Synopses & Reviews
Suspensions of Perception is a major historical study of human attention and its volatile role in modern Western culture. It argues that the ways in which we intently look at or listen to anything result from crucial changes in the nature of perception that can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century.
Focusing on the period from about 1880 to 1905, Jonathan Crary examines the connections between the modernization of subjectivity and the dramatic expansion and industrialization of visual/auditory culture. At the core of his project is the paradoxical nature of modern attention, which was both a fundamental condition of individual freedom, creativity, and experience and a central element in the efficient functioning of economic and disciplinary institutions as well as the emerging spaces of mass consumption and spectacle.
Crary approaches these issues through multiple analyses of single works by three key modernist painters -- Manet, Seurat, and Cezanne -- who each engaged in a singular confrontation with the disruptions, vacancies, and rifts within a perceptual field. Each in his own way discovered that sustained attentiveness, rather than fixing or securing the world, led to perceptual disintegration and loss of presence, and each used this discovery as the basis for a reinvention of representational practices.
Suspensions of Perception decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception -- in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography. In doing so, it provides a historical framework for understanding the current social crisis of attention amid the accelerating metamorphoses of our contemporary technological culture.
Review
andquot;Crary is the historian-philosopher of our spectacle lives.andquot;
andmdash; Artforum
Review
Crary is the historian-philosopher of our spectacle lives. The MIT Press
Synopsis
Suspensions of Perception decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception -- in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography.
Synopsis
Darkness has a history and a uniquely modern form. Distinct from electrification, nightlife, and artificial light, andldquo;artificial darknessandrdquo; has remained entirely overlooked until now. But controlled darkness was essential to the rise of photography, cinema, modern theater, and avant-garde art.
Artificial Darkness is the first book to delve into this phenomenon and its multiple applications across various media and art forms.
In exploring how artificial darkness shaped modern art and film, Noam M. Elcott addresses both sites of production, such as photography darkrooms, film studios, and scientific laboratories, and sites of reception like theaters, cinemas, and exhibitions. He argues that artists, scientists, and entertainers like andEacute;tienne-Jules Marey and Richard Wagner, Georges Mandeacute;liandegrave;s and Oskar Schlemmer, were often less interested in the captured image than in everything surrounding it: the screen, the darkness, and the experience of disembodiment. At the heart of the book is andldquo;the black screen,andrdquo; a technology of darkness crucial to wide-ranging arts and media and the ancestor of todayandrsquo;s blue and green screen technologies.
Turning familiar art and film narratives on their head, Artificial Darkness is a revolutionary treatment of an elusive, yet fundamental, aspect of art and media history.
About the Author
Jonathan Crary is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University. A founding editor of Zone Books, he is the author of Techniques of the Observer (MIT Press, 1990) and coeditor of Incorporations (Zone Books, 1992). He has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, Mellon, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Artificial Darkness
2. Dark Theaters
3. Black Screens
4. The Black Art of Georges Mandeacute;liandegrave;s
5. Spaceless Play: Oskar Schlemmerandrsquo;s Dance against Enlightenment
Coda: Historical Darknesses
Notes
Index