The Optical Unconscious

October Books

by Rosalind E. Krauss

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 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.

Genres: Art, Art History, Nonfiction, Theory, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Photography

366 pages, Paperback

First published May 10, 1993

About the author

American art critic, professor, and theorist who is based at Columbia University, teaching Modern Art and Theory.

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't have enough of the proper background to have understood 80% of what what discussed in this book, so I can't comment on its originality or correctness or even style (that's how lost I was.) BUT it made me think lots of things I've never thought before, and also think about lots of things I've never thought before, and for that I am grateful and give it 4 stars.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Optical Unconscious
By Rosalind E. Krauss

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.

[Egor xS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tremendously pleasurable, to the point of inducing wet dreams: gothic, arousing, fluid. All apart from the fact of being preeminent art criticism, pretty much Rosalind blossoming at her zenith.

[Zack2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A romp through twentieth century painting alongside a motley blend of French philosophy

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Of course, it's easy enough to laugh at Ruskin. The most analytic mind in Europe did not even know how to frame a coherent argument." And with that, we're off, Krauss twisting biography, art theory, optics, psychoanalysis, and that infamous little Klein four-group into what could only be described as a historiography of the erotics of modernist art. Which is perhaps what makes Maggie Nelson's odd shot across the bow at Krauss, in The Argonauts, all the more befuddling: her accusation is that "the tacit undercurrent of her argument, as I felt it, was that Gallop's maternity had rotted her mind." (As an aside, it's another ironic twist that this attack on Krauss also doubles as a defense of Ms. Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment herself.) But from whence does this reading of Krauss' recoiling at the corporeality of the maternal derive? For here we are consistently and constantly returned to the corporeal, against a too-quick narrative on the mechanics of vision which would occlude its material support from its function. Therefore, the occlusion of The Optical Unconscious from the modernist narrative is at one and the same stroke the occlusion of the body's corporeality. In a sense, I feel as though Nelson's insistence on maintaining the distinction between the corporeal and the intellectual in her reading of Krauss is saying more about her than it is about Krauss: the role that that pesky neo-Platonic Great Chain of Being still plays in her imaginary. In any case, Krauss tells us that if her title rhymes with Jameson's The Political Unconscious, "it's a rhyme that's intended," due to the "idiotic simplicity" yet "extravagant cunning" of Greimas' semiotic square. It's a tool that Krauss has employed to great use, perhaps most infamously in her "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," and here she draws out the dialectic between ground and figure - and between non-ground and non-figure - in order to trouble that correspondence-theory-like relation between viewer and observed that undergirds, in her example, both the child Ruskin's (and the adult Conrad's) imaginary in relation to the sea, and Fried and Greenberg on Stella (and undermined by Mondrian). We then turn to Ernst's reception by Breton and Aragon in the nascency of surrealism, of the "ready-made" as in opposition to the "reflexive immediacy" assumed by optics, which is supplemented through a reading of Freud's Wolf Man and Lacan's L schema. We get a Lyotardian reading of Duchamp via the Sartrean gaze, as against "classic perspectivism," before moving to Fry and the Bloomsbury group. Next, a Bataillean reading of Dalí, Barthes on Bataille, Lacan on Caillois (this at least helps clarify the latter's critique of camouflage as a concept - not a mimicry because hunting exists in the dimension of the olfactory in the first place, and ultimately a breakdown of the boundary between self and background, a becoming the background instead of merely mimicking it), Le Corbusier on geometry, Man Ray on sexual difference... We then get Picasso as conforming to the "justice" of boxing as outlined by Barthes' Mythologies, alongside his disdain for Duchamp (which, Krauss reminds us, is not engaging in "anti-art"). There's Derrida on Husserl's reliance on the figure of the instant, in correlation to the standard account of the mechanics of vision, and Lyotard on Freud's "A Child Is Being Beaten" which brings out the substitutability of the sign. Finally, we return to Greenberg on Pollock, where she counters his "vertical" reading of his work with one that maintains it in its "horizontality." Her reading of Pollock's late impasse, and his tragic death in a car crash in 1956, reminds me of Luiz Renato Martins' claim, in The Conspiracy of Modern Art, that modernism died with Rothko's suicide in 1970 (there are parallels to Basquiat's biography here as well). We end with Hesse's self-understanding of their work in relation to Deleuze and Guattari's theorizing: sure, the work precedes Anti-Oedipus, but these concepts had already been forwarded in Deleuze's earlier solo work. Overall, it's a strong work—Krauss truly is to art theory what Jameson is to literary theory, especially in their shared indebtedness to the triple legacy of Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis. I will admit, though, the text can be a bit dense at times, even if clear, and the concepts within and between essays don't always cohere so obviously. The main thesis, meanwhile, can feel repetitive if we simply move through various examples that demonstrate the same point. The references are simultaneously dizzyingly large in scope and gratuitously repetitive at times: we have familiar haunts, alongside, seemingly, everyone else. The chapter on Bataille and Dalí reads the weakest for me, though perhaps that largely comes down to personal disdain for these figures. Nevertheless, the present work is singularly impressive in its ambition, one which it mostly manages to deliver upon.

