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Abstract
This paper analyzes the early years of the influential art journal October. Beginning in 1976, October established itself as arguably the foremost art-critical voice of postmodernism. Significant essays, published between 1976 and 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 skeptical of their late-modernist inheritance. However, this paper contends that October did not merely report and analyze then-recent cultural developments, but rather 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.
Notes
1 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2002), 194.
2 On October's origins and relationship to Artforum, see Hal Foster, “Art Critics in Extremis,” Design and Crime and Other Diatribes (London: Verso, 2002), 105–22, and Thomas Crow, “Art Criticism in the Age of Incommensurate Values: On the Thirtieth Anniversary of Artforum,” in Modern Art in Common Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 85–93.
3 Craig Owens recollected that “The discussion [around postmodernism] became important around 1975, before Lyotard. He meant nothing to me at this point, and I hadn't even heard of him. … The first time I heard of [Lyotard's] argument was in 1980 in Montreal.” See Anders Stephanson, “Interview with Craig Owens,” Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 298–300.
4 See Charles Jencks, “The Rise of Post-Modern Architecture,” Architecture Association Quarterly 7, no. 4 (October–December 1975): 3–14; Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London: Academy, 1977).
5 Stephanson, “Interview with Craig Owens,” 299. In a personal e-mail to me, Crimp comments that his October office was, since the beginning of 1977, located in the offices of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, and that he was in regular contact with the architectural theorists there (the position of those theorists was largely pro-postmodernism but, in Crimp's words, “vehemently opposed the Charles Jencks view of postmodernism”).
6 I take this remark from Diarmuid Costello in Art History Versus Aesthetics, ed. James Elkins (London: Routledge, 2005), 85.
7 Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998), 106–25.
8 Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 35–69.
9 Fried later recalled: “In fact, what fascinated me about the Minimalists was that they read Greenberg, valued the same recent art, but saw in it a development that projected literalness. . . It was as if [they] were the ones who really believed the Greenbergian reduction. . .” Michael Fried in Discussions in Contemporary Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 73.
10 Michael Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella's New Paintings,” Artforum (November 1966): 403–25. Cited from the republished version in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 99n11. Thomas Kuhn's influence upon the art world is discussed by Caroline A. Jones in “The Modernist Paradigm: The Artworld and Thomas Kuhn,” Critical Inquiry 26 (Spring 2000): 488–528. Stanley Cavell also makes reference to Kuhn; see “Music Discomposed,” Must We Mean What We Say? updated ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1969]), 183.
11 Krauss, “A View of Modernism,” Artforum (September 1972): 51n9. Interestingly, the reference to Kuhn has been removed from the republished version found in Perpetual Inventory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 115–28.
12 Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 1,” October 3 (Spring 1977): 68–81; and “Notes on the Index: Part 2,” October 4 (Fall 1977): 58–67.
13 Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 1,” 68.
14 Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 1,” 68.
15 See Charles Sanders Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” The Philosophy of Peirce (New York: Dover Press, 1940).
16 However, such an identification is perhaps controversial. See the roundtable discussion and assessments in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (London: Routledge, 2007), 129–203.
17 For more on this displacement, see Matthew Bowman, “Rosalind Krauss,” in Fifty Key Writers on Photography, ed. Mark Durden (London: Routledge, 2013), 149–54.
18 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 41.
19 Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 42.
20 Douglas Crimp, Pictures (New York: The Committee for the Visual Arts, Inc., 1977), 28.
21 Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 87.
22 See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). Another key text was Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” later republished in Blindness and Insight: Essays on the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2d ed. rev. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983 [1971]).
23 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977).
24 Crimp, “Pictures,” 87.
25 Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse, part one,” October 12 (Spring 1980): 68.
26 Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse, part one,” 75.
27 At the tail-end of the exploration of allegory was Stephen Melville, “Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism,” October 19 (Winter 1981): 55–92. Melville's essay—and his subsequent writing—is an important analysis of what was too easily passed over in October's overall rejection of Greenberg and Fried.
28 See Craig Owens, “Earthwords,” October 10 (Fall 1979): 120–30.
29 After all, the range of procedures summarized under the titles of “conceptualism,” “postminimalism,” and the like were in themselves critical judgments arraigned against Greenberg's medium-specific modernism.
30 Stephanson, “Interview with Craig Owens,” 307.
31 The “necessarily” in this sentence points to a whole cluster of discussions concerning the relationship between art and criticism (or writing, more broadly) that cannot be tackled here. But fertile starting points would be Owens's “Earthwords” and Cavell's “Music Discomposed.”
Additional information
MATTHEW BOWMAN lectures in the Photography Department at Colchester School of Art and mostly researches art criticism in relation to history and philosophy. He is the author of numerous essays including “The New Critical Historians of Art?” in The State of Art Criticism, edited by James Elkins and Michael Newman (Routledge, 2008) and “Rosalind Krauss” in Fifty Key Writers on Photography, edited by Mark Durden (Routledge, 2013). An extended essay on Martin Heidegger's notion of de-distancing and its value for art historiography, titled “Shapes of Time: Melancholia, Anachronism, and De-Distancing,” has been published in Heidegger and the Work of Art History, edited by Amanda Boetzkes and Aron Vinegar (Ashgate, 2014). An essay “Art Criticism in the Contracted Field” is being completed for Oxford Art Journal. He is presently revising his doctoral research on October for publication as a book.