The Optical Unconscious

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The Optical Unconscious

Author : Rosalind E. Krauss
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262611053
Total Pages : 374 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis The Optical Unconscious by : Rosalind E. Krauss

Download or read book The Optical Unconscious written by Rosalind E. Krauss and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1994-07-25 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Optical Unconscious is a pointed protest against the official story of modernism and against the critical tradition that attempted to define modern art according to certain sacred commandments and self-fulfilling truths. The account of modernism presented here challenges the vaunted principle of "vision itself." And it is a very different story than we have ever read, not only because its insurgent plot and characters rise from below the calm surface of the known and law-like field of modernist painting, but because the voice is unlike anything we have heard before. Just as the artists of the optical unconscious assaulted the idea of autonomy and visual mastery, Rosalind Krauss abandons the historian's voice of objective detachment and forges a new style of writing in this book: art history that insinuates diary and art theory, and that has the gait and tone of fiction. The Optical Unconscious will be deeply vexing to modernism's standard-bearers, and to readers who have accepted the foundational principles on which their aesthetic is based. Krauss also gives us the story that Alfred Barr, Meyer Shapiro, and Clement Greenberg repressed, the story of a small, disparate group of artists who defied modernism's most cherished self-descriptions, giving rise to an unruly, disruptive force that persistently haunted the field of modernism from the 1920s to the 1950s and continues to disrupt it today. In order to understand why modernism had to repress the optical unconscious, Krauss eavesdrops on Roger Fry in the salons of Bloomsbury, and spies on the toddler John Ruskin as he amuses himself with the patterns of a rug; we find her in the living room of Clement Greenberg as he complains about "smart Jewish girls with their typewriters" in the 1960s, and in colloquy with Michael Fried about Frank Stella's love of baseball. Along the way, there are also narrative encounters with Freud, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard. To embody this optical unconscious, Krauss turns to the pages of Max Ernst's collage novels, to Marcel Duchamp's hypnotic Rotoreliefs, to Eva Hesse's luminous sculptures, and to Cy Twombly's, Andy Warhol's, and Robert Morris's scandalous decoding of Jackson Pollock's drip pictures as "Anti-Form." These artists introduced a new set of values into the field of twentieth-century art, offering ready-made images of obsessional fantasy in place of modernism's intentionality and unexamined compulsions.

Photography and the Optical Unconscious

Author : Shawn Michelle Smith
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822372991
Total Pages : 430 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis Photography and the Optical Unconscious by : Shawn Michelle Smith

Download or read book Photography and the Optical Unconscious written by Shawn Michelle Smith and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-04 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Photography is one of the principal filters through which we engage the world. The contributors to this volume focus on Walter Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious to investigate how photography has shaped history, modernity, perception, lived experience, politics, race, and human agency. In essays that range from examinations of Benjamin's and Sigmund Freud's writings to the work of Kara Walker and Roland Barthes's famous Winter Garden photograph, the contributors explore what photography can teach us about the nature of the unconscious. They attend to side perceptions, develop latent images, discover things hidden in plain sight, focus on the disavowed, and perceive the slow. Of particular note are the ways race and colonialism have informed photography from its beginning. The volume also contains photographic portfolios by Zoe Leonard, Kelly Wood, and Kristan Horton, whose work speaks to the optical unconscious while demonstrating how photographs communicate on their own terms. The essays and portfolios in Photography and the Optical Unconscious create a collective and sustained assessment of Benjamin's influential concept, opening up new avenues for thinking about photography and the human psyche. Contributors. Mary Bergstein, Jonathan Fardy, Kristan Horton, Terri Kapsalis, Sarah Kofman, Elisabeth Lebovici, Zoe Leonard, Gabrielle Moser, Mignon Nixon, Thy Phu, Mark Reinhardt, Shawn Michelle Smith, Sharon Sliwinski, Laura Wexler, Kelly Wood, Andrés Mario Zervigón

Passages in Modern Sculpture

Author : Rosalind E. Krauss
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262610339
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Passages in Modern Sculpture by : Rosalind E. Krauss

Download or read book Passages in Modern Sculpture written by Rosalind E. Krauss and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1981-02-26 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies major works by important sculptors since Rodin in the light of different approaches to general sculptural issues to reveal the logical progressions from nineteenth-century figurative works to the conceptual work of the present.

