Abstract Susanne Kriemann's Pechblende explores the material histories and visual (im)possibilities of uranium. Through a focus on the materiality of uranium, the article explores how the medium of photography is entangled with atomic histories by focusing on a series of exhibitions that explore the histories of photography, mining, and the damage slowly wrought by environmental change. While the violence of uranium exposure eludes vision, atomic light materially challenges the boundaries of the visible and the invisible, most tangibly shown in X-rays and autoradiographs, the camera-less exposures “taken” by uranium. Reading Kriemann's work through an eco-critical lens that centers environmental justice and labor, I explore the role of photography and the archive in the Anthropocene. Kriemann's counter-archival photographic practice draws attention to the socio-ecological costs of resource extraction while probing the limits of the visible. The materiality of the climate crisis necessitates thinking about materials—and the tangible consequences of their use—alongside questions of representation.
{"title":"Atomic Ecology","authors":"Siobhan Angus","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00450","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00450","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Susanne Kriemann's Pechblende explores the material histories and visual (im)possibilities of uranium. Through a focus on the materiality of uranium, the article explores how the medium of photography is entangled with atomic histories by focusing on a series of exhibitions that explore the histories of photography, mining, and the damage slowly wrought by environmental change. While the violence of uranium exposure eludes vision, atomic light materially challenges the boundaries of the visible and the invisible, most tangibly shown in X-rays and autoradiographs, the camera-less exposures “taken” by uranium. Reading Kriemann's work through an eco-critical lens that centers environmental justice and labor, I explore the role of photography and the archive in the Anthropocene. Kriemann's counter-archival photographic practice draws attention to the socio-ecological costs of resource extraction while probing the limits of the visible. The materiality of the climate crisis necessitates thinking about materials—and the tangible consequences of their use—alongside questions of representation.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42818356","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}
Abstract Recounting the first four Crusades using an evolving cast of marionettes, Wael Shawky's Cabaret Crusades trilogy is widely interpreted as exploring the construction of history. Close attention to the puppet performances, however, suggests that far more is at play than literalizing how the players on life's stage are caught up in history and swept along by external forces. For example, the identity of puppet and puppeteer is frequently destabilized, an instability achieved as much through the possibilities of video as within the material exchanges of puppet and puppeteer. The essay investigates several questions: What questions are posed regarding the interactions of human agency and matter when the marionette becomes the marionettist through the mediation of video? How might this push up against the more obvious histories that Shawky interrogates? And, ultimately, how does this revised form of representation transform understandings of that which the puppet has long represented—the very condition of the human?
{"title":"Puppets Pulling Back: Drawing Out Wael Shawky's Histories","authors":"Damian Taylor","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00449","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Recounting the first four Crusades using an evolving cast of marionettes, Wael Shawky's Cabaret Crusades trilogy is widely interpreted as exploring the construction of history. Close attention to the puppet performances, however, suggests that far more is at play than literalizing how the players on life's stage are caught up in history and swept along by external forces. For example, the identity of puppet and puppeteer is frequently destabilized, an instability achieved as much through the possibilities of video as within the material exchanges of puppet and puppeteer. The essay investigates several questions: What questions are posed regarding the interactions of human agency and matter when the marionette becomes the marionettist through the mediation of video? How might this push up against the more obvious histories that Shawky interrogates? And, ultimately, how does this revised form of representation transform understandings of that which the puppet has long represented—the very condition of the human?","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46526655","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}
Abstract A pretty perilous and challenging exercise, especially for someone like me who indulges in thinking of himself, in a somewhat defensive and questionable way, I confess, as having no specific field or period of competence and evading any precise definition or classification in academic terms. As a matter of fact, I have been lucky enough to spend most of my life in an institution, the EHESS [École des hautes études en sciences sociales], which, in those days, having become an independent school, was open to people who refused to defer to the academic division of labor and which, under the rule of great personalities like Fernand Braudel and my friend Jacques Le Goff, would welcome young people with non-conformist backgrounds in order for them to develop their formation according to their own lines. To develop it—I wouldn't say to achieve it, for as far as I am concerned there seems to be no end to it: hence the challenge, which consists in having to look back at one's own intellectual past through the viewer and the lens of the present. Part of the picture, which happened to be of great consequence to me, was, and still is, a great freedom and encouragement to travel, lecture, teach, and study abroad, in my case especially in the States, where, for a long time, I felt much more at ease with authentic art historians and critics than I did in France, and developed some deep and enduring friendships with great individuals like Meyer Schapiro, Rosalind Krauss, Tony Vidler, Tim Clark, and Hank Millon, not to mention several artists and architects I will refer to later. Travelling: I don't claim any originality when saying that I owe to my urge to travel a large part of my formation as an art historian. I remember with emotion looking with Meyer Schapiro through his travel notebooks. I keep boxes filled with my own.
