Draft version.

Final version: Matthew Bowman, “October’s Postmodernism” in Visual

Studies: A Journal of Documentation, vol. 31 nos 1-2, 2015, pp. 117-126

October’s Postmodernism

Matthew Bowman

This paper analyzes the early years of the influential art journal October. Beginning in
1976, October established itself as arguably the foremost art-critical voice of
postmodernism. Significant essays published between 1976 and 1981 on the index, the
expanded field of sculpture, allegory, and photography served as trajectories leading to a
deeper understanding of postmodernism and an emergent generation of artists skeptical
of their late-modernist inheritance. However, this paper contends that October did not
merely report and analyze then-recent cultural developments, but rather actively
contributed and constituted those developments through a dialogical relationship between
critics and artists. Therefore suggesting that any critical-historical reappraisal of
postmodernism would be incomplete without apprehending October’s collaboration with
artists in moving beyond late-modernism, this paper aims to demonstrate that much of
our contemporary sense of what comprises postmodernism for the visual arts is
fundamentally rooted in the intellectual positions advanced by October during 1976–
1981.

Keywords: October; Art Criticism; Rosalind Krauss (b. 1941); Douglas Crimp (b. 1944); Craig
Owens (1950–1990); Postmodernism

However, if finished works only become what they are because their being is a process of
becoming, they are in turn dependent on forms in which their process crystallizes:
interpretation, commentary, and critique. These are not simply brought to bear on works
by those who concern themselves with them; rather they are the arena of the historical
development of artworks in themselves, and thus they are forms in their own right.

—Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory1

October emerged in 1976 as a break-off from Artforum, rapidly becoming one of the foremost
American art-critical journals in the postwar era.2 With Clement Greenberg’s (1909–1994)

Visual Resources, Volume 31, Number 1, March 2015

ISSN 0197-3762 © 2015 Taylor & Francis
2 Bowman

influential theory of modernism appearing increasingly inapplicable to a younger generations of

artists, and even too limited to be of greater relevance within a changing world, October became
one of the most coherent critical voices to proffer an alternative theoretical account of
contemporary art largely produced from the 1960s onwards. Part of the journal’s distinctiveness
resided in its acceptance of the cluster of continental theories that were generally—if albeit
imprecisely—known as structuralism and post-structuralism. Articles published in the journal
would marshal such intellectual heavyweights (although at that time only starting to be
recognized with the Anglo-American academic scene) such as Roland Barthes (1915–1980),
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–
1913), and others, in order to navigate the field of art practices that fell out from under the rubric
of modernism. Indeed, October was not only presenting particular ideas associated with these
writers in a new context, but was also actively producing early translations of their writings. To
that extent, October was perhaps both a child of sorts to the major French journal Tel Quel and a
cousin to the English film theory Screen.
If structuralism and post-structuralism are perceivable as long-term elements that have
defined October and have largely been carried forth into other publications as well as art writing
more broadly, then the journal’s emphasis upon postmodernism is more historically specific.
October’s attempts to formulate a critical theory of postmodernism during the late 1970s and
early 1980s went hand-in-hand with its reception and dissemination of structuralism/post-
structuralism. It is notable, though, these initial attempts were made in relative independence
from and in many cases prior to the publications that would in many respects define the debate.
While Jean-François Lyotard’s (1924–1998) The Postmodern Condition was published in French
in 1979, it did not appear as a key text for the October journal’s formulation of postmodernism.
Similarly, most of the core tenets of October’s postmodernism existed in advance of Fredric
Jameson’s (b. 1934) groundbreaking writings on the subject.3 Nearer to October was
architectural theory, which preceded the journal in its effort to establish a notion of
postmodernism. Although it did not specifically reference postmodernism, Robert Venturi’s (b.
1925) Learning from Las Vegas critiqued the alleged elitism of modernist architecture; more
directly, Charles Jencks’s (b. 1939) The Language of Postmodernism was published in 1977.4
Yet while there was proximity here—made all the more so by Oppositions, an architectural
theory journal that held its offices in the same building as October—there were crucial
 October’s Postmodernism 3

