This article seeks to determine the basis for judgments on works of art in the writings of the art historian and critic Benjamin Buchloh. I argue that Buchloh's judgments are not Kantian aesthetic judgments, nor are they consequentialist moral or political judgments as to the positive or negative effects of artworks. Rather, Buchloh's judgments are based upon an implicit principle of 'legitimacy' or 'credibility' that is distinct from the mere possibility of specific artistic practices. I identify several factors that, for Buchloh, are involved in determining the legitimacy of any work of art. In the process I highlight apparent contradictions that result from Buchloh's rhetoric, specifically his tendency to conflate constitutive conditions of possibility with normative value judgments. For Buchloh, it is only through a successful negotiation of these factors that an artwork succeeds in constituting itself as a meaningful 'enunciation' within the structuring system of artistic practice at a given moment.

This article argues that Werner Herzog's 2010 film Cave of Forgotten Dreams both enacts and undermines a desire for origins that was characteristic of 20th century modernist discourse. I argue that the aim of the film is literally to embody the origin of cinema, as figured in the recurring motif of projected light playing across the darkened walls of Chauvet Cave, the earliest known site of prehistoric painting. Drawing on texts by Wilson Harris, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, this article demonstrates that the phenomenology of the film's cave scenes and of its archaeological reconstructions produces not a straightforward self-presence at the scene of origins, but rather an "anachronic" or split temporality that links an imagined state of primordiality to the contemporary moment in a way that eludes the problematic modernist criterion of psychological authenticity. By failing to produce an immersive illusion of prehistoricity, the film is constantly thrown back onto its own simple act of "monstration", or showing, without any transcendental ground. Instead of revealing a moment of origin, then, Cave of Forgotten Dreams plays the shifting role of what I describe, following the art historian Whitney Davis, as an ever-displaced "Figure 1" in an imaginary history of cinema.

This article reconstructs the Neo-Kantian framework of Erwin Panofsky’s theoretical essays of the 1910s and 1920s, demonstrating that the schematic subject/object relation developed in these publications is also implicitly at work in Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form as well as early iconographic studies such as Hercules am Scheidewege. The article then draws on György Lukács and Gillian Rose to argue that there is a circularity in Panofsky’s method whereby the empirically given assumes the role of a ‘quasitranscendental’ a priori object, and furthermore that Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of culture (with which Panofsky was in close dialog) shares this circularity. The aim of this article is not primarily to expose inconsistencies in Panofsky’s method, but rather to suggest that the impasses that art history encountered in its attempts to formalize itself as a discipline may serve as the point of departure for a future materialist art history.

Estrangement and recognition will alternate in the mind of any Anglo-American art historian reading Sebastian Egenhofer’s two books. His signposts are, if anything, overfamiliar: in Abstraktion – Kapitalismus – Subjektivität, the earlier volume, they are Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and the American Minimalists of the 1960s (Donald Judd is his key figure). The introduction of Michael Asher and Thomas Hirschhorn in Towards an Aesthetics of Production (originally published by Diaphanes as Produktionsästhetik in 2010) only barely stretches the canon. These are the white male totems of a certain late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century art history. They are, in particular, the totems of the so-called October school, whose representatives Egenhofer cites at regular intervals. What Egenhofer has done, however, is to make of his landmarks the stuff of a vastly ambitious conceptual framework that has no close analogue in Anglophone art history – nor, so far as I am aware, in any other language. To render that achievement legible requires translation in more senses than one.

Abstract Sabine T. Kriebel’s Revolutionary Beauty is the most thorough study to date of the Communist photomontage artist John Heartfield’s work for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (aiz) in the late 1920s and 1930s. Kriebel analyses Heartfield’s production through the frame of ‘suture’, a concept she derives from film theory. She argues that Heartfield’s work at once stimulated collective solidarity at the same time as it cultivated habits of visual suspicion and active political thinking in ways that may not have always coincided with official Communist aesthetic doctrine. Although Kriebel’s approach yields many valuable insights, there is nonetheless a danger that her theory of subject-formation may preclude a more critical understanding of representative politics as a form of mediation.

In order to explore the impact of the Occupy movement on artists and the art world, the editors of October wished to engage as broadly and openly as possible with figures who are directly involved, or who have a theoretical stake in Occupy. In addition to commissioning two essays and a conversation, we consulted in depth with Yates McKee, who helped us form a question and a list of potential respondents to a questionnaire. Lara Weibgen and Daniel Spaulding offered addi tional help. Here is what we asked, imposing nothing but rudimentary copyediting on the responses:As part of a cluster of texts devoted to Occupy Wall Street, the editors of October are soliciting responses, in any form, to the character, effects, aesthetics, and politics of the OWS movement. How has OWS affected your daily life and your political activities, and how have you affected it? What, in short, does it mean to you?