Annette Michelson: Conversations

Annette Michelson is a founding editor of the journal October and former professor of cinema studies at New York University. Before starting October, Michelson was the film critic for Artforum. Michelson’s influential work has focused on modernity, Russian and French avant-garde film, and American underground cinema. In this Soho TV interview with Steven Poser she acknowledges that advertising shapes the editorial content of art magazines (including Artforum) and discusses her objectives in starting October: creating a space where different art forms—dance, sculpture, film—could be written about together in a rigorous way and where artists’ writings and documents could be published. “It was our hope that [October] could celebrate that conjunction of innovation in the arts and certain kinds of political consciousness and awareness … to be defined as undoubtedly oriented toward the left. For myself, the issues of Marxist methodology are still alive,” Michelson says.