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.

Photography is one of the principal filters through which we engage the world. The contributors to this volume focus on Walter Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious to investigate how photography has shaped history, modernity, perception, lived experience, politics, race, and human agency. In essays that range from examinations of Benjamin's and Sigmund Freud's writings to the work of Kara Walker and Roland Barthes's famous Winter Garden photograph, the contributors explore what photography can teach us about the nature of the unconscious. They attend to side perceptions, develop latent images, discover things hidden in plain sight, focus on the disavowed, and perceive the slow. Of particular note are the ways race and colonialism have informed photography from its beginning. The volume also contains photographic portfolios by Zoe Leonard, Kelly Wood, and Kristan Horton, whose work speaks to the optical unconscious while demonstrating how photographs communicate on their own terms. The essays and portfolios in Photography and the Optical Unconscious create a collective and sustained assessment of Benjamin's influential concept, opening up new avenues for thinking about photography and the human psyche. Contributors. Mary Bergstein, Jonathan Fardy, Kristan Horton, Terri Kapsalis, Sarah Kofman, Elisabeth Lebovici, Zoe Leonard, Gabrielle Moser, Mignon Nixon, Thy Phu, Mark Reinhardt, Shawn Michelle Smith, Sharon Sliwinski, Laura Wexler, Kelly Wood, Andrés Mario Zervigón

Is there an acoustical equivalent to Walter Benjamin’s idea of the optical unconscious? In the 1930s, Benjamin was interested in how visual media expand our optical perception: the invention of the camera allowed us to see images and details that we could not consciously perceive before. This study argues that Benjamin was also concerned with how acoustical media allow us to “hear otherwise,” that is, to listen to sound structures previously lost to the naked ear. Crucially, they help sensitize us to the discursive sonority of words, which Benjamin was already alluding to in his autobiographical work. In five chapters that range in scope from Tieck’s Blonde Eckbert, which Benjamin once called his locus classicus of his theory of forgetting, to Alexander Kluge’s films and short texts, where he develops what he calls “sound perspectives,” this monograph discusses how the acoustical unconscious enriches our understanding of different media, from the written word to radio and film. As the first book-length study of Benjamin’s linguistic, cultural-historical, and media-theoretical reflections on sound, this book will be particularly relevant to students and scholars of both German studies and sound studies.

Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum of the 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the major formulation of the theory of postmodernism. In this challenging collection of fifteen essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.

Studies major works by important sculptors since Rodin in the light of different approaches to general sculptural issues to reveal the logical progressions from nineteenth-century figurative works to the conceptual work of the present.

The history of contemporary art in Russia, from socialist realism to the post-Soviet alternative art scene. In The Museological Unconscious, Victor Tupitsyn views the history of Russian contemporary art through a distinctly Russian lens, a "communal optic" that registers the influence of such characteristically Russian phenomena as communal living, communal perception, and communal speech practices. This way of looking at the subject allows him to gather together a range of artists and art movements--from socialist realism to its "dangerous supplement," sots art, and from alternative photography to feminism--as if they were tenants in a large Moscow apartment. Describing the notion of "communal optics," Tupitsyn argues that socialist realism does not work without communal perception--which, as he notes, does not easily fit into crates when paintings travel out of Russia for exhibition in Kassel or New York. Russian artists, critics, and art historians, having lived for decades in a society that ignored or suppressed avant-garde art, have compensated, Tupitsyn claims, by developing a "museological unconscious"--the "museification" of the inner world and the collective psyche.

Rosalind Krauss is, without visible rival, the most influential American art writer since Clement Greenberg. Together with her colleagues at ^IOctober^R, the journal she co-founded, she has played a key role in the introduction of French theory into the American art world. In the 1960s, though first a follower of Greenberg, she was inspired by her readings of French structuralist and post-structuralist materials, revolted against her mentor's formalism, and developed a succession of radically original styles of art history writing. Offering a complete survey of her career and work, ^IRosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From Formalism to Beyond Postmodernism^R comprises the first book-length study of its subject. Written in the lucid style of analytic philosophy, this accessible commentary offers a consideration of her arguments as well as discussions of alternative positions. Tracing Krauss's development in this way provides the best method of understanding the changing styles of American art criticism from the 1960s through the present, and thus provides an invaluable source of historical and aesthetic knowledge for artists and art scholars alike.