Books in the October Files series

A critical primer on artist Richard Serra's work.

Texts-including essays, reviews, and statements by the artist-on the work of Sherrie Levine.

Essential texts on the work of Bruce Nauman, spanning the five decades of the artist's career.

When Mary Kelly's best-known work, Post-Partum Document (1973-1979), was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1977, it caused a sensation¿an unexpected response to an intellectually demanding and aesthetically restrained installation of conceptual art. The reception signaled cultural resistance to the themes of the work: feminism and the cultural mythologizing of motherhood. This volume of essays and interviews begins with this foundational work, offering an early statement by the artist, a subsequent interview, and an essay situating the work within a broader feminist discourse that includes Martha Rosler and Judy Chicago. The collection examines such themes in Kelly's work as labor, war trauma, and the politics of care, while emphasizing the artist's sustained engagement with multiple feminisms, multiple histories of feminism, and multiple generations of feminists.

Essays and interviews that span Mary Kelly's career highlight the artist's sustained engagement with feminism and feminist history.

Critical texts and interviews that explore the drawings, animations, and theatrical work of the South African artist William Kentridge.Since the 1970s, the South African artist William Kentridge has charted the turbulent terrain of his homeland in both personal and political terms. With erudition, absurdist humor, and an underlying hope in humankind, Kentridge's artwork has examined apartheid, humanitarian atrocities, aging, and the ambiguities of growing up white and Jewish in South Africa. This October Files volume brings together critical essays and interviews that explore Kentridge's work and shed light on the unique working processes behind his drawings, prints, stop-animation films, and theater works.The texts include an interview by the artist Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator of the first major retrospective of Kentridge's work; an essay by Andreas Huyssen on the role of shadow-play in Kentridge's film series 9 Drawing for Projection; and investigations of Kentridge's work for opera and theater by Maria Gough, Joseph Leo Koerner, and Margaret Koster Koerner. An analysis by influential art historian Rosalind Krauss, the editor of this volume, argues that Kentridge's films are the result of a particularly reflexive drawing practice in which the marks on the page—particularly the smudges, smears, and erasures that characterize his stop-animations—define the act of drawing as a temporal medium. Krauss's understanding of Kentridge's work as embodying a fundamental tension between formal and sociological poles has been crucial to subsequent analyses of the artist's work, including the new essay by the anthropologist Rosalind Morris, who has collaborated with Kentridge on several projects.Essays and InterviewsCarolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Maria Gough, Andreas Huyssen, William Kentridge, Joseph Leo Koerner, Margaret Koster Koerner, Rosalind Krauss, Rosalind Morris