The Acoustical Unconscious

Author : Robert Ryder
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110733021
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis The Acoustical Unconscious by : Robert Ryder

Download or read book The Acoustical Unconscious written by Robert Ryder and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-02-21 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there an acoustical equivalent to Walter Benjamin’s idea of the optical unconscious? In the 1930s, Benjamin was interested in how visual media expand our optical perception: the invention of the camera allowed us to see images and details that we could not consciously perceive before. This study argues that Benjamin was also concerned with how acoustical media allow us to “hear otherwise,” that is, to listen to sound structures previously lost to the naked ear. Crucially, they help sensitize us to the discursive sonority of words, which Benjamin was already alluding to in his autobiographical work. In five chapters that range in scope from Tieck’s Blonde Eckbert, which Benjamin once called his locus classicus of his theory of forgetting, to Alexander Kluge’s films and short texts, where he develops what he calls “sound perspectives,” this monograph discusses how the acoustical unconscious enriches our understanding of different media, from the written word to radio and film. As the first book-length study of Benjamin’s linguistic, cultural-historical, and media-theoretical reflections on sound, this book will be particularly relevant to students and scholars of both German studies and sound studies.

The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths

Author : Rosalind E. Krauss
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262610469
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (14 download)

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Book Synopsis The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths by : Rosalind E. Krauss

Download or read book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths written by Rosalind E. Krauss and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1986-07-09 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum of the 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the major formulation of the theory of postmodernism. In this challenging collection of fifteen essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.

The Museological Unconscious

Author : Victor Tupitsyn
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262201739
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (622 download)

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Book Synopsis The Museological Unconscious by : Victor Tupitsyn

Download or read book The Museological Unconscious written by Victor Tupitsyn and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of contemporary art in Russia, from socialist realism to the post-Soviet alternative art scene. In The Museological Unconscious, Victor Tupitsyn views the history of Russian contemporary art through a distinctly Russian lens, a "communal optic" that registers the influence of such characteristically Russian phenomena as communal living, communal perception, and communal speech practices. This way of looking at the subject allows him to gather together a range of artists and art movements--from socialist realism to its "dangerous supplement," sots art, and from alternative photography to feminism--as if they were tenants in a large Moscow apartment. Describing the notion of "communal optics," Tupitsyn argues that socialist realism does not work without communal perception--which, as he notes, does not easily fit into crates when paintings travel out of Russia for exhibition in Kassel or New York. Russian artists, critics, and art historians, having lived for decades in a society that ignored or suppressed avant-garde art, have compensated, Tupitsyn claims, by developing a "museological unconscious"--the "museification" of the inner world and the collective psyche.

Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism

Author : David Carrier
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 0313076421
Total Pages : 140 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism by : David Carrier

Download or read book Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism written by David Carrier and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2002-10-30 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rosalind Krauss is, without visible rival, the most influential American art writer since Clement Greenberg. Together with her colleagues at ^IOctober^R, the journal she co-founded, she has played a key role in the introduction of French theory into the American art world. In the 1960s, though first a follower of Greenberg, she was inspired by her readings of French structuralist and post-structuralist materials, revolted against her mentor's formalism, and developed a succession of radically original styles of art history writing. Offering a complete survey of her career and work, ^IRosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From Formalism to Beyond Postmodernism^R comprises the first book-length study of its subject. Written in the lucid style of analytic philosophy, this accessible commentary offers a consideration of her arguments as well as discussions of alternative positions. Tracing Krauss's development in this way provides the best method of understanding the changing styles of American art criticism from the 1960s through the present, and thus provides an invaluable source of historical and aesthetic knowledge for artists and art scholars alike.

