a crux for the October journal. October was at the forefront of the critique against painting during the early 1980s, but the publication of ‘Painting as model’ suggests a sea change in the journal. I shall examine how Damisch’s entwining of phenomenology and structuralism, as a model for October that helped revise its understanding of painting and for rethinking the relationship between art history and art criticism.

Contents of issue here: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/jcp/2019/00000005/00000001

Le pubblicazioni edite da Arshake sono sottoposte al preliminare vaglio scientifico di un comitato di referee anonimi e si avvale quindi della procedura peer review. / Arshake pubblications are submitted for peer-review to a scientific committee of undisclosed members.

Youtube video of lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rodf1rphxn0

While most of Hubert Damisch’s major books have been made available in English since the publication of Yve-Alain Bois’ review essay “Painting as Model,” it nonetheless remains a shame that Fenêtre Jaune Cadmium—the subject of Bois’ review—has not been translated. Although best known as a specialist in Renaissance art, the essays of Fenêtre show how Damisch’s distinct art-theoretical project emerges from his early writings on modernist and post-war painting, phenomenology, and structuralism.

This paper argues that Damisch’s writings and Bois’ essay serves as a crux for the October journal. October was at the forefront of the critique against painting during the early 1980s, but the publication of “Painting as Model” suggests a sea-change in the journal. I shall examine how Damisch’s entwining of phenomenology and structuralism, as a model for October that helped it revise its understanding of painting and for rethinking the relationship between art history and art criticism.

Conference abstract
21 Jun 2018
9.30am to 5pm


Yve-Alain Bois’ seminal text Painting as Model, published in 1990, is still cited as being an extremely important collection of essays that looks at painting as being both a conceptual and a material enquiry. Bois believes that one must concentrate on both the formal elements of a work of art and its physical qualities to fully understand its totality.

Schedule:
9.30 - 10.00 Registration
10.00 - 10.15 Daniel Sturgis: Welcome
10.15 - 11.15 Eric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne: Unframing painting, ‘pushing back the walls’
11.15 - 12.00 Moyra Derby: Models of Attention
12.00 - 12.15 Break
12.15 - 1.15 Dr Matthew Bowman: The Intertwining: Damisch, Bois, and October’s Rethinking of Painting
1.15 - 2.15 Lunch
2.15 - 3.15 Lisa Florman: Description and Resistance
3.15 - 4.00 Daniel Neofetou: A World for Us: On the Prefiguration of Reconciliation in Barnett Newman's Painting
4.00 - 4.45 Roundtable: Yve-Alain Bois and Eric Alliez. Chaired by Philip Armstrong

The symposium is free and open to all. Booking is essential.
Please use the booking form below to reserve your place.

Yve-Alain Bois will deliver an opening lecture to introduce this event on 20 June 2018.
Tickets for the keynote must be purchased separately: http://bit.ly/yve-alain-bois.

Painting as ReModel is convened by Daniel Sturgis, Reader in Painting and Programme Director of BA Fine Art at Camberwell College of Arts. It is presented by the Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon Graduate School Public Programme.

Le pubblicazioni edite da Arshake sono sottoposte al preliminare vaglio scientifico di un comitato di referee anonimi e si avvale quindi della procedura peer review | Arshake pubblications are submitted for peer-review to a scientific committee of undisclosed members. critical grounds # 12 6

Fondata da Rosalind Krauss e Annette Michelson nel 1976, la rivista «October» si pone immediatamente sulla scena internazionale come singolare spazio di discussione sul presente dell’arte e della critica, oggetto di analisi e di dense riflessioni che muovono dall’esigenza di ripensare in maniera radicale il sistema dell’arte e le sue egemonie. Fin dal titolo, un’esplicita citazione del film dedicato da Eisenstein alla rivoluzione sovietica, la rivista statunitense afferma infatti la propria natura militante, rivendicando la possibilità per la critica, e per l’arte insieme, di essere vettore di trasformazione delle strutture sociali e di pensiero attraverso l’azione politica della produzione culturale. Un processo di cui il volume, grazie ad un continuo confronto con le diverse voci che animano il dibattito sulle due sponde dell’oceano, ricostruisce i luoghi privilegiati – l’analisi mediale, la centralità della fotografia, la rilettura dell’avanguardia europea in termini antiformalistici –  dando conto degli esiti eterogenei e plurimi della condotta critica della rivista, dal periodo eroico della fondazione agli anni più recenti, in cui si nota un’istituzionalizzazione delle proposte che culmina nella pubblicazione di Art since 1900, il monumentale manuale di storia dell’arte firmato da alcuni tra i teorici più attivi sulle pagine di «October». Ad emergere con chiarezza da questo ampio lavoro di ricostruzione e di interpretazione è un quadro teorico denso ed estremamente articolato che conferma il ruolo cruciale delle riviste nell'elaborazione del contemporaneo discorso sull'arte e sulla critica.

AMG: Let’s start by tracing a sort of genealogy across your professional career from the seventies until present time (putting the stress in the essays included in the Spanish book and in chronological order). Why did you choose photography as a way to question the modernist discourse and to open the way for postmodernism? Which were your referents at that moment: Benjamin, Barthes…?  Assuming you took Benjamin as a “paradigm”, which of his ideas (Short History of Photography, Artwork in the Age of Reproduction, optical unconscious, decline of the aura) interested your more?

DC: At the time that I organized the Pictures exhibition at Artists Space in 1977, I began to notice the importance of photography in the work of younger generation of artists.  Although Cindy Sherman was not in that show, I had seen her early work, the photo-performance-narrative work she was doing just prior to beginning the untitled film still series.  The show itself had only a few photographic works, by Jack Goldstein and Troy Brauntuch.  Shortly later, Sherrie Levine, who was also in the Pictures show, began using appropriated photographs.