differences. As Craig Owens (1950–1990), one of October’s early editors, later remarked: “The
term postmodernism was picked up in part from architecture, but only as a term, not as a
discourse.”5
All of this is to suggest then that October’s comprehension of postmodernism was
relatively distinctive at the moment of its formation. However, this suggestion could be pushed
more strongly: not only was it distinctive, but it was productive, too, insofar as it played a
considerably significant role in setting the terms and conditions through which a critical
postmodernism would take hold in the art world. The ways in which artists such as Cindy
Sherman (b. 1954), Sherrie Levine (b. 1947), and Richard Prince (b. 1949)—to name but a few
examples—have been understood as definitively postmodern is very much a consequence of
October’s early writings on their works. It is little wonder, therefore, that the late philosopher/art
critic Arthur Danto (1924–2013) proposed that the 1980s were “the October decade.”6 By the
same token, it seems right to agree with Perry Anderson (b. 1938) when he writes in a footnote:
“the path-breaking essays of Rosalind Krauss (b. 1941), Douglas Crimp (b. 1944) and Craig
Owens of 1979–1980, has yet to be properly documented.”7 A comprehensive historicization of
postmodernism would be failing in its duty if it fails to take October into account and examine
its relative distinctiveness.
Undergirding the emergence of postmodernism within October’s pages, it could be
argued, was not only the exhaustion of Clement Greenberg’s theory of modernism but also the
opportunity to move beyond that theory afforded by the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s (1922–
1996) influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). That there was a felt need to
reassess Greenberg’s discussion of medium specificity was very much under the pressure of
minimalism which, by the mid-1960s, occupied an especially prominent position in the New
York art scene. Interpretations of minimalism differ greatly, but one ongoing bone of contention
is whether it represented a culmination of Greenberg’s theories or a rupture from them—Hal
Foster’s retrospective argument that minimalism was simultaneously both seems correct.8
Viewing minimalism as the logical consequence of Greenberg’s theory, Michael Fried (b. 1939)
turned to Kuhn’s notion of the paradigm in order to reconsider modernism’s history and present
structure.9 This led to one of the less noticed fault lines between Fried and Rosalind Krauss,
inasmuch as the latter would also attempt to appropriate Kuhn for the purpose of critiquing
Greenberg. But although they looked to the same book in order to push beyond Greenberg, they
4 Bowman

offer subtly differing interpretations which ultimately point in interestingly different directions.
Firstly, Fried engaging Kuhn briefly in a footnote to his 1966 essay “Shape as Form”:

What the modernist painter can be said to discover . . . is not the irreducible essence of all
painting but rather that which, at the present moment in painting’s enterprise . . . [stands]
comparison with . . . the modernist and premodernist past whose quality seems to him
beyond question. . . . [This antireductionist and antipositivist account] has significant
affinities with the persuasive account of the enterprise of science put forward in Thomas
S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. . .”10

And now Krauss, in her 1972 essay “A View of Modernism”:

In characterizing scientific advance, [Kuhn] described those periods in which evidence

begins to be assembled which the reigning paradigm cannot explain; that is, under the
terms of the existing paradigm the new evidence appears anomalous, freakish. But it is
the pressure of this anomalous evidence that characterizes scientific advance, calling not
only for its own acknowledgment, but demanding as well the invention of an entire new
paradigm, or . . . a “new world.”11

For Fried, modernism occupies a place analogous to science: particular art forms and
concerns are akin to paradigms and are therefore prone to paradigm shifts. Flatness may have
struck Greenberg as the defining feature of painting’s commitment medium specificity, but in
Fried’s eyes it was but one moment, one paradigm, in the historical spectrum of modernism.
Now, what is important about Fried’s borrowing from Kuhn is that it casts modernism itself as
internally determined by ruptures instead of any linear teleology—but this means we do not
move beyond modernism (likewise, in Kuhn, the history of science is presentable as a history of
ruptures, but we do not move beyond science into a realm that we might call “post-science”). For
Krauss, on the other hand, modernism is a paradigm, and, in this recognition it follows as a
corollary that the modernist paradigm is finite in structure, that there will emerge “anomalous”
aspects that will not dovetail with the dominant paradigm, and that there would be a shift
towards a new paradigm sooner or later.
 October’s Postmodernism 5

In conceiving modernism as a paradigm, then, Krauss can be begin mapping out a theory
of postmodernism; however, this proved to be a relatively slow process in her writings.
Published as a two-part essay in 1977, but written the year before, “Notes on the Index” was a
response to the evidently pluralistic condition of contemporary art.12 As Krauss wrote:

