The Optical Unconscious

(Paperback)

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"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 ready-made images of obsessional fantasy in place of modernism's intentionality and unexamined compulsions.

Reviews

Original, fascinating, personal, often brilliant, combative

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 charactersGreenberg, Pollock, Woolf, Warhol, Deleuze, Sartre, Artaud, Madonna, and Jung productively inhabit these pageswhich add up to nothing less than a persuasive rewriting of 20th-century culture.

Author Bio

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.