OCTOBERPub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1162/octo_a_00444
Coco Fusco
{"title":"Art Communities at Risk: On Cuba","authors":"Coco Fusco","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00444","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The article discusses the political actions of Cuban artist group 27N, including a conversation with some of its members and one of its manifestoes.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"135-143"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43734854","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}
OCTOBERPub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1162/octo_a_00442
{"title":"Art Communities at Risk: An Introduction","authors":"","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00442","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"121-121"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43059080","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}
OCTOBERPub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1162/octo_a_00443
Zdenka Badovinac
{"title":"Art Communities at Risk: On Slovenia","authors":"Zdenka Badovinac","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00443","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract “Art Communities At Risk: Slovenia” talks about how it is somehow easier to take a moral than a political position in times of crisis today—and how political manipulations often hide under seemingly moral attitudes. The author analyzes these issues against the background of growing authoritarian forces in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Slovenia, which saw the rise of covid-19 and Janez Janša as prime minister at the same time. Janša's government systematically ignores professional competencies in cultural institutions as well as in science, especially in relation to the epidemic.The voice of experts in the field of culture is ignored, and this is precisely because their specialized knowledge is not neutral. In a time when the space for free speech is shrinking, the need for a clear positioning becomes even more pressing. The author discusses the exhibition Bigger than Myself / Heroic Voices from Ex-Yugoslavia, which she curated for Rome's MAXXI museum last summer. The work shown there addressed Yugoslav emancipatory histories in relation to the issues of particular urgency today: global capitalism, the posthuman condition, and the return of authoritarianism, in particular. The Slovenian authorities took a hostile attitude towards the exhibition, not only because it presented critical voices from the region but also because artists from the former Yugoslavia were presented there, who, according to Slovenian right-wingers, are no longer worthy of participating in national cultural projects. Concerning the example of what is happening in Slovenia today, the essay asks why there has been such a strong turn to the right in Central and Eastern Europe, which is reviving “traditional” morality, patriarchy, and nationalism and engaging in political interference in cultural institutions. The current governments of Slovenia and other countries in the region want to get rid of the critical voices of left-wing experts in culture by favoring ostensibly neutral experts. It removes from important positions all those it considers to be leftists and replaces them with its own people in order to seemingly strike a balance between the various political options. This balancing act and new “neutrality,” however, are just one of the modern disguises of acute authoritarianism in Eastern Europe.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"122-134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45155777","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}
OCTOBERPub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1162/octo_a_00437
Lu Märten
{"title":"Lu Märten: Four Texts∗","authors":"Lu Märten","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00437","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article collects four texts written by German feminist-materialist art historian Lu Märten (1879–1970): “Artistic Aspects of Labor in Old and New Times” Published in 1903 in the social-democratic journal Die Zeit at a time when Märten dedicated the majority of her writings on form to feminist perspectives on housing and reproduction. It is her first systematic essay on what will become a central concern of her own “life-work,” namely, the question of how to break open the capitalized division between “productive labor” and what Märten calls “social-personal” work. Märten thus sketches an understanding of labor outside of its capitalist determinations and notions of progressive temporality. Essence and Transformation of Forms (Arts) This text appeared in 1924 in the journal Arbeiterliteratur. Its immediate objective was to explain the aim of her similarly titled book to a proletarian audience. In this short summary, Märten emphasizes the importance of ethnography for her project. Rather than isolating forms from their social surroundings, as was traditional in art history, the practice of viewing forms ethnographically allows their origins to be seen in a broader framework of social-collective materialities and vital needs. Märten argues that this shift in perspective could be an aid de-fetishizing workerss relationships with the object world. “Art and Proletariat” This was first published in 1925 in Franz Pfemfert's Die Aktion and later that year reprinted in Czech translation in Pásmo, a magazine run by the revolutionary artist collective Devětsil. The article argues that the notion of “proletarian art” is politically and systematically pointless given that “art” is merely the historically specific, impoverished manifestation of form under the conditions of industrial capitalism. In place of art, Märten draws on the notion of “classless form” in order to imagine a monist state of form beyond the divisions of class, gender, and species. “Workers and Film” Written in 1928, this text was not printed during Märten's lifetime, instead serving as a script for a radio broadcast, as was the case for most of her published and unpublished texts on film. Almost a decade before Walter Benjamin's Artwork essay (1936), Märten's “Workers and Film,” along with numerous other articles and radio broadcasts, addressed strikingly similar questions, yet under profoundly different premises. In Märten's synthetic understanding of a monist material culture of people and things, film promised to actualize a technologically mediated monism for the industrial age.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"15-34"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47589267","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}
OCTOBERPub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1162/octo_a_00433
Tom McDonough
{"title":"Cinema at a Standstill∗","authors":"Tom McDonough","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00433","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00433","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract “Cinema at a Standstill” examines the theory and practice of film within the Situationist International, circa 1968. Questioning Guy Debord's refusal to document the group's participation in the abortive revolution of May-June ‘68, the essay explores the Situationists' ambivalence to the image as mnemonic device. Their refusal of film's iconicity did not, however, mean a complete refusal of its logic: The austere, text-based posters produced by the SI during the uprising are here read as a species of revolutionary intertitle for a film running in real time along the streets. Sharing the aniconic quality found at the same moment in the work of Daniel Buren and Jean-Luc Godard, this Situationist imageless cinema is read through the dialectic of repetition and stoppage first developed by Giorgio Agamben.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"79-95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45676628","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}