Almost everyone is agreed about 70s art. It is divided, split, factionalized. . . . We are
asked to contemplate a great plethora of possibilities in the list that must now be used to
draw a line around the art of the present: video; performance; body art; conceptual art;
photo-realism in painting and an associated hyper-realism in sculpture; story art;
monumental abstract sculpture (earthworks); and abstract painting, characterized, now,
not by rigor but by a willful eclecticism.13

While the list demonstrates obvious pluralism, and even “prefigured an image of personal
freedom, of multiple options now open to individual choice or will,”14 the direction of Krauss’s
argument is to propose an underlying coherence that is too easily missed. Such coherence resists
the identification of a specific artistic style available to the eye that then can be reified by the
critic or historian, but is rendered palpable through the semiotic notion of the “index.” Initially
formulated by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), the index is a type of sign that establishes its
meaning through physical, non-arbitrary connection to the referent.15 A key example here for
Krauss would be photography, especially exemplified by Man Ray’s (1890–1976) Rayographs.16
What is striking, however, about “Notes on the Index” is that it utilizes the assumed conjunction
between photography and indexicality but disrupts the order of these terms. In effect, Krauss is
not so much claiming that there is an indexical principle underpinning and conjoining the
diversity of 1970s art, rather it is a displaced form of photography that performs this operation.17
“Notes on the Index” is significant insofar as it represents a first attempt to theorize a
new, avowedly non-modernist paradigm. Looking beyond the bewildering multiplicity of surface
phenomena, she diagnoses its hidden structure. It is notable, however, that the term
“postmodernism” is not present at this stage. Indeed, it would be not until two years later that it
makes its first appearance in Krauss’s criticism. Like “Notes on the Index,” her 1979 essay
“Sculpture in the Expanded Field” is a response to a constellation of recent art practices
interlinked by an undergirding conceptual structure. And just as she proposes an implicit
6 Bowman

photographic logic bringing together a range of practices in “Notes on the Index,” Krauss
examines how sculpture anchors various procedures that seem, at first glance, to be non-
sculptural. This she does by appropriating the Klein Group diagram, as a means of visualizing
the conceptual expansion and interconnectivity that results from the traditional understanding of
sculpture being exceeded. Taken together, the displacement of photography beyond its own
domain and the corresponding expansion of sculpture, both attest to a major transformation in
artistic production and serve as evidence for the closure of the modernist epoch. She writes:

In order to name this historical rupture and the structural transformation of the
cultural field that characterizes it, one must have recourse to another term. The
one already in use in other areas of criticism is postmodernism. There seems no
reason not to use it.18

The remaining pages of “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” aim to give some sense of what might
be entailed in theorizing postmodernism. Particularly definitive, for Krauss, is that the notion of
the medium or its specificity no longer functions as the chief ambition for artists:

For, within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given
medium—sculpture—but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural
terms, for which any medium—photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture
itself—might be used.19

Yet Krauss’s mention of postmodernism hardly seems a ringing endorsement of the term; her
stated “no reason not to use it” barely equates to a strong reason for using “postmodernism” as
the categorical descriptor for the cultural context that subtends the expanded field. Here, at this
early stage, the use-value of “postmodernism” was still far from certain; her diagram of
sculpture’s expanded field may convey logical stability, but underpinning it was contingency and
conceptual mobility. Critical positions were still being defined, and, in the wider span of her
writings, it is notable that postmodernism would seldom occupy an especially prominent place.
A more insistent exploration and defense of postmodernism was evident in a slightly
different generation of October critics, namely, Douglas Crimp and Craig Owens, and it is to
these two figures that this essay now turns. Of considerable pertinence here is the 1977
 October’s Postmodernism 7

exhibition Pictures that was curated by Crimp for Artists Space in New York. While the 1979
essay “Pictures” included in the eighth issue of October—based on the original exhibition from
two years before—has become justly well known as an early key theoretical elucidation of the
so-called Pictures Generation, it is probably less realized that it was significantly different from
an earlier version that was published as the catalog accompanying the exhibition. For example,
the list of artists discussed slightly differs between a two versions: the 1977 version of the essay
examined the works of Troy Brauntuch (b. 1954), Jack Goldstein (1945–2003), Sherrie Levine,
Robert Longo (b. 1953), and Philip Smith (b. 1952); however, the 1979 version swapped Smith
for Cindy Sherman. Other differences could be highlighted, but a fuller comparative analysis is
impossible within the brief scope of this essay. We can, though, point to a disjunction between
the two versions of “Pictures” that offers some evidence of how the discourse of postmodernism
was growing in the late 1970s. For instance, in 1977, Crimp contextualizes the Pictures
generation in this manner:

The self-reflexiveness and formalism of recent art appears to have been abandoned, as are
interests in the specific characteristics of the medium (Goldstein’s films are not primarily
about film; Smith’s drawings are not about drawing). . . . It would be a mistake, however,
to think of this work as effecting a complete break with recent art, or with modernism as
a whole. . . . Because the pictures that these artists are making raise issues of the
psychology of the image so forcefully, the entire tradition of modernism that stems from
Symbolism appears once again relevant. A return to the writings of Freud with a
completely new understanding of how they might be useful for criticism is one of the
prospects that this art offers. . . . In this, the work of these artists maintains an allegiance
to that radical aspiration that we can continue to recognize as modernist.20

And now contrast that statement with the following from two years later:

At the beginning of this essay, I said that it was due precisely to this kind of abandonment
of the artistic medium as such that we had witnessed a break with modernism, or more
precisely with what was espoused as modernism by Michael Fried. . . . The work I have
attempted to introduce here is related to a modernism conceived differently, whose roots
are in the symbolist aesthetic announced by Mallarme . . . .
8 Bowman

Nevertheless, it remains useful to consider recent work as having effected

a break with modernism and therefore as postmodernist. But if postmodernism is
to have theoretical value, it cannot be used merely as another chronological term;
rather it must disclose the particular nature of a breach with modernism.21

Both passages are worth quoting in length insofar as it makes clear what remains stable
and what alters between the two versions of “Pictures.” There is a shared emphasis upon
symbolist art as an alternative modernism that is common to both, yet in 1977 that emphasis
permits Crimp to identify the Pictures generation with modernism as such, whereas by 1979 the
identification is still in evidence but seemingly no longer theoretically sufficient. It is striking
that, for Crimp in 1979, even an alternative modernism proximate to symbolism is not quite
enough to capture what is distinct about the emerging generation of artists, therefore
necessitating a reference to postmodernism. However, even in 1979, postmodernism as a concept
occupied a highly contested terrain, torn between both conservative and critical tendencies,
thereby forcing Crimp to distinguish sharply between the Pictures generation and a recent
exhibition staged at the Whitney in New York that was given the title of New Image Painting.
For Crimp, postmodernism was not a retreat to the safety or pleasures of the picture—with its
associations of immediate or semi-naturalist figurative imagery—but an analysis of its semiotic
and ideological functions.
Craig Owens’s important two-part essay “The Allegorical Impulse” continued Crimp’s
analysis of signification and representation through recourse to the notion of allegory. Perhaps
rather unexpectedly, allegory, which had long been judged negatively by critics, was redeemed
as a theory during the 1970s insofar as it helped elucidate the new range of postmodernist
practices. Part of its redemption was partly under the spotlight of the rise of deconstruction,
especially within literary criticism and, in particular, the writings of Paul de Man (1919–1983).22
Another reason for this resurgence was the revived interest in the works of Walter Benjamin
(1892–1940) and especially the translation of his Ursprung des deutchen Trauerspiel published
in 1977.23 Benjamin’s book was especially prominent in Owens’s “The Allegorical Impulse.”
Published in 1980, Owens’s essay was somewhat more settled with the concept of
postmodernism than the previous examples we have seen; however, the central role of
Benjamin’s theory of allegory testified to the continuing legacy of modernism. Indeed, that
 October’s Postmodernism 9

Owens could recruit Benjamin for the theorization of postmodernism arguably demonstrates that
Clement Greenberg’s conception of modernism had become so pervasive in the art world,
meaning that Benjamin was scarcely recognizable in the late 1970s as a modernist.
Rearticulating Crimp’s dictum that “underneath each picture there is always another
picture,”24 Owens provisionally describes allegory as that which “occurs whenever one text is
doubled by another.”25 This initial proposition is later bolstered by a litany of definitive
characteristics:

Appropriation, site-specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity,

hybridization—these diverse strategies characterize much of the art of the present and
distinguish it from its modernist predecessors. They also form a whole when seen in
relation to allegory, suggesting that postmodernist art may in fact be identified by a
single, coherent impulse . . . .26

Some of these characteristics are already familiar from the essays by Krauss and Crimp—they
are modifications of their core arguments—as is the tendency to isolate a more or less singular
impulse that acts as a gravitational center. And indeed, many of the same artists are named as
exemplars of these characteristics. The list also serves to clarify October postmodernism’s point-
by-point opposition to Greenberg’s core tenets. Whereas, for instance, Greenberg demanded
medium specificity within painting, Owens retorts with discursivity (which Greenberg would
have associated with “literature”) and hybridization. Yet it might be argued that just as October
produced postmodernism, their determinate negation of Greenberg and Fried also
correspondingly produced a version of late-modernism. Although the dialectical intertwining of
postmodernism and modernism had its fecundity, it generated its own simplifications which later
required critical analysis.27 Another aspect of allegory—especially in its outward manifestations
as discursivity and hybridization—was that it enjoined audiences to acknowledge the
entanglement of visual and textual practices. At face value, this entailed a recomprehension of
the artwork as a kind of rebus, but, equally significantly, it testified to or proffered a narrowed
distance between artworks and criticism. Owens’s essay—as well as his earlier essay on
Smithson, “Earthwords”—not only proposed that postmodernism redeemed allegory; it was also
an allegory of the proximity between art and art criticism.28
The period 1977–1980, then, witnesses the rise of postmodernism within art-critical
discourse. While the lineaments of that postmodernism were only imprecisely perceptible at
10 Bowman

first—mirroring the lingering presence of modernism within the debate—the beginning of the
1980s codified the terms of the discussion, thereby assisting in establishing the reception of
artists such as Cindy Sherman and others. This is not to propose, however, that the process of
reception is unidirectional; just as criticism generated the criteria for the reception of postmodern
art—soon discriminating between neoconservative and critical versions of the phenomenon—
artistic practice was the condition of possibility for that criticism.29 And just as art was the
condition of possibility for that criticism, art criticism analyzed the consequences of those
practices, thus helping to produce more intellectually refined forms of postmodernism. Owens,
for instance, was skeptical about the division of labor that demarcates the critic from the artist
insofar as it serves “to treat the work of art as a symptom” and places “the artist in the position of
the unconscious reflex and the critic in the position of the diagnostician.” Against this privileging
of the art critic and the reduction of art to the pre-reflexive, Owens clearly resituates his own
practice:

the split between critic and artist, then, had been compromised, and we were writing not
necessarily about these critical and opposition practices but alongside them. There was
an exchange there, and one’s criticism was conducting the same work in a different arena
and in a different way.30

Understanding art criticism in this manner compels us to reject any conception that posits
criticism as merely commentary, reportage, description, or simply judgment—that is to say, as
reception. Instead, we must also attend to its productive dimensions, theorizing and historicizing
how art and its criticism are necessarily imbricated.31 Although this essay has only spotlighted
criticism’s productivity by arguing that October performed a major role in producing a
postmodernism for the visual arts, such a step is essential for both our deeper histories of
postmodernism and if we are to comprehend how art criticism and art practice are articulated and
displaced through each other.

MATTHEW BOWMAN lectures in the Photography Department at Colchester School of Art

and mostly researches art criticism in relation to history and philosophy. He is the author of
numerous essays including “The New Critical Historians of Art?” in The State of Art Criticism,
edited by James Elkins and Michael Newman (Routledge, 2008) and “Rosalind Krauss” in Fifty
Key Writers on Photography, edited by Mark Durden (Routledge, 2013). An extended essay on
 October’s Postmodernism 11

Martin Heidegger’s notion of de-distancing and its value for art historiography, titled “Shapes of
Time: Melancholia, Anachronism, and De-Distancing,” has been published in Heidegger and the
Work of Art History, edited by Amanda Boetzkes and Aron Vinegar (Ashgate, 2014). An essay
“Art Criticism in the Contracted Field” is being completed for Oxford Art Journal. He is
presently revising his doctoral research on October for publication as a book.

