OCTOBERPub Date : 2021-04-10DOI: 10.1162/OCTO_A_00419
D. Joselit
{"title":"NFTs, or The Readymade Reversed","authors":"D. Joselit","doi":"10.1162/OCTO_A_00419","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_A_00419","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Modern and contemporary art have redefined the relationship between information and matter. Whether in the readymade's scrambling of the categories of art and commodity or Conceptual art's translation of matter into information, the artwork is embedded in a dynamic multi-media discourse. The NFT, or non-fungible-token, reverses this long genealogy of contemporary art by hijacking the category of art as nothing more than a tool for designing a new asset class, ripe for exuberant speculation. In short, the readymade—whose purpose was to demonstrate the fungibility of artworks when shifted from one discursive category to another—has been reversed.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"3-4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49207144","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 : 2021-04-10DOI: 10.1162/OCTO_A_00420
Pamela M. Lee
{"title":"Our Names: An Open Letter to Asian Sisters","authors":"Pamela M. Lee","doi":"10.1162/OCTO_A_00420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_A_00420","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This open letter responds to the murders of six women of Asian descent on March 16, 2021, all workers in Atlanta-area massage parlors. It describes both the contemporary climate and the historical foundations for anti-Asian/AAPI racism in the country, and it reflects on both the promise and the violence that inheres in acts of naming and nomination for Asian women. In its address to “Asian sisters,” the letter challenges the terms of Asian American representation and considers larger discussions among BIPOC scholars about whether to refuse institutional recognition by the state.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"5-8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44917685","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 : 2021-04-10DOI: 10.1162/OCTO_A_00416
Heiða Björk Árnadóttir
{"title":"Nature, the Nonhuman, and the Critique of Representation in Dieter Roth's Biodegradable Work","authors":"Heiða Björk Árnadóttir","doi":"10.1162/OCTO_A_00416","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_A_00416","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The practice of the Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth is distinguished by his pioneering use, since the early 1960s, of biodegradable materials. This essay examines the development of Roth's practice from Concrete Art to process-oriented and biodegradable work in the context of the reconceptualization of the “concrete” within the global artistic network of Fluxus in the postwar period. Highlighting the challenge Roth's biodegradable work poses to the traditional conceptual limits of the spheres of culture and nature, it argues that the profound transformation of Roth's practice in the early 1960s was rooted in the artist's growing discontent with the idealist and ethical premises of modern art and aesthetics, at the heart of which is the distinction between the human and the nonhuman. In this, Roth's biodegradable works precede later preoccupations with how humans relate to the natural environment, both in early earthworks from the late '60s and in contemporary practice. By examining Roth's biodegradable works in the context of Fluxus, this essay points towards aspects of Fluxus work that remain unexamined, most crucially the role of the natural and the nonhuman in Fluxus critiques of representation.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"70-87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47750054","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 : 2021-04-10DOI: 10.1162/OCTO_A_00417
Liz Linden, Susan Ballard
{"title":"Art Writing and Allegory in the Anthropocene","authors":"Liz Linden, Susan Ballard","doi":"10.1162/OCTO_A_00417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_A_00417","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay traces the emergence of a rich and densely layered field of art writing within the Anthropocene. We ask: If the Anthropocene is all around us, where is it in art writing? We identify the emergence of Anthropocenic art writing: writing that is not art writing about the Anthropocene per se but rather art writing that takes its cue from the operations and outcomes of the Anthropocene itself, including its flagrant disregard for boundaries (disciplinary and otherwise), and its agency. We find such strategies already at work, particularly, in writing by artists such as Hito Steyerl, Martha Rosler, and Chris Kraus, as well as in writing that is polyphonic either through the collaboration of multiple writers or through collage. We map art writing's strata (its past and present delineations, some of its cardinal points) in order to identify sites of resistance to the accelerations of the contemporary era, which is to say places where deceleration and deliberation may be possible. Anthropocenic art writing claims such modes as its own. While for scientists the Anthropocene has been marked by the contestation of golden spikes, in art writing these proxy signals go far beyond employing “nature” and the environment as a theme or topic, taking the Anthropocene as an allegorical mode itself.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"88-108"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42875951","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 : 2021-04-10DOI: 10.1162/OCTO_A_00415