{"title":"My Formative Years∗","authors":"Hubert Damisch","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00446","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract A pretty perilous and challenging exercise, especially for someone like me who indulges in thinking of himself, in a somewhat defensive and questionable way, I confess, as having no specific field or period of competence and evading any precise definition or classification in academic terms. As a matter of fact, I have been lucky enough to spend most of my life in an institution, the EHESS [École des hautes études en sciences sociales], which, in those days, having become an independent school, was open to people who refused to defer to the academic division of labor and which, under the rule of great personalities like Fernand Braudel and my friend Jacques Le Goff, would welcome young people with non-conformist backgrounds in order for them to develop their formation according to their own lines. To develop it—I wouldn't say to achieve it, for as far as I am concerned there seems to be no end to it: hence the challenge, which consists in having to look back at one's own intellectual past through the viewer and the lens of the present. Part of the picture, which happened to be of great consequence to me, was, and still is, a great freedom and encouragement to travel, lecture, teach, and study abroad, in my case especially in the States, where, for a long time, I felt much more at ease with authentic art historians and critics than I did in France, and developed some deep and enduring friendships with great individuals like Meyer Schapiro, Rosalind Krauss, Tony Vidler, Tim Clark, and Hank Millon, not to mention several artists and architects I will refer to later. Travelling: I don't claim any originality when saying that I owe to my urge to travel a large part of my formation as an art historian. I remember with emotion looking with Meyer Schapiro through his travel notebooks. I keep boxes filled with my own.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44798186","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}
Abstract The artist writes about being persecuted by the Russian government for “body-positive” art, which could lead to a lengthy jail sentence.
这位艺术家写道，他因为“身体积极”的艺术而受到俄罗斯政府的迫害，这可能导致他被判长期监禁。
{"title":"Art Communities at Risk: On Russia","authors":"Y. Tsvetkova","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00445","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The artist writes about being persecuted by the Russian government for “body-positive” art, which could lead to a lengthy jail sentence.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45457914","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}
Abstract “Art Work as Life Work: Lu Märten's Feminist ‘Objectivity’” highlights the feminist stakes of German feminist-materialist art historian Lu Märten's interventions in the interwar discourses on art and labor, on objectivity (Sachlichkeit), and the new media of film and radio. The essay argues that Märten's contributions to these areas sit squarely within more familiar narratives of materialist aesthetics and Weimar culture (from Walter Benjamin's epochal Artwork Essay to the Bauhaus) and that they do so on account of her heterodox reading of Marx and commitment to Spinoza's monism. In Märten's view, this non-binary materialism offered an alternative, non-Hegelian route to a materialist conception of art or as she preferred to say, form. In contrast to art history's academic formalism, Märten espouses a notion of form that does not maintain art's autonomy but instead connects art to other social fields. Here form always evolves out of informality. The essay traces the close bond between art work and life work across Märten's multiple publications, including her theoretical magnum opus Essence and Transformation of Forms/Arts and her studies on The Economic Conditions of Artists and The Female Artist. In so doing, the text contributes to revisiting the firm boundaries that art history has drawn between objects and communities.
