ABSTRACT
Less than a decade after Guy Debord’s publication of The Society of the Spectacle, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson in 1976 founded the journal October. Initially both associate editors at Artforum, Krauss and Michelson left the latter over a dispute on what Krauss ironically referred to as ‘the Lynda Benglis thing’: a controversy about a centrefold advertisement for Linda Benglis, arranged by her dealer Paula Cooper (Bracker, 1995, p. 77). The spread was somewhat deviously arranged by Benglis’s gallery and revealed a provocative photograph of a naked Benglis holding a sizable dildo against her pubic area. Krauss and Michelson, along with four other Artforum editors, denounced the copyrighted advertisement as an object of obscene vulgarity. The image, they wrote in a letter to the editor, represented a ‘qualitative leap’ in the journal and the incident was ‘deeply symptomatic of conditions that call for critical analysis’. ‘As long as they infect the reality around us’, the editors wrote, ‘these conditions shall have to be treated in our future works as writers and editors’ (quoted in Bracker, 1995, p. 107). 1 In line with this announcement, Krauss and Michelson established October: an advertisement-free journal that read on its cover ‘Art | Theory | Criticism | Politics’, indicating the journal’s dedication to connect these four hefty pillars. The writers who became, along with Krauss, most closely associated with the journal were Benjamin Buchloh, Douglas Crimp, Hal Foster, and Yve-Alain Bois. 2
