OCTOBER最新文献

{"title":"Notes for Wavelength","authors":"M. Snow","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00484","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Notes and diagrams made by the great experimental filmmaker as he devised his revolutionary WAVELENGTH (1967).","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41953190","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction to Notes for Wavelength","authors":"M. Turvey","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00482","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Longtime readers of October hardly need reminding that artist Michael Snow, who passed away in January 2023 at the age of ninety-four, was of singular importance to our journal, and especially to one of our founding editors, Annette Michelson. Michelson's first article devoted exclusively to a North American filmmaker “of the independent persuasion” was about Snow and especially his film Wavelength (1967), and this film in many ways exemplified the advanced art of the late 1960s and ‘70s that October was founded, in part, to defend and champion: art that was perceived as analytic rather than expressive; that expanded its medium even while hyperbolizing its defining conventions; that foregrounded temporality and duration; and that prompted cognitive reflection on the viewer's part about their phenomenological experience of the work and its possible sociopolitical ramifications.1 (In retrospect, the film is also notable for its humor, which, while not addressed in much depth at the time, was partly informed by the Duchampian legacy of puns and wordplay, often involving the titles of works, that also influenced October and its early canon of artists. Humor was to remain a major, but underappreciated, feature of Snow's work.) Snow first appeared in October in issue No. 4 (Autumn 1977), with his “Notes for Rameau's Nephew,” about his film Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974), his contribution to the so-called New Talkie of the 1970s.2 The same issue contained an article by critic Amy Taubin, who had acted in Wavelength, about an exhibition of Snow's photographs at MoMA.3 Almost two years later, Michelson published in these pages her second major text on Snow, “About Snow,” in which she revisited Wavelength, but this time through the lens of a more politicized and psychoanalytically inflected version of phenomenology, which she took from French film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry.4 Now, according to Michelson, the film affirms the spectator as “transcendental subject” by offering a “gratifying confirmation of a threatened sovereignty” to audiences, something that is even more true, Michelson argued, of Snow's film La région centrale (1970).5 Snow would feature in many subsequent essays published in the journal, including in a cluster of texts devoted to his work in issue No. 114 in 2005, among which was an interview with Snow conducted by Michelson about his work in music.6 He was also the subject of an October Files (No. 24) co-edited by Michelson and Kenneth White.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45723493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On Peter Weibel","authors":"Joseph Leo Koerner","doi":"10.3917/mult.022.0119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3917/mult.022.0119","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract He was always the youngest in the group. In 1966, the core participants in what he—with Valie Export—would later dub “Viennese Actionism” applied for government funding to attend the Destruction in Art Symposium in London. The group sent him, just twenty-two years old, to the ministry to argue their case. He remained their go-to spokesperson. On June 7, 1968, at the Kunst und Revolution event in Lecture Hall 1 of the University of Vienna, it was he who introduced the wild proceedings with an “Inflammatory Speech,” his raised right asbestos-gloved hand in flames. Ending quickly in a cry of pain—kerosene on his naked forearm caught fire—his oration, titled (after Lenin's pamphlet) “What Is to Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement,” gave way to the more scandalous, though perhaps less cunning, actions of his older comrades. Otto Muehl, a “former middle- school teacher,” as one “memory protocol” described him, screamed obscenities while whipping a bandaged man until he bled. Gunter Brus, after undressing onstage, cut himself and (again the protocol) “masturbated for about 20 minutes” before shitting and pissing in the audience's direction. Oswald Wiener, his speech drowned out onstage by grunting, was falsely heard to say that the shitting should move from the lecture hall to St. Stephen's Cathedral, the city's holy of holies. Meanwhile he, the event's “inflammatory” opening speaker, was the only actual student to address the Austrian Socialist Students’ Union (the hapless host of Vienna's infamous “hot quarter-hour”), and he had come well equipped. He brought with him a water bucket to extinguish his burning glove and wore safety goggles to protect his eyes against flames and, as things turned out, against blood, excrement, and urine. When he died this year, just four days short of his seventy-ninth birthday, Peter Weibel seemed perennially youthful. He had led the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe for almost a quarter century, indefinitely postponing his retirement by mounting art exhibitions—sometimes as many as seven in one year—that reshaped the definition of art exhibitions. It was Weibel, earlier and more consistently than anyone, who gave museological form to our posthuman, postmedium, anthropocenic condition. Sprawling, experimental, and provisory, these exhibitions yielded mighty catalogues: about surveillance, futurity, and digital art, about forgotten contemporaries (like Vilém Flusser) and emergent stars (Weibel was early in celebrating