{"title":"Art Work as Life Work: Lu Märten's Feminist “Objectivity”","authors":"J. Nachtigall, K. Stakemeier","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00438","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract “Art Work as Life Work: Lu Märten's Feminist ‘Objectivity’” highlights the feminist stakes of German feminist-materialist art historian Lu Märten's interventions in the interwar discourses on art and labor, on objectivity (Sachlichkeit), and the new media of film and radio. The essay argues that Märten's contributions to these areas sit squarely within more familiar narratives of materialist aesthetics and Weimar culture (from Walter Benjamin's epochal Artwork Essay to the Bauhaus) and that they do so on account of her heterodox reading of Marx and commitment to Spinoza's monism. In Märten's view, this non-binary materialism offered an alternative, non-Hegelian route to a materialist conception of art or as she preferred to say, form. In contrast to art history's academic formalism, Märten espouses a notion of form that does not maintain art's autonomy but instead connects art to other social fields. Here form always evolves out of informality. The essay traces the close bond between art work and life work across Märten's multiple publications, including her theoretical magnum opus Essence and Transformation of Forms/Arts and her studies on The Economic Conditions of Artists and The Female Artist. In so doing, the text contributes to revisiting the firm boundaries that art history has drawn between objects and communities.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46003820","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}
Abstract In this conversation, Andrea Fraser discusses her recent book, 2016 in Money, Museums, and Politics, which considers the imbricated relationships between plutocracy, political power, and cultural institutions in the United States. She discusses the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump and the rise of right-wing populism; the history of private philanthropy and museum patronage; recent activist campaigns demanding the resignation of museum trustees, such as Warren B. Kanders at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the concept of “reflexive resistance.”
在本次对话中，安德里亚·弗雷泽讨论了她的新书《2016年金钱、博物馆和政治》，该书探讨了美国富豪、政治权力和文化机构之间错综复杂的关系。她讨论了2016年唐纳德·j·特朗普(Donald J. Trump)的当选和右翼民粹主义的兴起;私人慈善事业和博物馆赞助的历史;最近的维权运动要求博物馆理事辞职，比如惠特尼美国艺术博物馆(Whitney museum of American Art)的沃伦·b·坎德斯(Warren B. Kanders);以及"反射性抵抗"的概念
{"title":"On Institutional Democratization and Reflexive Resistance: A Conversation with Andrea Fraser","authors":"John Hulsey","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00440","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this conversation, Andrea Fraser discusses her recent book, 2016 in Money, Museums, and Politics, which considers the imbricated relationships between plutocracy, political power, and cultural institutions in the United States. She discusses the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump and the rise of right-wing populism; the history of private philanthropy and museum patronage; recent activist campaigns demanding the resignation of museum trustees, such as Warren B. Kanders at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the concept of “reflexive resistance.”","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44341002","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}
Abstract In this conversation—recorded in 2019 for the artist's first solo museum exhibition—New Orleans–based Garrett Bradley discusses her filmic work as well as its relationship to institutional archives and personal communities with art historian Huey Copeland. What emerges is a critical account of Bradley's evolving Black feminist practice—its inspirations, antecedents, and analogues—which puts pressure on filmic conventions to move toward an “affective resymbolization” of America's racial imaginaries and the means through which they might be contested, shared, and visualized for audiences on all sides of the color line.
{"title":"On Black Affective Forms: A Conversation with Garrett Bradley∗","authors":"Huey Copeland","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00441","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00441","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this conversation—recorded in 2019 for the artist's first solo museum exhibition—New Orleans–based Garrett Bradley discusses her filmic work as well as its relationship to institutional archives and personal communities with art historian Huey Copeland. What emerges is a critical account of Bradley's evolving Black feminist practice—its inspirations, antecedents, and analogues—which puts pressure on filmic conventions to move toward an “affective resymbolization” of America's racial imaginaries and the means through which they might be contested, shared, and visualized for audiences on all sides of the color line.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47414326","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}
Abstract Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942) was filmed during World War II and takes place in the early period of the Nazi occupation of Poland, yet it focuses on the story of a theater group, on actors, and on the metaphysical question of what makes up a convincing performance. Some early critics suggested that this was not the way to tackle a dire political situation, and that the portrayal of Nazis as humans, with their own sense of humor and theater, was disrespectful to the plight of the Poles and Polish Jewry. For the film, however, the political action and the tracing of the philosophical implications of a theatrical performance are not alternative procedures, but are closely linked to one another, and in this respect Lubitsch follows Shakespeare's own staging of power. The article pursues this argument, firstly, in the analysis of the series of Shylock monologues in the film (“Hath not a Jew eyes?”), focusing on the hyper-theatricality of each repetition. Secondly, it analyzes the series of encounters between two main characters, the Nazi Colonel Ehrhardt and the Polish actor Joseph Tura, especially their last encounter. The author compares the encounter between Ehrhardt and Tura to the Mousetrap scene in Hamlet and argues that it functions as the primal scene—in the Freudian meaning of the term—of the film as such. Their encounter is comical, yet at the same time both politically and metaphysically completely serious: The film shows us two visions of Hamlet, and with that, two visions of modernity, embodied in a Nazi colonel and a Polish actor. The film seems to suggest that there is no defeating Nazism without a thorough understanding of the theatricality of power as such—a Shakespearean lesson that is vital also for our contemporary moment.
