The Optical Unconscious (October Books)

Author - Rosalind E. Krauss ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Paperback Book item from The MIT Press was reviewed on 4-Nov-2008.

Search ISBN:0262611058 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. The Optical Unconscious (October Books) Reference Book. Classifications : Criticism History & Criticism Arts & Photography Subjects Books General History & Criticism Arts & Photography Subjects Books General AAS History & Criticism Arts & Photography Subjects Books General . Click the following link to view the cover of The Optical Unconscious (October Books).

Related topics: Criticism. History & Criticism. Arts & Photography. Subjects. Books. General. History & Criticism. Arts & Photography. Subjects. Books.

1) Paperback Book The Optical Unconscious (October Books) by The MIT Press. Kraus´s "The Optical Unconcious" is a good companion, as it were, to Martin Jay´s "Downcast Eyes." Both discuss the dilema of visuality in Modernist thought and then -whoa - bring out post-modernism just by speaking about the eye and seeing. While Jay gets technical with his notion of "occular centrism," Kraus lets us feel what it means to watch or be watched. Her approach to the male gaze, the fashionable term for good old fashioned voyerism, is that it is natural. Sure, it one can analyse it as a by product of the failure of the industrial revolution to liberate people from work and to bring about more leisure time for the masses (by implication create greater equality - fewer people watching each other in the negative sense). Krauss is right when she insists that looking is a normal, natural occurance in contemporary society. She is also on target about the obsession Americans have with time, and that sight is the quickest method of human understanding. A great book!¤

2) Paperback Book The Optical Unconscious (October Books) by The MIT Press. Through a carefully structured narrative agenda, Rosalind Krauss is able to foreshadow, a compromised and descriptive text, about the contemporary use of the word "understand", specially if applied to the modernist arts and its criticism. Greatly to the advantage of us, lesser audiences, every thesis is exhibited with both academic rigor and narrative richness, permiting thus, the emergence of rich and useful images, powerful to illustrate, vinculate, even sometimes explain, many of the contemporary works of other theorists, that come to the text sometimes to expose, sometimes to poison, the general arguments around modernist production and the understanding of arts. Great for abbandoning oneself into insomnia, it is common to find provocative images, greatly to the advantage of self-involment in the arguments, and to the further underdstanding of the actual state of simbolical exchange, in the present tense. The involment in contemporary thought and debate, and the well constructed historical narrative, provides the text with an surprisingly effective mirror to look at our culture at an compromisingly close viewpoint, in wich many constitutive arguments of contemporary culture today are reflected just as the many of the historical lies that are still at use now at the "explaining" of the artistic pulsions, and its assimilation by the artistic institutions.¤

3) Paperback Book The Optical Unconscious (October Books) by The MIT Press. 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. Rosalind Krauss tells the story of the optical unconscious, an unruly, disruptive force that persistently haunted the field of modernism from the 1920s to the 1950s and continues to disrupt it today. From Max Ernst´s collage novels and Marcel Duchamp´s hypnotic Rotoreliefs to Jackson Pollock´s drip pictures and Eva Hesse´s luminous sculptures, she finds artists who offered readymade images of obsessional fantasy in place of modernism´s intentionality and unexamined compulsions.¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 2-Dec-2008, 02626110589780262611053, 700-920-1X0-770-690-580-8

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