Vision and visuality

by Hal Foster (Editor)

A Village Voice Best Book of the Year, this seminal work presents new models of vision and examines modern theories of seeing in the context of contemporary critical practice.


With contributions by: Norman Bryson Jonathan Crary Martin Jay Rosalind Krauss Jacqueline Rose


Discussions in Contemporary Culture is an award-winning series co-published with the Dia Center for the Arts in New York City. These volumes offer rich and timely discourses on a broad range of cultural issues and critical theory. The collection covers topics from urban planning to popular culture and literature, and continually attracts a wide and dedicated readership.

Genres: Art, Art History, Philosophy, Theory

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Hal Foster is a Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University specializing in 20th century art.

Note: for the comic book artist, see Harold "Hal" Foster.

Reviews

[alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Rosalind Krauss essay in here, "The Im/Pulse to See" is fantastic. Its centered around a Duchamp collage piece of a little girl experiencing a zootrope. Krauss creates this wonderfully useful explanation/metaphor about pulsation, in regard to the light, to the sense of attraction and to the throbbing experience of both the mechanism and the illusion...I'll spare you my meager summary and just say: its fabulous. read it.

[yuefei]

[Monoskop]

This is a great, short-but-dense read that builds up a semi-coherent understanding of what has been termed "Cartesian perspectivalism" (which becomes more familiar and easy to understand as the text progresses from one essay to another), identified as the primary scopic regime of Modernity in the West, and its various interventions or disruptions that are also disruptions of the congealed subject/object positions that is immanent to this perspectivalism. The criticism aimed at this book (and at a great amount of academic and theoretical texts) is understandable, but honestly I think this is a read that is incredibly rewarding if you take up the challenge (knowing nothing about Heidegger and phenomenology, and barely any Lacan, all of whom are mentioned throughout, I still got a lot out of this).

Bryson's text suffers a little from being placed within this context of interventions, but his emphasis on the fact that his essay was not an attempt to be historical clears things up.

Rose's essay is probably the most difficult and relevant text here. In it, she poses the issues with which postmodernism has been analysed/diagnosed (think of the major texts by Jameson, Lyotard and Deleuze & Guattari). I have a sneaking suspicion that I'll be returning to her thoughts regarding the paradox of identification for politically-charged images more than a few times.

[M · Rating 1 out of 5]

well, I read it, I guess. Very jargony. I suppose it's fairly presumptuous of me to call this complete gibberish without being familiar with much of the cited works, but I'm still going to do so anyway.