The 10th Anniversary

Volume 10 kicked off with a compendium on a prevailing topic in the mid-’80s artworld, “The Crisis in Knowledge: Poststructuralism, Postmodernism, Postmodernity,” including essays by Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lucy Lippard, and then-emerging African-American scholar, Cornel West. The most sought after philosopher of the moment, Jacques Derrida, was interviewed by Robert Cheatham and Jerry Cullum. The postmodern theme recurred at year’s end with “Art and the Sacred in the Postmodern Era,” a title that was inspired by another magazine’s erroneous transcription of one of Lyotard’s book titles-which should have been “Art and the Secret in the Postmodern Era.” This collection of essays by Suzi Gablik and others included the only extract ever published of the fragmentary final volume of Mircea Eliadeâs History of Religious Ideas. By happy accident, the correct topic of “the secret” got its due in the title of “Architecture in the Land of the Secret Formula,” a special issue with the Architecture Society of Atlanta that was contained in a glassine envelope and printed as a sheaf of differently-sized leaflets and objects. “Love and Death in the Old South” (see photo) was the first of a sequence of issues devoted to artists’ pages. Another issue featured a survey of the rise of ironic neo-modernism.