OCTOBERPub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1162/octo_a_00434
D. Rodowi̇ck
{"title":"Angelica Mesiti's World Citizens∗","authors":"D. Rodowi̇ck","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00434","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00434","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this essay, I review a 2019 exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo entitled When Saying Is Doing, which featured work by Angelica Mesiti, a contemporary Australian artist who works on questions of performance, immigration, and non-verbal communication in multi-screen moving image installations. On the contemporary global stage, if we do not share the same linguistic community or communities, how is human interrelatedness expressed through other forms of ordinary language, where “language” is now considered not as speech but rather as human expressiveness in its most diverse and complex manifestations? What happens when shared language is neither “speech” nor conversation in the linguistic sense? Needed here is a newly imagined vision of the communicability of human community that I refer to as “neighboring.” Putting Mesiti's work in productive dialogue with Stanley Cavell and other critics, I examine how skeptical problems of isolation, privacy, and unknownness are potentially addressed and responded to in contemporary art.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"96-113"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43626947","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}
OCTOBERPub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1162/octo_a_00430
M. Nixon
{"title":"“Killing for Show”: A Conversation with Julian Stallabrass","authors":"M. Nixon","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00430","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this conversation prompted by the publication of Julian Stallabrass's Killing for Show: Photography, War and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), Stallabrass and Mignon Nixon discuss the roles played by photography in two wars that, Stallabrass contends, were simultaneously staged for, and concealed from, the camera. The discussion encompasses diverse modes of war photography, from photojournalism and official military photography to amateur and trophy images, aftermath photographs, and found images used by contemporary artists. It dwells on questions of memory, systemic cruelty, trauma, and melancholy, and on shifts in technology, media, and social relations that have altered the dynamics of killing for show over time, without eliminating the imperative.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"3-23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44545578","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}
OCTOBERPub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1162/octo_a_00435
Kyle Stine
{"title":"Nonhuman Cinema and the Logistical Sublime∗","authors":"Kyle Stine","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00435","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson's Logistics (2012) is the longest film ever made, at over thirty-five days in duration. The film endeavors to make the world-spanning network of global logistics perceptible through an experience of the slow journey of the Dutch container-ship Elly Maersk from Gothenburg, Sweden, to Shenzhen, China. Following this document of an oceanic passage that coincided with—and was at one point halted by—the events of the Arab Spring, this article explores how extreme durational cinema raises questions about the position of the spectator and the limits of representation in an era of digitally networked media. It suggests that there exists, beyond the immediate relationship between spectator and image, a correspondence between the magnitude of filmic address and the logistical conditions of art's creation.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"114-144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42094141","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}
OCTOBERPub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1162/octo_a_00431
Colby Chamberlain
{"title":"Prescribed Performances: Fluxus and Disability","authors":"Colby Chamberlain","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00431","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In 1961, George Maciunas first met the artists and composers whom he would organize into the neo-avant-garde movement known as Fluxus. That same year, he acquired a persistent cough that was later diagnosed as asthma. Drawing from disability-studies scholars including Alison Kafer, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Jasbir K. Puar, and Ellen Samuels, “Prescribed Performances” considers the historical dimensions of this coincidence. Maciunas belonged to a new class of medical subject, the patient of chronic illness who depended on postwar medical innovations (such as steroids) and integrated a regime of self-management into their everyday life. To chart where and how the subject presented in neo-avant-garde performance intersected with the one produced by an emerging biopolitical apparatus for regulating public health, this article turns to the first Fluxus concerts, held in Europe in 1962–63, and then moves forward into the 1970s, asking how event scores, multiples, happenings, and body art were all inflected by their authors' experiences of debility, gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and precarity. Maciunas's Solo for Sick Man (1962), FluxClinic (1966), One Year (1973–74), Hospital Event (1975–76), and Flux Wedding (1978) will be discussed in relation to works by George Brecht, John Cage, Hi Red Center, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Shigeko Kubota, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, and La Monte Young.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"24-51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47317468","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}
OCTOBERPub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1162/octo_a_00432
Felicity D. Scott
{"title":"A Straighter Kind of Hip∗","authors":"Felicity D. Scott","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00432","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article recovers Resource One, an “alternative” computer-resource center founded in San Francisco in 1971 and celebrated by Whole Earth Catalog–founder Stewart Brand as a “counter-computer” initiative in his 1972 Rolling Stone article “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.” Departing from the usual mythologizing of personal computing often linked to Brand's rhetoric of “access to tools,” this reading re-situates Resource One in the urban commune where it was located, Project One. Optic Nerve's video documentary about the communards' life there, Project One (1972), serves as both archive and interpretation of the commune, helping to demonstrate the economic and political utility of the ambivalence harbored within the notion of participation and the ethos of do-it-yourself. The essay ties the logic of participation to the emergence of a new topology of material and informatic domains as well as to novel configurations of home and work. It does so to trace forms of subjectivity that were then being forged through computerization in the service of a postindustrial economy.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"52-78"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48527614","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}