October 

About: October is an academic journal published by The MIT Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Painting & Exhibition. It has an ISSN identifier of 0162-2870. Over the lifetime, 1014 publications have been published receiving 18765 citations. The journal is also known as: Oct & 10. month.

Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse

Abstract: Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind. The discourse of post-Enlightenment English colonialism often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false. If colonialism takes power in the name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures of farce. The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing. A classic text of such partiality is Charles Grant’s ‘Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain’ which was only superseded by James Mills’s History of India as the most influential early nineteenth-century account of Indian manners and morals. The absurd extravagance of Macaulay’s ‘Minute’ (1835) – deeply influenced by Charles Grant’s ‘Observations’ – makes a mockery of Oriental learning until faced with the challenge of conceiving of a ‘reformed’ colonial subject.

Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics

Abstract: On the occasion of its opening in 2002, the Palais de Tokyo immediately struck the visitor as different from other contemporary art venues that had recently opened in Europe. Although a budget of 4.75 million euros was spent on converting the former Japanese pavilion for the 1937 World’s Fair into a “site for contemporary creation,” most of this money had been used to reinforce (rather than renovate) the existing structure.1 Instead of clean white walls, discreetly installed lighting, and wooden floors, the interior was left bare and unfinished. This decision was important, as it reflected a key aspect of the venue’s curatorial ethos under its codirectorship by Jerome Sans, an art critic and curator, and Nicolas Bourriaud, former curator at CAPC Bordeaux and editor of the journal Documents sur l’art. The Palais de Tokyo’s improvised relationship to its surroundings has subsequently become paradigmatic of a visible tendency among European art venues to reconceptualize the “white cube” model of displaying contemporary art as a studio or experimental “laboratory.”2 It is therefore in the tradition of what

The New Cultural Politics of Difference

Abstract: In these last few years of the 20th century, there is emerging a significant shift in the sensibilities and outlooks of critics and artists. In fact, I would go so far as to claim that a new kind of cultural worker is in the making, associated with a new politics of difference. These new forms of intellectual consciousness advance reconceptions of the vocation of critic and artist, attempting to undermine the prevailing disciplinary divisions of labor in the academy, museum, mass media and gallery networks, while preserving modes of critique within the ubiquitous commodification of culture in the global village. Distinctive features of the new cultural politics of difference are to trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general and universal in light of the concrete, specific and particular; and to historicize, contextualize and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting and changing. Needless to say, these gestures are not new in the history of criticism or art, yet what makes them novel – along with the cultural politics they produce – is how and what constitutes difference, the weight and gravity it is given in representation and the way in which highlighting issues like exterminism, empire, class, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, nation, nature, and region at this historical moment acknowledges some discontinuity and disruntion from previous forms of cultural critique.

Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered

Abstract: Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"' is generally taken to be an affirmation of mass culture and of the new technologies through which it is disseminated. And rightly so. Benjamin praises the cognitive, hence political, potential of technologically mediated cultural experience (film is particularly privileged).2 Yet the closing section of this 1936 essay reverses the optimistic tone. It sounds a warning. Fascism is a "violation of the technical apparatus" that parallels fascism's violent "attempt to organize the newly proletarianized masses"-not by giving them their due, but by "allowing them to express themselves."3 "The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life."4 Benjamin seldom makes sweeping condemnations, but here he states categorically: "All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war."5 He is writing during the early period of fascist military adventurism-Italy's colonial war in Ethiopia, Germany's intervention in the Spanish Civil War. Yet Benjamin recognizes that the aesthetic justification of this policy was already in place at the century's start. It was the Futurists who, just before World War I,