{"title":"Lubitsch, Shakespeare, and the Theatricality of Power∗","authors":"Gregor Moder","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00439","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942) was filmed during World War II and takes place in the early period of the Nazi occupation of Poland, yet it focuses on the story of a theater group, on actors, and on the metaphysical question of what makes up a convincing performance. Some early critics suggested that this was not the way to tackle a dire political situation, and that the portrayal of Nazis as humans, with their own sense of humor and theater, was disrespectful to the plight of the Poles and Polish Jewry. For the film, however, the political action and the tracing of the philosophical implications of a theatrical performance are not alternative procedures, but are closely linked to one another, and in this respect Lubitsch follows Shakespeare's own staging of power. The article pursues this argument, firstly, in the analysis of the series of Shylock monologues in the film (“Hath not a Jew eyes?”), focusing on the hyper-theatricality of each repetition. Secondly, it analyzes the series of encounters between two main characters, the Nazi Colonel Ehrhardt and the Polish actor Joseph Tura, especially their last encounter. The author compares the encounter between Ehrhardt and Tura to the Mousetrap scene in Hamlet and argues that it functions as the primal scene—in the Freudian meaning of the term—of the film as such. Their encounter is comical, yet at the same time both politically and metaphysically completely serious: The film shows us two visions of Hamlet, and with that, two visions of modernity, embodied in a Nazi colonel and a Polish actor. The film seems to suggest that there is no defeating Nazism without a thorough understanding of the theatricality of power as such—a Shakespearean lesson that is vital also for our contemporary moment.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41813770","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}
Abstract This article presents an introduction to four texts that the German feminist-materialist art historian Lu Märten (1879–1970) published between 1903 and 1928. It outlines some of the major concepts of and contexts for this unduly neglected thinker. Her writings covered a wide terrain that spanned studies on the labor conditions of female artists, polemics against “proletarian art,” and a monist, rather than dialectical, view on film, art, and what she called the “full life-work of a human.” At the core of her multiple endeavors was the demand for remaking the history of art as a history of form that is more capacious than art's institutionalized Western field. Situating Märten's work in historical debates (e.g., on Marxist aesthetics in the 1930s), the introduction also points to the new legibility that her nonaligned materialism gains with the material turn in the humanities.
{"title":"Lu Märten: An Introduction to Four Texts","authors":"J. Nachtigall, K. Stakemeier","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00436","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article presents an introduction to four texts that the German feminist-materialist art historian Lu Märten (1879–1970) published between 1903 and 1928. It outlines some of the major concepts of and contexts for this unduly neglected thinker. Her writings covered a wide terrain that spanned studies on the labor conditions of female artists, polemics against “proletarian art,” and a monist, rather than dialectical, view on film, art, and what she called the “full life-work of a human.” At the core of her multiple endeavors was the demand for remaking the history of art as a history of form that is more capacious than art's institutionalized Western field. Situating Märten's work in historical debates (e.g., on Marxist aesthetics in the 1930s), the introduction also points to the new legibility that her nonaligned materialism gains with the material turn in the humanities.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42719699","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}
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.
摘要本文讨论了古巴艺术家团体27N的政治行动，包括与一些成员的对话和其宣言之一。
{"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
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