William Kentridge and Olafur Eliasson). Of these many shows, the four co-curated with Bruno Latour, who passed away five months before Weibel, were the most significant. Weibel and Latour called them Gedankenausstellungen (“thought exhibitions”). With challenging titles like “Making Things Public,” “Reset Modernity,” and “Critical Zones” and conceptual in what they displayed and how, they blurred the lines between science and art, gallery space and laboratory, aesthetic object and poli","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46276867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Conversation with Manuel Borja-Villel","authors":"Yve-Alain Bois, B. Buchloh","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00481","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00481","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract One could argue that Manuel Borja-Villel fuses the position of the melancholic museum director, mourning the loss of the emancipatory projects of the recent past, with that of the activist utopian museum director, elaborating, if not enacting, the urgently needed changes necessary for a different future of institutional and cultural practices to be achieved. Since his initial appointment at the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona in 1990 and continuing on to this January, when he left his directorship of the Reina Sofía, Borja-Villel has advanced, or rather re-embodied, the great tradition of the progressive museum director of the 1920s and ‘30s, from Alexander Dorner in Hannover to Alfred Barr in New York. Theirs was a tradition that defined the functions of the curator as being those of a scholar, cultivating historical memory as a form of collective enlightenment and visionary innovation as the dissemination of current critical thought and oppositional practice. As directors, they had imagined the museum to be an extension of the public sphere, one whose functions were comparable to those of libraries and the various faculties of the university: to collect and organize knowledge and critical and historical reflection in order to satisfy the largest possible public's desire for cultural literacy, beyond the inherited or enforced distinctions of class privileges. Unlike that of his contemporary American colleagues, Borja-Villel's institutional success was not the result of incessant compromises with the ever-intensifying demand to turn the museum's exhibitions into an expanded field of spectacle culture. Nor did he expand the museum's collections to serve as the affirmative substrate of speculative investment. Borja-Villel—until now protected by the legal principles of a recently restituted liberal-democratic state—could develop and sustain his exemplary practice of organizing truly historical exhibitions and building a formidable collection within the boundaries set by his comparatively limited access to public resources. Not to have yielded to those pressures, to private capital and its property control, is undoubtedly one of the reasons the newly emerging reactionary forces in Spain (as everywhere else) determined that it was time to conclude its support for the aspirations that had emerged from the oppositional practices of Conceptual art and institutional critique that had been formative for Borja-Villel (much more so than for any other museum director known to us in either Europe or the United States). Typically, to mention just a few examples, the first great comprehensive retrospective exhibition of Hans Haacke's work was organized by Borja-Villel, as were the first major European retrospectives of Marcel Broodthaers and James Coleman, of Lygia Clark and Nancy Spero. And another, equally ground-breaking exhibition (among dozens of others), Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, and Max Jorge Hinderer's The Potosí Principle—one of the fir","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44941214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Conversation with Sergei Loznitsa*","authors":"Jean-Michel Frodon","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00485","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00485","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Film critic and scholar Jean-Michel Frodon interviews Ukrainian filmmaker about his career, beginning with his training in mathematics and science (and the surprising connections between math and movies), his training at Russian film school, his relationship with various of his teachers, how he finances his films, and of course the films themselves, including Train Stop, My Joy, Blockade, Mr. Landsbergis, The Natural History Of Destruction, Maidan, Reflection, Austerlitz, In the Fog, A Gentle Creature, Donbass, and Babi Yarr Context.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49485563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Air Conditioner, or Revolutionary Cinema without a Future","authors":"Sarah Hamblin","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00486","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00486","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay is an effort to imagine new modes of revolutionary cinema in the age of the Capitalocene. Starting from the premise that the environmental volatility of this new epoch forces us to fundamentally reconsider the basic tenets of the revolutionary imagination, the essay asks what radical transformation looks like when we abandon earlier modes of resistance and visions of the future that are wedded to anthropocentric fantasies of humanity's sovereignty over nature and the promises of petromodernity. To begin answering this question, the text takes up the lo-fi Angolan Africanfuturist film Air Conditioner (Fradique 2020). Set in Luanda, Angola, where air-conditioning units across the city suddenly begin failing and falling from windows, the film dramatizes the problems of technological collapse combined with a rapidly warming climate. Resigning the legacies of colonialism and the nation's protracted conflict between communist and capitalist forces to the decaying infrastructural backdrop of the film, Air Conditioner is instead concerned with the new modes of solidarity and ideas of futurity that emerge from within these conditions of catastrophe. The film's incidental references to socialism, combined with its meandering narrative and languid pace, render it quite different in form and tone from the revolutionary anti-colonial cinemas of independence. Thus, against earlier images of revolution as a sudden rupture that harnesses the twin powers of industrialization and human agency, Air Conditioner roots itself in slowness, imagining revolution as a process of withdrawal based on the wearing out of life.