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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, not only because its insurgent plot and characters rise from below the calm surface of the known and lawlike 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.

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CHOICE Review

This highly original text challenges the traditional account of a media- and vision-oriented modernism. Krauss refuses the optical logic of mainstream modernism, as it is defined by formal interest in figure-ground relationships, in order to present sophisticated alternative readings based on carnal and unconscious experiences she identifies as a kind of optical unconscious. Drawing on the theoretical work of Freud, Lacan, Bataille, Callois, Deleuze, and Lyotard, Krauss provides a fresh approach to a variety of 20th-century artists whose importance, she believes, lies outside of the retinal quality of their work. She is especially thorough in the areas of Surrealism and Anti-Form art of the 1960s, and pays special attention to Ernst's collages, Duchamp's rotoreliefs, Pollock's drip paintings, and Hesse's sculpture, as well as the work of Twombly, Morris, and Warhol. It is here, in her new look at these artists, that the book will perhaps have its greatest value. Ultimately, Krauss (art history, Columbia), editor of the journal October, offers a provocative reconceptualizing of the theoretical underpinnings of modernism. Advanced undergraduate; graduate; faculty. S. L. Jenkins; University of Southern California