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)

Clement Greenberg: Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (2000)

“In this work, which gathers previously uncollected essays and a series of seminars delivered at Bennington College in 1971, Greenberg provides his most expansive statement of his views on taste and quality in art. He insists that despite the attempts of modern artists to escape the jurisdiction of taste by producing an art so disjunctive that it cannot be judged, taste is inexorable. He maintains that standards of quality in art, ohe artist’s responsibility to seek out the hardest demands of a medium, and the critic’s responsibility to discriminate, are essential conditions for great art. He discusses the interplay of expectation and surprise in aesthetic experience, and the exalted consciousness produced by great art. Homemade Esthetics allows us to watch the critic’s mind at work, defending (and at times reconsidering) his controversial and influential theories. Charles Harrison’s introduction to this volume places Homemade Esthetics in the context of Greenberg’s work and the evolution of 20th century criticism.”

Foreword by Janice Van Horne Greenberg
Introduction by Charles Harrison
Publisher Oxford University Press, 2000
ISBN 0195139232, 9780195139235
256 pages

Publisher

PDF

De Stijl magazine (1917-1921) [Dutch]

De Stijl, Dutch for “The Style”, also known as neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917. In a narrower sense, the term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 founded in the Netherlands. De Stijl is also the name of a journal that was published by the Dutch painter, designer, writer, and critic Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), propagating the group’s theories. Though the magazine never sold more than 300 copies, it had a strong influence on art in the Netherlands and abroad.

De Stijl: Maanblad gewijd aan de moderne beeldende vakken en kultuur
Edited by Theo van Doesburg
Published in Delft (1917-18) and Leiden (1918-21)

Issues in JPG and PDF