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The Optical UnconsciousStock informationGeneral Fields
Special Fields
DescriptionThe 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. Promotion info"This is critical theory grounded in the viscera and in the libido. A minimum of academic jargon, a satisfying helping of lovely description, a surprising amount of good dirty sex, not to mention an all-star cast of characters - Greenberg, Pollock, Woolf, Warhol, Deleuze, Sartre, Artaud, Madonna, and Jung productively inhabit these pages - which add up to nothing less than a persuasive rewriting of 20th-century culture." Voice Literary Supplement "Original, fascinating, personal, often brilliant, combative." Arthur C. Danto , Artforum Author descriptionRosalind E. Krauss, University Professor at Columbia University and an editor and cofounder of October magazine, is the author of The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), The Optical Unconscious (1993), The Picasso Papers (1999), and Bachelors (1999), all published by the MIT Press, and coauthor (with Yve-Alain Bois) of Formless: A User's Guide (Zone Books, 1997). |