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45761073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Wavelength Papers","authors":"Federico Windhausen","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00483","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract What remains of the North American avant-garde of the 1960s and ‘70s? Certainly many more films than filmmakers, but a paper trail as well. Housed in museums, university libraries, film archives, and personal collections across the United States and Canada, a decentralized and ever-expanding set of documents and ephemera is shaping and informing numerous research-based projects in curation, academic scholarship, and film restoration. And yet, in contrast to this contemporary trend, the collected papers of Michael Snow at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto have yet to be explored in depth. A notable exception is Elizabeth Legge's monograph on Snow's Wavelength (1967), which cites some of the notes he kept during the film's conceptualization and production.2 Because the analysis of those notes was not one of Legge's primary objectives, however, her book reproduces only three of the pages in Snow's Wavelength file. The occasion of Snow's recent passing will doubtless be met by various forms of retrospection, and this small contribution to that extended moment of reflection makes available in print a greater number of the Wavelength files than have previously been published. They represent a rare instance of a canonical avant-garde film's being accompanied by a significant corpus of scribblings, illustrations, and diagrams. This selection, comprising twenty-four pages taken from the filmmaker's unbound notes, introduces some of the themes and questions that Snow was putting to paper during the project's year of gestation. Below, I offer a few remarks on those pages. They are admittedly somewhat arbitrary, but they are intended to bring to light some of the archive's lesser-known revelations.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47812755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Anti-Manga: Sasaki Maki, Ishiko Junzō, and Avant-Garde Comics in Japan","authors":"Ryan Holmberg","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00477","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay considers the theory and practice of avant-garde manga in Japan in the 1960s and early ’70s, focusing on the work of Sasaki Maki and Hayashi Seiichi in the alt-manga magazine Garo and on the writings of Ishiko Junzō, Nakahara Yūsuke, and Nakamura Hiroshi, with a view to related theories in contemporary Japanese art and experimental film, particularly “anti-art” and “image theory.”","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41543917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On Meme Work∗","authors":"Ivan Knapp","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00474","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract While memes have been implicated in a loosening of the boundary between illusion and reality during the rise of Trumpism and the COVID-19 pandemic, they have been afforded scarce attention from a psychoanalytic perspective. This essay proposes that Sigmund Freud's language on dream-work can be used to describe the psychical work that these digital items effect. If Freud's terms identify the operations by which unconscious fantasies are inscribed in certain cultural artefacts, their resonance with memetic characteristics suggests that the meme may be a privileged form for investigating the mass mediation of group dynamics. Drawing on the work of psychoanalysts such as Stephen Mitchell, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, René Kaës, and Didier Anzieu, this text explores how their theoretical frameworks might enrich a conceptualization of the role that memes play within the psychic life of groups.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45553849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Siberia: Dissolving Earths","authors":"Sophie J. Williamson","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00480","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The processes of colonization often feature campaigns to decouple indigenous inhabitants from their relationship with the land. This practice has a particularly violent history in the Russian republic of Yakutia and across wider Siberia; indeed, systemic oppression and exploitation continues there to this day. While the international art world has turned its attention towards indigenous futures and forms of knowledge, it has focused primarily on the Americas as well as the Nordic and Oceania regions. “Siberia: Dissolving Earths” discusses the need for developing an international platform for Siberia and its indigenous cultural, ecological, and scientific communities, especially in a time when ties with the region are being severed given its “Russian” identity, a categorization so few of the region's inhabitants want.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45756564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}