Rosalind Krauss: Bachelors (1999)

“Since the 1970s Rosalind Krauss has been exploring the art of painters, sculptors, and photographers, examining the intersection of these artists concerns with the major currents of postwar visual culture: the question of the commodity, the status of the subject, issues of representation and abstraction, and the viability of individual media.

These essays on nine women artists—gathered as Bachelors—are framed by the question, born of feminism, “What evaluative criteria can be applied to women’s art?” In the case of surrealism, in particular, some have claimed that surrealist women artists must either redraw the lines of their practice or participate in the movement’s misogyny. Krauss resists that claim, for these “bachelors” are artists whose expressive strategies challenge the very ideals of unity and mastery identified with masculinist aesthetics. Some of this work, such as the “part object” (Louise Bourgeois) or the “formless” (Cindy Sherman) could be said to find its power in strategies associated with such concepts as écriture feminine. In the work of Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, or Sherrie Levine, one can make the case that the power of the work can be revealed only by recourse to another type of logic altogether. Bachelors attempts to do justice to these and other artists (Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Louise Lawler, Francesca Woodman) in the terms their works demand.”

Publisher MIT Press, 1999
October Books
ISBN 0262112396, 9780262112390
228 pages

Reviews: James Elkins (CAA Reviews 1999), Fred Andersson (Leonardo 2000).

Publisher

PDF

Rosalind E. Krauss: The Optical Unconscious (1993–) [EN, ES]

“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 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. Krauss also gives us the story that Alfred Barr, Meyer Shapiro, and Clement Greenberg repressed, the story of a small, disparate group of artists who defied modernism’s most cherished self-descriptions, giving rise to an unruly, disruptive force that persistently haunted the field of modernism from the 1920s to the 1950s and continues to disrupt it today.

In order to understand why modernism had to repress the optical unconscious, Krauss eavesdrops on Roger Fry in the salons of Bloomsbury, and spies on the toddler John Ruskin as he amuses himself with the patterns of a rug; we find her in the living room of Clement Greenberg as he complains about “smart Jewish girls with their typewriters” in the 1960s, and in colloquy with Michael Fried about Frank Stella’s love of baseball. Along the way, there are also narrative encounters with Freud, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard.

To embody this optical unconscious, Krauss turns to the pages of Max Ernst’s collage novels, to Marcel Duchamp’s hypnotic Rotoreliefs, to Eva Hesse’s luminous sculptures, and to Cy Twombly’s, Andy Warhol’s, and Robert Morris’s scandalous decoding of Jackson Pollock’s drip pictures as “Anti-Form.” These artists introduced a new set of values into the field of twentieth-century art, offering ready-made images of obsessional fantasy in place of modernism’s intentionality and unexamined compulsions.”

Publisher MIT Press, 1993
An October Book
ISBN 026211173X, 9780262111737
365 pages

Reviews: Gregg M. Horowitz (JAAC 1994), Briony Fer (Art Hist 1994), Brian Grosskurth (Oxford Art J 1994), Terry Smith (Modernism/modernity 1995), more.
Commentary: Roger Kimball (New Criterion 1993), James Elkins (2013), Brooke Carlson (2014).

Publisher (EN)

Optical Unconscious (English, 1993)
El inconsciente óptico (Spanish, trans. J. Miguel Esteban Cloquell, 1997)

Caleb Kelly (ed.): Sound (2011)

“Sound is one of a series documenting major themes and ideas in contemporary art.

The ‘sonic turn’ in recent art reflects a wider cultural awareness that sight no longer dominates our perception or understanding of contemporary reality. The background buzz of myriad mechanically reproduced sounds increasingly mediates our lives. Tuning in to this incessant auditory stimulus some of our most influential artists have investigated the corporeal, cultural and political resonance.

In tandem with recent experimental music and technology, art has opened up to hitherto excluded dimensions of noise, silence and the act of listening. Artists working with sound have engaged in new forms of aesthetic encounter with the city and nature, the everyday and cultural otherness, technological effects and psychological states.

New perspectives on sound have generated a wave of scholarship in musicology, cultural studies and the social sciences. But the equally important rise of sound in the arts since 1960 has so far been sparsely documented. This volume is the first sourcebook to provide, through original critical writings and artists’ statements, a genealogy of sonic pathways into the arts; philosophical reflections on the meanings of noise and silence; dialogues between art and music; investigations of the role of listening and acoustic space; and a comprehensive survey of sound works by international artists from the avant-garde era to the present.”

Artists surveyed include Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, Doug Aitken, Maryanne Amacher, Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Kim Cascone, Martin Creed, Paul DeMarinis, Bill Fontana, Kim Gordon, Dan Graham, Ryoji Ikeda, Mike Kelley, Christina Kubisch, Bernhard Leitner, Alvin Lucier, Len Lye, Christian Marclay, Max Neuhaus, Carsten Nicolai, Hermann Nitsch, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Luigi Russolo, Karin Sander, Mieko Shiomi, Michael Snow and Bill Viola.

Writers include Ralph T. Coe, Christoph Cox, Suzanne Delehanty, William Furlong, Liam Gillick, Paul Hegarty, Branden W. Joseph, Douglas Kahn, Dan Lander, W.J.T. Mitchell, Michael Nyman, R. Murray Schafer, Michel Serres, David Toop and Paul Virilio.

Publisher Whitechapel Gallery, London, with MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2011
Documents of Contemporary Art series
ISBN 0854881875, 9780854881871
239 pages

review (Neural)
review (Sophie Hoyle, an)

publisher
co-publisher

PDF (biographies on pp 224-227 are missing)