Cassandra Guan
{"title":"Critique of Flowers: The Exigency of Life in the Era of Its Technical Reproducibility","authors":"Cassandra Guan","doi":"10.1162/OCTO_A_00415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_A_00415","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Need, as an epigenetic concept, originated with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, for whom it referred to the pressure of circumstances that compel animals to develop new organs in the course of evolution. It reappeared in twentieth-century science as the somatic disequilibrium that Sigmund Freud, following Psycho-Lamarckian biologists, first called “the need of life” (die Not des Lebens) and then “the drives” (Trieb). The invention of time-lapse cinematography around 1900, initially as an optical instrument in the experimental study of plant physiology, visibly enlarged the epigenetic paradigm: Plants were suddenly perceived as agential beings, attached to the physical environment not by their roots, but rather by their needs and activities. The disquieting impression of responsive behavior became the selling point of the BASF-commissioned nitrogen-fertilizer commercial Miracle of Flowers (1926), a film celebrated by Rudolf Arnheim as “the most fantastic, thrilling, and beautiful picture ever made.” This article interrogates the sovereignty of need in epigenesis, using Miracle of Flowers as a case study. Through a close reading of the animal-like organisms in this film and the emotional reactions they elicited, need is reimagined as a maladaptive force embodied in technical media that tethers unhappy individuals to punishing environments.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42395002","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 : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1162/octo_a_00410
H. Copeland, Hal Foster, D. Joselit, Pamela M. Lee
{"title":"A Questionnaire on Decolonization","authors":"H. Copeland, Hal Foster, D. Joselit, Pamela M. Lee","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00410","url":null,"abstract":"The term decolonize has gained a new life in recent art activism, as a radical challenge to the Eurocentrism of museums (in light of Native, Indigenous, and other epistemological perspectives) as well as in the museum's structural relation to violence (either in its ties to oligarchic trustees or to corporations engaged in the business of war or environmental depredation). In calling forth the mid-twentieth-century period of decolonization as its historical point of reference, the word's emphatic return is rhetorically powerful, and it corresponds to a parallel interest among scholars in a plural field of postcolonial or global modernisms. The exhortation to decolonize, however, is not uncontroversial-some believe it still carries a Eurocentric bias. Indeed, it has been proposed that, for the West, de-imperialization is perhaps even more urgent than decolonization. What does the term decolonize mean to you in your work in activism, criticism, art, and/or scholarship? Why has it come to play such an urgent role in the neoliberal West? How can we link it historically with the political history of decolonization, and how does it work to translate postcolonial theory into a critique of the neocolonial contemporary art world? Respondents include Nana Adusei-Poku, Brook Andrew, Sampada Aranke, Ian Bethell-Bennett, Kader Attia, Andrea Carlson, Elise Y. Chagas, ISUMA, Iftikhar Dadi, Janet Dees, Nitasha Dhillon, Hannah Feldman, Josh T. Franco, David Garneau, Renee Green, Iman Issa, Arnold J. Kemp, Thomas Lax, Nancy Luxon, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Saloni Mathur, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Alan Michelson, Partha Mitter, Isabela Muci Barradas, Steven Nelson, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Alessandro Petti, Paulina Pineda, Christopher Pinney, Elizabeth Povinelli, Ryan Rice, Andrew Ross, Paul Chaat Smith, Nancy Spector, Francoise Verges, Rocio Zambrana, and Joseph R. Zordan.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"3-125"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42960399","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 : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1162/octo_a_00411
Leah Dickerman
{"title":"Aaron Douglas and Aspects of Negro Life∗","authors":"Leah Dickerman","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00411","url":null,"abstract":"In 1934, Aaron Douglas created an epic four-panel mural series, Aspects of Negro Life (1934), for the branch library on 135th Street in Manhattan, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The panels answered a call, issued by the first major program for federal support of the arts in the United States, to represent “an American scene.” In them, Douglas traced the trajectory of African American history in four stages and across two mass migrations: from Africa into enslavement in America; through Emancipation and Reconstruction; into the modern Jim Crow South; and then northward with the Great Migration to Harlem itself. The narrative Douglas constructed was remarkable in both its historical sweep and as a story of America seen through Black eyes. This essay explores how Douglas's approach to the trenchant and understudied Aspects of Negro Life panels was shaped by rich conversations across a decade-about what it meant to be Black in America, how the “African” in “African-American” was to be understood, and what a distinctly African-American modernism might be-with an interdisciplinary nexus of thinkers, activists, and artists that included W. E. B. Du Bois; a co-founder of the NAACP and co-editor of the Crisis, sociologist Charles S. Johnson; poet-activist James Weldon Johnson; bibliophile Arturo Schomburg; and philosopher-critic Alain Locke. Looking at Douglas's visual narrative in this context offers insight into how parallel practices of archive-building, art making, history writing, and criticism came together not only to shape a vision of America but also to champion a model of Black modernism framed through diaspora.