As the ‘October’ Journal Turns 50, This Reading List Charts Its Legacy

Rosalind E. Krauss founded October alongside Annette Michelson and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and the journal can’t be disentangled from her own work as a critic. Even before the term “postmodernism” first appeared in October, Krauss was engaged in a critique of modernism’s claims of originality, appeals to the authority of the artist-creator, and blind faith in the purity and integrity of artistic mediums. The Optical Unconscious is Krauss’s most captivating effort to dismantle modernism from within. For a taste, see her counter straightforward readings of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings as paintings by reminding us that they were born not on the wall but on the floor—in a state of abject horizontality and as receptacles for waste.

October lay claim to film in its first issue, which explained that the journal was named after Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928). October’s sustained dialogue with film owed a great deal to Annette Michelson, who is celebrated for her writings on Soviet cinema of the kind collected in this 2020 volume. Michelson explicates the ways in which filmmakers such as Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov regarded radical technical experimentation as suited to the advancement of revolutionary politics. Especially breathtaking is her 1972 essay on Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and its efforts toward social transformation through a “transformation of consciousness.”

Of the figures most closely associated with October, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh has drawn most vigorously on the Marx-inflected tradition of “critical theory” (as practiced by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, et al.) that sought to study cultural forms as crystallizations of socioeconomic tensions and contradictions. Formalism and Historicity, a 2015 anthology of Buchloh’s writing, poses questions concerning the co-optation of the avant-garde by institutions, the market, and spectacle culture, and makes a case for the inseparability of form and politics. In one of his most inventive essays, Buchloh argues that Conceptual art’s eschewal of visual substance in favor of linguistic presentations left it uniquely positioned to interrogate social institutions and their reduction of human experience to bloodless paper-pushing.

In 1987 Douglas Crimp helmed a special issue of October dedicated to the unfolding AIDS epidemic. A year later, his issue was reworked into a book that remains a bracing document of AIDS activism and an inflection point in the evolution of queer theory. Among the catalysts for the special issue was Crimp’s involvement in the activist collective ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which inspired a collection of texts that brokered an alliance between theoretical perspectives and activist energies. A vigorous expression of what Crimp called “mourning and militancy,” this book stands alone in the early October canon in its direct engagement with identity politics.

In 2010 Carrie Lambert-Beatty’s monograph on dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and writer Yvonne Rainer arrived as an essential model of interdisciplinary scholarship and an accessible entry point into the delirious hybridity of the 1960s. Being Watched offers a reframing of Rainer that understands her pared-down choreography in relation to her acute awareness of the body’s ensnarement in a play of gazes. For Lambert-Beatty, Rainer’s interest in the tension between her physical body and her body as seen connects her work in dance to her explorations in film, just as it implicates Minimalist sculpture’s probing of embodied experience and the rise of mass-mediated spectatorship during an increasingly televised age.