Under Blue Cup

Author : Rosalind E. Krauss
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262551233
Total Pages : 153 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Under Blue Cup by : Rosalind E. Krauss

Download or read book Under Blue Cup written by Rosalind E. Krauss and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A personal journey leads a celebrated critic to discover “knights of the medium,” contemporary artists who battle the aesthetic meaninglessness of the post-medium condition. In Under Blue Cup, Rosalind Krauss explores the relation of aesthetic mediums to memory—her own memory having been severely tested by a ruptured aneurysm that temporarily washed away much of her short-term memory. (The title, Under Blue Cup, comes from the legend on a flash card she used as a mnemonic tool during cognitive therapy.) Krauss emphasizes the medium as a form of remembering; contemporary artists in what she terms the “post-medium” condition reject that scaffolding. Krauss explains the historical emergence of the post-medium condition and describes alternatives to its aesthetic meaninglessness, examining works by “knights of the medium”—contemporary artists who extend the life of the specific medium. These artists—including Ed Ruscha, William Kentridge, Sophie Calle, Harun Farocki, Christian Marclay, and James Coleman—reinstate the recursive rules of a modernist medium by inventing what Krauss terms new technical supports, battling the aesthetic meaninglessness of the post-medium condition. The “technical support” is an underlying ground for aesthetic practice that supports the work of art as canvas supported oil paint. The technical support for Ruscha's fascination with gas stations and parking lots is the automobile; for Kentridge, the animated film; for Calle, photojournalism; for Coleman, a modification of PowerPoint; for Marclay, synchronous sound. Their work, Krauss argues, recuperates more than a century of modernist practice. The work of the post-medium condition—conceptual art, installation, and relational aesthetics—advances the idea that the “white cube” of the museum or gallery wall is over. Krauss argues that the technical support extends the life of the white cube, restoring autonomy and specificity to the work of art.

Techniques of the Observer

Author : Jonathan Crary
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262531078
Total Pages : 190 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (31 download)

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Book Synopsis Techniques of the Observer by : Jonathan Crary

Download or read book Techniques of the Observer written by Jonathan Crary and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1992-02-25 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This analysis of the historical formation of the observer is a compelling account of the prehistory of the society of the spectacle. In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision. Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.

The Sublime Object of Ideology

Author : Slavoj Žižek
Publisher : Verso
ISBN 13 : 9780860919711
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (197 download)

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Book Synopsis The Sublime Object of Ideology by : Slavoj Žižek

Download or read book The Sublime Object of Ideology written by Slavoj Žižek and published by Verso. This book was released on 1989 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative and original work, Slavoj _i_ek takes a look at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. From the sinking of the Titanic to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, from the operas of Wagner to science fiction, from Alien to the Jewish Joke, the author’s acute analyses explore the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society. _i_ek takes issue with analysts of the postmodern condition from Habermas to Sloterdijk, showing that the idea of a ‘post-ideological’ world ignores the fact that ‘even if we do not take things seriously, we are still doing them’. Rejecting postmodernism’s unified world of surfaces, he traces a line of thought from Hegel to Althusser and Lacan, in which the human subject is split, divided by a deep antagonism which determines social reality and through which ideology operates. Linking key psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts to social phenomena such as totalitarianism and racism, the book explores the political significance of these fantasies of control. In so doing, The Sublime Object of Ideology represents a powerful contribution to a psychoanalytical theory of ideology, as well as offering persuasive interpretations of a number of contemporary cultural formations.

Bachelors

Author : Rosalind E. Krauss
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262611657
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (116 download)

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Book Synopsis Bachelors by : Rosalind E. Krauss

Download or read book Bachelors written by Rosalind E. Krauss and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000-08-25 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays on nine women artists are framed by the question, born of feminism, "What evaluative criteria can be applied to women's art?" Since the 1970s Rosalind Krauss has been exploring the art of painters, sculptors, and photographers, examining the intersection of these artists concerns with the major currents of postwar visual culture: the question of the commodity, the status of the subject, issues of representation and abstraction, and the viability of individual media. These essays on nine women artists are framed by the question, born of feminism, "What evaluative criteria can be applied to women's art?" In the case of surrealism, in particular, some have claimed that surrealist women artists must either redraw the lines of their practice or participate in the movement's misogyny. Krauss resists that claim, for these "bachelors" are artists whose expressive strategies challenge the very ideals of unity and mastery identified with masculinist aesthetics. Some of this work, such as the "part object" (Louise Bourgeois) or the "formless" (Cindy Sherman) could be said to find its power in strategies associated with such concepts as écriture feminine. In the work of Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, or Sherrie Levine, one can make the case that the power of the work can be revealed only by recourse to another type of logic altogether. Bachelors attempts to do justice to these and other artists (Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Louise Lawler, Francesca Woodman) in the terms their works demand.

