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)

Sibyl Moholy-Nagy: Moholy-Nagy – Experiment in Totality (1950–)

“This biography of the Constructivist leader László Moholy-Nagy illustrates his struggle for a total approach to seeing-teaching-creating. Written by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, László’s second wife and lifetime collaborator, she witnessed many of the defining moments of the Bauhaus movement and its migration to the United States and its continuation as the Chicago New Bauhaus and Institute of Design. An excellent first-person account.”

With an Introduction by Walter Gropius
Publisher Harper & Brothers, New York, 1950
262 pages

Second edition
Publisher MIT Press, 1969
xviii+259 pages

PDF (1950)
Internet Archive (1950, multiple formats)
PDF (2nd ed., 1969, added on 2020-1-3)

Michael Fried: Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998)

“Much acclaimed and highly controversial, Michael Fried‘s art criticism defines the contours of late modernism in the visual arts. This volume contains twenty-seven pieces, including the influential introduction to the catalog for Three American Painters, the text of his book Morris Louis, and the renowned Art and Objecthood. Originally published between 1962 and 1977, they continue to generate debate today. These are uncompromising, exciting, and impassioned writings, aware of their transformative power during a time of intense controversy about the nature of modernism and the aims and essence of advanced painting and sculpture.

Ranging from brief reviews to extended essays, and including major critiques of Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, and Anthony Caro, these writings establish a set of basic terms for understanding key issues in high modernism: the viability of Clement Greenberg’s account of the infralogic of modernism, the status of figuration after Pollock, the centrality of the problem of shape, the nature of pictorial and sculptural abstraction, and the relationship between work and beholder. In a number of essays Fried contrasts the modernist enterprise with minimalist or literalist art, and, taking a position that remains provocative to this day, he argues that minimalism is essentially a genre of theater, hence artistically self-defeating.

For this volume Fried has also provided an extensive introductory essay in which he discusses how he became an art critic, clarifies his intentions in his art criticism, and draws crucial distinctions between his art criticism and the art history he went on to write. The result is a book that is simply indispensable for anyone concerned with modernist painting and sculpture and the task of art criticism in our time.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1998
Art History series
ISBN 0226263193, 9780226263199
333 pages

Publisher

PDF (10 MB, updated on 2019-6-9)