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"126-162"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45709185","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 : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1162/octo_a_00412
G. Baker
{"title":"Sharing Seeing","authors":"G. Baker","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00412","url":null,"abstract":"In 2007, artist Sharon Lockhart made a large-scale photograph of two young girls reading braille, based on a specific photograph by August Sander from the 1930s made in an institute for blind children. Turning to the widespread iconography of blindness in the history of photography, this essay considers the importance of such images for a larger theory of photographic spectatorship. Lockhart's image of blind children relates to Sander's photograph, but does not duplicate it in all respects; her alteration of the historical image opens onto the larger non-coincidence of vision that photographic seeing instantiates. Ultimately, Lockhart's relational practice of photography-connecting each photograph she makes to prior images, while never fully duplicating or replicating them-provides a model for understanding the relational dynamics of photographic spectatorship. The essay also discusses Paul Strand, Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Kaja Silverman's World Spectators, “straight photography,” and Michael Fried.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"163-175"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43921202","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 : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1162/octo_a_00408
C. Miller
{"title":"Surrealism's Homophobia","authors":"C. Miller","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00408","url":null,"abstract":"The primary document of Surrealist homophobia is a transcript, published in 1928 in the magazine La Révolution surréaliste, entitled “Research on Sexuality/ Extent of Objectivity, Individual Determinations, Degree of Consciousness.” The text records the first two of twelve closed, mostly men-only meetings, held in Paris between 1928 and 1932 by members and fellow travelers of the Surrealist group, at which the participants, according to the collective ethos of Surrealist practice, discussed their sexual preferences, experiences, and beliefs. In the published sessions, the group's leader, André Breton, who convened the meetings and edited the transcript, repeatedly denounced male homosexuality. The problematics of these repudiations are the topics of this article, the intention of which is to map the historical conditions of Breton's heteronormativity and to outline the latter's function in his theory of Surrealism. To this end, the essay displaces the psychoanalytic emphasis customary in Surrealism's reception in order to locate the movement in the historical discourse of sexuality. In the French culture wars of the 1920s, Surrealism mobilized a sexual negativity against the mainstream. Yet in certain key respects, Breton's thought preserved a heterosexist logic of conjugality. Ultimately, a historical reading of Surrealism's homophobia indicates the family ties between dialectical idealism and heteronormativity.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"207-229"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1162/octo_a_00408","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47412182","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 : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1162/OCTO_A_00406
Jessica R. Williams
{"title":"A Pariah Among Parvenus: Anne Fischer and the Politics of South Africa's New Realism(s)∗","authors":"Jessica R. Williams","doi":"10.1162/OCTO_A_00406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_A_00406","url":null,"abstract":"While scholars have begun to explore the complex afterlives of “new realism” in Europe and the Americas following the collapse of Weimar democracy, its reception on the African continent has received far less attention. Looking to the unheralded documentary work that Anne Fischer, a German- Jewish refugee to Cape Town, produced in the early years of the Second World War, this essay examines how she and South African contemporary Constance Stuart Larrabee variously employed German modernist photographic aesthetics to both critique and uphold public fictions of race in the decade leading up to the advent of apartheid. In considering these women's work, the text sheds light on how issues of race, class, and gender inflected Fischer's experience of exile and, in turn, how she mobilized her lens in her new colonial context as a young pariah among parvenus","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"143-175"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1162/OCTO_A_00406","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44259581","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}