The Illusion of Conscious Will

Author : Daniel M. Wegner
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262290553
Total Pages : 743 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (622 download)

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Book Synopsis The Illusion of Conscious Will by : Daniel M. Wegner

Download or read book The Illusion of Conscious Will written by Daniel M. Wegner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-08-11 with total page 743 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.

Perpetual Inventory

Author : Rosalind E. Krauss
Publisher : MIT Press (MA)
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Perpetual Inventory by : Rosalind E. Krauss

Download or read book Perpetual Inventory written by Rosalind E. Krauss and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 2010 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collection of essays spanning three decades of the writings of Rosalind E. Krauss.

At the Edge of Sight

Author : Shawn Michelle Smith
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822378264
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis At the Edge of Sight by : Shawn Michelle Smith

Download or read book At the Edge of Sight written by Shawn Michelle Smith and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The advent of photography revolutionized perception, making visible what was once impossible to see with the human eye. In At the Edge of Sight, Shawn Michelle Smith engages these dynamics of seeing and not seeing, focusing attention as much on absence as presence, on the invisible as the visible. Exploring the limits of photography and vision, she asks: What fails to register photographically, and what remains beyond the frame? What is hidden by design, and what is obscured by cultural blindness? Smith studies manifestations of photography's brush with the unseen in her own photographic work and across the wide-ranging images of early American photographers, including F. Holland Day, Eadweard Muybridge, Andrew J. Russell, Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, and Augustus Washington. She concludes by showing how concerns raised in the nineteenth century remain pertinent today in the photographs of Abu Ghraib. Ultimately, Smith explores the capacity of photography to reveal what remains beyond the edge of sight.

Optical Allusions

Author : Jay S Hosler
Publisher : Active Synapse
ISBN 13 : 9780967725529
Total Pages : 132 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (255 download)

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Book Synopsis Optical Allusions by : Jay S Hosler

Download or read book Optical Allusions written by Jay S Hosler and published by Active Synapse. This book was released on 2008 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Optical Allusions is for those people seeking a painstakingly researched, scientifically accurate, eye-themed comic book adventure! Wrinkles the Wonder Brain has lost his bosses eye and now he has to search all of human imagination for it. Along the way, he confronts biology head on and accidentally learns more about eyes and the evolution of vision than he thought possible. And, as if a compelling story with disembodied talking brains, shape-changing proteins, and giant robot eyes wasn't enough, each tale is followed by a fully illustrated, in-depth exploration of the ideas introduced in the comic story. Designed to be a hybrid college text book/comic book, Optical Allusions is suitable for advanced readers with an interest in evolution and real science. 127 pages.

The Book of the It

Author : Georg Groddeck
Publisher : Ravenio Books
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4./5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis The Book of the It by : Georg Groddeck

Download or read book The Book of the It written by Georg Groddeck and published by Ravenio Books. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Georg Walther Groddeck was born in Germany in 1866. Although he spent his early years as a writer—he produced a novel, poetry, and a volume of art criticism—he became a doctor in middle life and, from that point on, thought of himself as healer rather than artist. He spent the remainder of his life as director of a clinic at Baden-Baden, and continued to write, but his plan for reviewing every aspect of knowledge in terms of the hypothesis presented in The Book of the It was cut short by his death in 1934. His other books, The World of Man, The Unknown Self, and Exploring the Unconscious, are collections of Groddeck’s writings on science, cosmology, and art.

Snapshots of the Soul

Author : Molly Thomasy Blasing
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501753703
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Snapshots of the Soul by : Molly Thomasy Blasing

Download or read book Snapshots of the Soul written by Molly Thomasy Blasing and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Snapshots of the Soul considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day. Drawing on theories of the lyric and the elegy, the social history of technology, and little-known archival materials, Molly Thomasy Blasing offers close readings of poems by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Joseph Brodsky, and Bella Akhmadulina, as well as by the late and post-Soviet poets Andrei Sen-Sen'kov, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, and Kirill Medvedev, to understand their fascination with the visual language, representational power, and metaphorical possibilities offered by the camera and the photographic image. Within the context of long-standing anxieties about the threat that visual media pose to literary culture, Blasing finds that these poets were attracted to the affinities and tensions that exist between the lyric or elegy and the snapshot. Snapshots of the Soul reveals that at the core of each poet's approach to "writing the photograph" is the urge to demonstrate the superior ability of poetic language to capture and convey human experience. Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.