Tricks of the Light
Essays on Art and Spectacle
-
- $22.99
-
- $22.99
Publisher Description
Essays on media systems and contemporary art by a leading theorist of modern visual culture
Tricks of the Light brings together essays by critic and art historian Jonathan Crary, internationally known for his groundbreaking and widely admired studies of modern Western visual culture. This collection features a compelling selection of Crary's responses to modern and contemporary art and to the transformations of twentieth-century media systems and urban/technological environments. These wide-ranging and provocative texts explore the work of painters, performance artists, writers, architects, and photographers, including Allan Kaprow, Eleanor Antin, Ed Ruscha, John Berger, Bridget Riley, J.G. Ballard, Rem Koolhaas, Gretchen Bender, Dennis Oppenheim, Paul Virilio, Robert Irwin, and Uta Barth. There are also reflections on filmmakers Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc-Godard, David Cronenberg, and others. The book is enhanced by several expansive essays on the unstable status of television, both amid its beginnings in the 1930s and then during its assimilation into new assemblages and networks in the 1980s and 90s. These assess its many-sided role in the reshaping of subjectivity, temporality, and the operation of power. Like all of Crary's work, his writing here is grounded in the acuteness of his engagement with perceptual artifacts of many kinds and in his nuanced reading of historical processes and their cultural reverberations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this erudite collection of previously published essays, art historian Crary (Scorched Earth) examines 20th-century visual art (including performance, photography, television, and film) and how it negotiates perception and attention. He takes a microscope to Gretchen Bender's 1987 video installation Total Recall, in which "delirium, sensory overload" upend "our familiar, domestic relationship to the TV screen" and "intensif our physiocognitive involvement to a threshold at which it becomes acute," and contends that in Marcel Duchamp's 1912 painting The Passage from Virgin to Bride, "the audience becomes a key agent creation" due to the work's sense of openness, which creates "an active field of potentially unlimited relationships" that "resist being inserted into a structural logic." Linking these essays is the idea of attention: how "the emergence of a social, urban, psychic, industrial field increasingly saturated with sensory input" in the 19th century complicated the ability to focus even as new systems of consumerism demanded it, and how visual culture can challenge spectators to look more intently and with all their senses. Students of 20th-century art and media will appreciate Crary's fine-grained analysis and prescient cultural insights, including how television can "produce, rather than represent, a world of experience" that "becomes more real than so-called everyday life." This is edifying.
