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.
{"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}
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.
{"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}
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.
{"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}
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.
{"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}
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.
需要，作为一个表观遗传学概念，起源于让-巴蒂斯特·拉马克，对他来说，它指的是环境的压力，迫使动物在进化过程中发育新的器官。它在20世纪的科学中再次出现，作为西格蒙德·弗洛伊德（Sigmund Freud）继精神拉马克生物学家之后，首先称之为“生命的需要”（die Not des Lebens），然后称之为”驱动力”（Trieb）的身体不平衡。1900年左右，延时摄影技术的发明，最初是作为植物生理学实验研究的一种光学仪器，明显扩大了表观遗传学范式：植物突然被认为是能动的生物，不是通过它们的根，而是通过它们的需求和活动与物理环境相连。反应性行为的令人不安的印象成为巴斯夫委托制作的氮肥商业片《花的奇迹》（1926）的卖点，这部电影被鲁道夫·阿恩海姆誉为“有史以来最奇妙、最激动人心、最美丽的画面”。通过仔细阅读这部电影中类似动物的生物及其引发的情绪反应，需求被重新想象为一种不适应的力量，体现在技术媒体中，将不快乐的人束缚在惩罚性的环境中。
{"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}
H. Copeland, Hal Foster, D. Joselit, Pamela M. Lee
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.
“去殖民化”一词在最近的艺术行动主义中获得了新的生命，作为对博物馆的欧洲中心主义(根据土著、土著和其他认识论观点)以及博物馆与暴力的结构关系(无论是与寡头受托人的关系，还是与从事战争或环境掠夺业务的公司的关系)的激进挑战。在唤起二十世纪中期的非殖民化时期作为其历史参考点时，这个词的强调回归在修辞上是强大的，它对应于学者在后殖民或全球现代主义的多元领域的平行兴趣。然而，非殖民化的劝诫并非没有争议——一些人认为它仍然带有欧洲中心主义的偏见。事实上，有人提出，对西方来说，去帝国化可能比非殖民化更紧迫。在你的行动主义、批评、艺术和/或学术工作中，“去殖民化”一词对你来说意味着什么?为什么它会在新自由主义的西方扮演如此紧迫的角色?我们如何将它与去殖民化的政治历史联系起来，以及它如何将后殖民理论转化为对新殖民主义当代艺术世界的批评?受访者包括Nana adusi - poku, Brook Andrew, Sampada Aranke, Ian Bethell-Bennett, Kader Attia, Andrea Carlson, Elise Y. Chagas, ISUMA, Iftikhar Dadi, Janet迪斯，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 mccloden, Alan michael, Partha Mitter, Isabela Muci Barradas, Steven Nelson, ugochukwuu - smooth C. Nzewi, Alessandro Petti, Paulina Pineda，Christopher Pinney, Elizabeth Povinelli, Ryan Rice, Andrew Ross, Paul Chaat Smith, Nancy Spector, Francoise Verges, Rocio Zambrana和Joseph R. Zordan。
{"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}
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.
{"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}
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.
{"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}
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.
{"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}
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
{"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}
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