In this stunningly original and far-ranging book, Rosalind Krauss persuasively argues for an alternative history developed against the grain of mainstream modernism's construction of a field of rational modernism's construction of a field of rational visuality. Drawing brilliantly from the work of artists and theoreticians who have helped to shape modern culture (Duchamp, Picasso, Pollock; Freud, Bataille, Lacan), Krauss challenges our notion of what constitutes "seeing" by relocating vision itself within the opacity of the body and the invisibility of the unconscious. -- Leo Bersani, University of California The Optical Unconscious effectively derails the official versions of modern art's history that have dominated the field for so long. Rosalin Krauss's study will be shaping discussions of Surrealism, mondrian, Picasso, and Pollock for years to come. A book of impassioned arguments, dialogues, and reinterpretating." -- Norman Bryson
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.
Original, fascinating, personal, often brilliant, combative
*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*
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