The Optical Unconscious by Rosalind E. Krauss - ISBN: 9780262611053
Paperback
Taking the form of a protest against the official story of modernism, this text tells the story of the optical unconscious, an unruly, disruptive force that persistently haunted the field of modernism from the 1920s to the 1950s.

The Optical Unconscious

$103.31

  • Paperback

    366 pages

  • Release Date

    25 July 1994

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Summary

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 mod…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9780262611053
ISBN-10:0262611058
Author:Rosalind E. Krauss
Publisher:MIT Press Ltd
Imprint:MIT Press
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:366
Edition:New edition
Release Date:25 July 1994
Weight:590g
Dimensions:229mm x 178mm x 22mm
Series:October Books
What They're Saying

Critics Review

Original, fascinating, personal, often brilliant, combative

Original, fascinating, personal, often brilliant, combative

– Arthur C. Danto * Artforum *

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 *

About The Author

Rosalind E. Krauss

Rosalind E. Krauss is University Professor in the Department of Art History at Columbia University, where, from 1995 to 2006, she held the Meyer Schapiro Chair in Modern Art and Theory. She is a founding editor of October and the author of Passages in Modern Sculpture, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Myths, The Optical Unconscious, Bachelors, Perpetual Inventory, Under Blue Cup (all published by the MIT Press), and other books.

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