1
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-
Kentor (London: Continuum, 2002), 194.
2
On October’s origins and relationship to Artforum, see Hal Foster, “Art Critics in Extremis,” Design and
Crime and Other Diatribes (London: Verso, 2002), 105–22, and Thomas Crow, “Art Criticism in the
Age of Incommensurate Values: On the Thirtieth Anniversary of Artforum,” in Modern Art in Common
Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 85–93.
3
Craig Owens recollected that “The discussion [around postmodernism] became important around 1975,
before Lyotard. He meant nothing to me at this point, and I hadn’t even heard of him. . . .The first time I
heard of [Lyotard’s] argument was in 1980 in Montreal.” See Anders Stephanson, “Interview with
Craig Owens,” Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson et al.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 298–300.
4
See Charles Jencks, “The Rise of Post-Modern Architecture,” Architecture Association Quarterly 7, no.
4 (October–December 1975): 3–14; Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London:
Academy, 1977).
5
Stephanson, “Interview with Craig Owens,” 299. In a personal e-mail to me, Crimp comments that his
October office was, since the beginning of 1977, located in the offices of the Institute for Architecture
and Urban Studies, and that he was in regular contact with the architectural theorists there (the position
of those theorists was largely pro-postmodernism but, in Crimp’s words, “vehemently opposed the
Charles Jencks view of postmodernism.”).
6
I take this remark from Diarmuid Costello in Art History Versus Aesthetics, ed. James Elkins (London:
Routledge, 2005), 85.
7
Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998), 106n25.
8
Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the
Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 35–69.
9
Fried later recalled: “In fact, what fascinated me about the Minimalists was that they read Greenberg,
valued the same recent art, but saw in it a development that projected literalness. . . It was as if [they]
were the ones who really believed the Greenbergian reduction. . .” Michael Fried in Discussions in
Contemporary Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 73.
10
Michael Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings,” Artforum (November 1966): 403–25.
Cited from the republished version in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), 99n11. Thomas Kuhn’s influence upon the art world is discussed by Caroline A.
Jones in “The Modernist Paradigm: The Artworld and Thomas Kuhn,” Critical Inquiry 26 (Spring
2000): 488–528. Stanley Cavell also makes reference to Kuhn; see “Music Discomposed,” Must We
Mean What We Say? updated ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1969]), 183.
12 Bowman

11
Krauss, “A View of Modernism,” Artforum (September 1972): 51n9. Interestingly, the reference to
Kuhn has been removed from the republished version found in Perpetual Inventory (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2010), 115–128.
12
Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 1,” October 3 (Spring 1977): 68–81; and “Notes on the
Index: Part 2,” October 4 (Fall 1977): 58–67.
13
Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 1,” 68.
14
Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 1,” 68.
15
See Charles Sanders Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” The Philosophy of Peirce (New
York: Dover Press, 1940).
16
However, such an identification is perhaps controversial. See the roundtable discussion and assessments
in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (London: Routledge, 2007), 129– 203.
17
For more on this displacement, see Matthew Bowman, “Rosalind Krauss,” in Fifty Key Writers on
Photography, ed. Mark Durden (London: Routledge, 2013), 149–54.
18
Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 41.
19
Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 42.
20
Douglas Crimp, Pictures (New York: The Committee for the Visual Arts, Inc., 1977), 28.
21
Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 87.
22
See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). Another key
text was Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” later republished in Blindness and Insight:
Essays on the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2d ed. rev. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983 [1971]).
23
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne (London: Verso,
1977).
24
Crimp, “Pictures,” 87.
25
Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse, part one,” October 12 (Spring 1980): 68.
26
Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse, part one,” 75.
27
At the tail-end of the exploration of allegory was Stephen Melville, “Notes on the Reemergence of
Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in
Art and Criticism,” October 19 (Winter 1981): 55–92. Melville’s essay—and his subsequent writing—
is an important analysis of what was too easily passed over in October's overall rejection of Greenberg
and Fried.
28
See Craig Owens, “Earthwords,” October 10 (Fall 1979): 120–30.
29
After all, the range of procedures summarized under the titles of “conceptualism,” “postminimalism,”
and the like were in themselves critical judgments arraigned against Greenberg’s medium-specific
modernism.
30
Stephanson, “Interview with Craig Owens,” 307.
31
The “necessarily” in this sentence points to a whole cluster of discussions concerning the relationship
between art and criticism (or writing, more broadly) that cannot be tackled here. But fertile starting
points would be Owens’s “Earthwords” and Cavell’s “Music Discomposed.”