La rivista "October" 1976-2004: dagli anni della militanza a quelli dell'egemonia critica

Critical debate in the United States from the end of the 1970s has had to take into account the need to rethink methods of art analysis, first in reacting against the rigid rules that the Formalist method had dictated from the end of the 1940s and then, progressively equipping itself with the analysis of new art practices and hybridizing instruments borrowed from other disciplines. The departure from the disciplinary confines of art as a traditionally-understood institution on the part of critics and artists who shared a perhaps by-then past season of continual posing of the problem of roles, instruments, methodologies and finalities of critical action, led to the atomization of the Formalist system which had been adopted as the principal reference point of art historians in the United States until the end of the 1970s. The foundation of the magazine “October” responded to this process of self-analysis and the attempt to build new instruments with which to analyse the complexity of artistic experimentation. The group of authors who worked together on the magazine never satisfied themselves, however, with simply looking at the novelties in art which came forward in those years, but instead combed through the whole of the experience of twentieth century art in its entirety, always considering it in a dialogue with the interpretative stage. The experience of art and criticism together build up a cultural history that can not in any way be kept separate from the speculative processes which from the end of the 1970s overcame the subject in its individual and social dimension. The emergence of the epistemological crisis that postmodern philosophical reflection highlights, contributes to an articulation of a discourse of art criticism which is more and more consciously open to the previously unknown possibilities suggested by the adoption of investigative instruments borrowed from different disciplines. “October” magazine is one of the places in which this debate takes place, where new proposals are put forward for art criticism which break with an asphyxiating and immobilizing past. “October” is the place where hypotheses are tested and from which one may move to constantly pose problems regarding methods; it is the place where procedures are verified and supporters, profitable meetings and exchanges are counted, but it is also the place where a new method is affirmed whose validity is cared for by the exclusion of dissenting voices. .. [edited by Author]