OCTOBER最新文献

{"title":"The Physiognomy of a Nation","authors":"Stephanie Schwartz","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00492","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay revisits American Photographs, one of the most important photographic books of the 1930s. Containing two portfolios by Walker Evans and an essay by Lincoln Kirstein, the 1938 publication presents readers with eighty-seven photographs printed one per double-page spread. While critical studies of the book have focused on the sequential ordering of the photographs, and on the book's filmic qualities, this essay considers the book's other organizing principle: physiognomy. More specifically, focusing on Evans's decision to include three photographs that he made in Cuba into the book's first part, it attends to the processes of racialization organizing the book and producing America in the 1930s. Challenging canonical accounts of American Photographs and Depression-era documentary more broadly, this essay argues for a history of documentary that does not dispense with its modernism. The argument is not that modernism is still with us but that we need its repetitions.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"273 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135556257","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":"Universal Prostitution: Francis Picabia's Diagrams of Proletarianization","authors":"Jaleh Mansoor","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00493","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00493","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay argues that the diagram and mechanomorph, those idioms for which Francis Picabia is most known in the history of the avant-garde, pushed past representation on the one hand and aesthetic abstraction on the other to access and articulate the historical specificity of the emergent proletarian subject position. Split between human labor bearer and source of abstract labor, the worker becomes both appendage and analog to productive technology as a node in the circulation of value. Borrowing language from Marx, who used the term “universal prostitution” to describe surplus-value-productive, or modern, labor that not only internally divides but also pits the worker against her or his own interests, Picabia's work investigates the advent of the post-human as a function of value. In this sense, his work is indicative of “real,” or concrete, abstraction.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"273 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135556406","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":"Proletarian Feedback: The Mirror of the Soviet Public Sphere","authors":"Devin Fore","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00490","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00490","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract One glaring problem that faced the Bolsheviks upon seizing power was the absence of their vaunted class subject. The party had led a successful revolution in the name of the industrial worker, but once the dust settled after the civil war, reality exposed the proclaimed “dictatorship of the proletariat” to be little more than an empty slogan for propagandists. The proletariat was a historico-philosophical no-show. Its truancy had a number of reasons, both factual and theoretical. First, while proletarians had always been something of a rarity in the largely agrarian economy of imperial Russia, the industrial working class became even scarcer after the civil war had decimated the manufacturing capacity of Russia and ruralized the country once again. When the Bolsheviks finally took control, Russia's industrial output had fallen to thirty percent of prewar levels. Historians have consequently described the Bolsheviks as a “superstructure in need of a base”2 and a “vanguard of a nonexistent class.”3 Add to this, second, the fact that the physiognomy of the working class was changing in the 1920s as the forces of production shifted away from the methods of heavy manufacture typical of the second industrial revolution toward newer, automated technologies that relied less on physical exertion than on the scientific knowledge of engineers and managers. At least until Stalin's spectacular revival of older, “classical” forms of industry at the end of the decade—a return that seemed to be motivated less by economic exigency than by retrograde iconography—blast furnaces and factory workbenches were being replaced by telematic machinery and bureaucratic control centers. Third, according to revolutionary theory, in the phase of the transition to communism the proletariat was not even a class, strictly speaking, but the social force that abolishes class identity as such in order to establish for the first time in world history the conditions for a truly universal subject.4 The revolutionary class is, necessarily, the last class. Party philosophers could provide no substantialist definition of this “free dynamei (power, force),” as Marx called the proletariat, since this non-class had no concrete features of its own but was instead understood as an energy that dissolved the existing socioeconomic order.5 Paradoxically, then, the very success of the revolution “causes the concept of the proletariat to ‘disappear.’”6","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135556252","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":"Collective Reception: Essays in Honor of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh","authors":"Kevin Lotery, Trevor Stark, Hyewon Yoon","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00489","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00489","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"2013 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135556256","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":"Shapes, Wholes, History: For Benjamin","authors":"Rachel Haidu","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00495","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract How can we understand the phrase “Painting After the Subject of History,” which forms the subtitle of Benjamin Buchloh's opus on Gerhard Richter? This essay proposes that that post-subject might be addressed by shapes, rather than figures, closely examining paintings from Philip Guston's celebrated “return to figuration” in the 1970s, when, it is argued, figuration's referentiality is exceeded by the force of Guston's painted shapes. Indeed that force registers as the public dimension of the artist's paintings, addressing an American hellscape, or its unconscious register, populated by images from Kent State, Civil Rights massacres, Vietnam, and more. As Gestalt theorists (Max Wertheimer) and philosophers (Ludwig Wittgenstein) have determined, shapes are respectively “imprinted as wholes” and participate in sign systems––becoming, thereby, not-whole. It is with this