[Stanimir · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The Optical Unconscious (1993), Rosalind Krauss challenges the dominant Greenbergian narrative of modern art as a pursuit of purity and autonomy. Instead, she highlights movements like Surrealism and Dada as vital counter-narratives, driven by the subjective states of the unconscious. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, Krauss argues that modernism was deeply intertwined with psychoanalytic thought, as seen in the works of figures such as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst. Notable for its unconventional, almost diaristic style, the book reveals the personal and psychological underpinnings of artistic creation, offering a nuanced and compelling reexamination of modernism's complexities.

[Hari Collins · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant book; if it is at times repetitive, particularly in its denunciations of Greenbergian modernist 'opticality', it has Krauss' genius for instantly revelatory structural insights which suddenly transform how you think of the whole field. Indeed it is very much about that skill, which she wants to disavow, to get outside of the Greenbergian world, and in the end perhaps can't – the book is much less formally incoherent than it would like to be. But still, amazing, and has changed how I think about twentieth-century art radically and in multiple ways.

[Ana García Julio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinante

[Jeremy Wineberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Krauss has such and interesting way of slicing up the last 100 years of art production that this book, along with Formless: a User's Guide, have seriously rerouted my understanding of the connections between artists, their work and the ideas they bat around.

This book deals with how the conscious is "shot through with unconscious conflict." One exapmle that stuch out for me was her discussion of Duchamp's spinning discs as a hypnotically erotic take on the optical illusion: "one encounters the body of the physiological optic's seeing fully emeshed in the temporal dimension of the nervous life, as it is also fully awash in optical illusion's 'false induction.' But it is here, as well, that one connects to this body as the site of libidinal pressure on the visual organ, so that the pulse of desire is simultaneously felt as the beat of repression."

She builds a string of associations from these rotating discs to the eye, the breast, sexual penetration: "And within the pulse, as it carries one from part-object to part-object, advancing and receding through the illusion of this three dimensional space, there is also a hint of the persecutory threat that the object poses for the viewer, a threat carried by the very metamorphic rhythm itself as its constant thrusting of the form into a state of dissolve brings on the experience of formlessness, seeming to overwhelm the once-bounded object with the condition of the informe."

I see this kind of interpretation as injecting a sense of life into these relics from early modernism, making them quite relevant to a culture that is now overwhelmed with such an erotic pulse and at the same time incredibly repressed.

[Dorian · Rating 1 out of 5]

I frequently have trouble with art criticism but I'm going to give this a try because a photographer I respect recommended it.
Partly, I am trying to decide if the main reason I always end up being so annoyed by art criticism is because it is usually written by people for whom the story about the art is more important than the image itself. I like seeing how an artist did the work, what media, how it was applied, a preferred brush or brand of paper towels or whatever.
It's not that I don't love words and stories, my membership in this forum certainly indicates a love of stories, but verbal and visual are difficult companions.
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I doubt I will ever be able to finish this book. Half-way through and I am done. This book unfortunately, confirms my worst reactions to art criticism. I have filled the margins with comments and exclamations and that is a very bad sign. Sentence by sentience, it makes a certain sense, even within each paragraph it is plausible, but much beyond that it darts about like a lecture by a self-nominated "expert" without any actual insight. An editor with authority would have been a great help. Or perhaps not.

[Maria]

A must for modern visual artists!
The Optical Unconsious 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.