October: The First Decade, 1976-1986

October Books

by Annette Michelson (Editor), Joan Copjec (Editor), Rosalind E. Krauss (Editor)

"OCTOBER: The First Decade" brings together a selection of some of the most important and representative texts, many from issues long out of print, that have appeared in one of the foremost journals in art criticism and theory. Contributors include Rosalind Krauss, Sergei Eisenstein, Peter Handke, Georges Didi Huberman, Mary Ann Doane, and Hans Haacke. Their essays are organized under the categories of the index, historical materialism, the critique of institutions, psychoanalysis, rhetoric, and the body.Annette Michelson is Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. Rosalind Krauss is Professor of Art History at Hunter College, CUNY Douglas Crimp is an art critic, and Joan Copjec is a film theorist.

Hardcover

First published September 22, 1987

About the author

Annette Michelson was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. A founding editor of the journal October, she wrote on art and cinema for more than five decades.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not much to say here; this is a fabulous collection of some of October's key early work - it includes Roger Callois' stunning essay on imitative insects 'Mimicy and Legendary Psychasthenia', a paper that inspired Lacan's work on the mirror stage, Sergei Eisenstein's 'Notes for a Film of Capital' (he'd be one of a tiny group who could have pulled it off), Homi Bhabha's essential essay 'Of Mimicry and Man: the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse' subsequently anthologised almost everywhere as well as other key peices by Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Georges Bataille, Joan Copjec, Mary Ann Doune and other key writers of psychoanalytically inflected, Marxist influenced cultural and art theory from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many of these remain essential reading for social, cultural and artistic analysis, and laid the foundations for several key strands of contemproary academic work.

Alarmingly, I found it in a remainder bin in a bookshop in Melbourne in June 1998; it remains much (re)visited.

Vital.