ambivalent relation to the sign that Guston's painting explores how shapes can make unconscious forces public. Rather than understanding shapes along a continuum between figuration and abstraction, however, this essay argues that it is Guston's collaborations with poets such as Frank O'Hara that serve as the origin point of his “shape painting.”","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135556405","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":"Ahlam Shibli's <i>Death</i> and Photography in Arabic: A Letter from a Pillar of Salt","authors":"Hannah Feldman","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00498","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00498","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This letter turns to late-nineteenth-century understandings of photography in Arabic as al-taswir al-shamsi—which translates roughly as “solar imaging”—to read a suite of photographs by Ahlam Shibli that depicts the ways in which martyrs of the second intifada are remembered in Nablus. Drawing on connotations embedded in the Arabic term taswir and in a careful study of the way light works in Shibli's photographs, the letter—addressed to you from a person who identifies as a pillar of salt, stuck, looking back but wanting to move forward—makes the argument that, far from indexing a past built on death and displacement, the photographs give light to an alternate social reality in which the Palestinian lives free from the constraints of life as the Israeli's have allowed it, which is to say life as a condition of death.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135556254","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 Underneaths of Painting, Redux: For Silke Otto-Knapp, 1970–2022","authors":"G. Baker","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00469","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00469","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay explores the untold histories opened up by Francis Picabia's painting The Spanish Night, 1922. Out of place within Dada but clearly in dialogue with the work of Marcel Duchamp and parodying conservative or neo-classical styles of painting but also undermining the avant-garde tactics of a still-nascent Surrealism, Picabia's canvas has been too simply dismissed as part of the artist's own return to figuration, a sudden retrenchment and embrace of a vehement anti-modernism. Instead, the work seethes with connection to underground tactics moving between Dada and Surrealism, and it establishes a formal structure that determines Picabia's painting for the following decades. This essay identifies and attempts to name the formal tactics of the work, tracing their implications for other artists—from Surrealism into the present moment. Among the other people and concepts discussed are William Copley, Man Ray, Hubert Damisch, Robert Desnos, the “return to order,” figuration, kitsch, Surrealism, Superrealism, and bad painting.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"3-60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49308735","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":"Facing Poland's “New Historical Politics”: A Conversation with Jaroslaw Suchan","authors":"grupa o.k.","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00473","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00473","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This conversation between Jarosław Suchan, director of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland, from 2006 to 2022, and grupa o.k., the collaborative endeavor of Julian Myers and Joanna Szupinska, addresses the current political crisis in Poland under the rule of the ethnocentric right-wing populist party Law and Justice and its effects on art-institutions in that country. It addresses Suchan's innovative approach to the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, which he sees as internationalist and emancipatory, and explores the circumstances of his dismissal by forces within the ultra-conservative government. It provides Suchan's parsing of disparate factions within the ruling party, his critical analysis of their aims to advance a whitewashed view of Polish history, his efforts to produce a counternarrative to this “new historical politics,” and his hopes and fears for a Polish cultural scene under right-wing populist direction.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"130-145"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48743477","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":"Dada Meets Dixieland: Marcel Duchamp Explains Fountain∗","authors":"B. Bailey","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00470","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00470","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In a 1953 recorded conversation with Harriet, Carroll, and Sidney Janis that was never published, Marcel Duchamp gave his earliest and most detailed description of the origin and submission of the readymade Fountain to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. In addition to featuring several notable revelations about the Fountain episode, the interview is also remarkable for the light it sheds on another nearly contemporary account of the story of Fountain, published in 1956 in the book Modern Art USA by the art and music historian Rudi Blesh. Passionate advocates for Ragtime and the Dixieland jazz revival, Blesh and Harriet Janis were frequent writing partners, publishing several music and art books, and together founded a record label to record traditional jazz artists. Through Harriet and Sidney Janis's extensive artworld connections, Blesh became a close associate of Duchamp, whose impact on Blesh's formulation of Modern Art USA has not been given adequate consideration by scholars. This article presents an analysis of both the Janis and Blesh accounts of Fountain, which together comprise the most comprehensive narrative description of this iconic work of art from Duchamp's perspective.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"61-96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46044038","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 Object Comes Alive”: A Conversation with Claes Oldenburg∗","authors":"Hal Foster","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00472","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00472","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this interview, the late Claes Oldenburg looks back on both the motivations and the modalities of his distinctive practice. Among the topics discussed are his signature “guises,” such as the Ray Guns and the Flags, the performative basis of his early objects, and his sustained commitment to an aesthetic of shape-shifting.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"111-129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42233716","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}