The Optical Unconscious

361 Pages·1994·7.158 MB·English

by  Rosalind E. Krauss

Fourth printing, 1996
First MIT Press paperback edition, 1994
© 1993 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic
or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and
retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Sabon by DEKR Corporation and was printed and bound in the
United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Krauss, Rosalind E.
The optical unconscious / Rosalind E. Krauss.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-11173-X (HB), 0-262-61105-8 (PB)
1. Visual perception. 2. Optical illusions. 3. Artists
Psychology. I. Title.
N7430.5.K73 1993
701—dc20 92-28978
CIP
For Denis Hollier

Acknowledgments
The logical extension of work begun over a decade ago, on Giacometti’s
connection to “primitivism” as that was being rethought by the group
around Documents and on surrealist photography, this book owes much
to the two instigators of those early projects: William Rubin, who invited
me to contribute to the catalogue of his “Primitivism” and Twentieth-
Century Art, and Jane Livingston, who had the vision and the persistence
to transform research on surrealist photography into an exhibition and
thus to collaborate with me on our joint L’Amour Fou: Photography and
Surrealism. The issues generated by those two projects seemed to demand
further investigation and I therefore embarked on the present work.
In this I have been aided by the many people, most particularly my students
at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, who listened to
this material as I tried it out in lecture form. I am also grateful to the
University of Southern California’s Getty Lectureship, which gave me the
opportunity to present the early chapters of the book to a perceptive and
questioning audience. Help in the writing of the book was further provided
by a CUNY Research Fellowship. The encouragement and advice offered
by friends and colleagues who read the manuscript have been extraordi­
narily important to me. I want to thank them here, although many of them
will see how often I have stubbornly held out against their counsel: Leo
Bersani, Yve-Alain Bois, Anne Boyman, Benjamin Buchloh, Robert Corn­
field, Hubert Damisch, Teri Wehn-Damisch, Georges Didi-Huberman,
Ulysse Dutoit, Hal Foster, Anne Hollander, Denis Hollier, Martin Jay,
Molly Nesbit, John Rajchman, Margit Rowell, Julia Strand, Mark Strand,
Holly Wright. And to Roger Conover, my editor at the MIT Press, my
thanks here are only a token of what I owe to his support of my work.
The optical arts spring from the eye and solely from the eye.
—Jules Laforgue, “Impressionism”
And what about little John Ruskin, with his blond curls and his blue sash
and shoes to match, but above all else his obedient silence and his fixed
stare? Deprived of toys he fondles the light glinting off a bunch of keys, is
fascinated by the burl of the floorboards, counts the bricks in the houses
opposite. He becomes the infant fetishist of patchwork. “The carpet,” he
confesses about his playthings, “and what patterns I could find in bed
covers, dresses, or wall-papers to be examined, were my chief resources.”
This, his childish solace, soon becomes his talent, his great talent: that
capacity for attention so pure and so disinterested that Mazzini calls Rus-
kin’s “the most analytic mind in Europe.” This is reported to Ruskin. He
is modest. He says, “An opinion in which, so far as I am acquainted with
Europe, I am myself entirely disposed to concur.”
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. The most
analytic mind in Europe produced Modern Painters, a work soon to be
known as one of the worst-organized books ever to earn the name of
literature. Prolix, endlessly digressive, a mass of description, theories that
trail off into inconclusiveness, volume after volume, a flood of internal
contradiction.
Yet there’s still the image of the child, with his physical passivity and his
consuming, visual fire. I think of him squatting on the garden path, knees
and arms akimbo, staring at the ants swarming along the cracks between
the paving stones, fixating all that miniaturized activity into purest, linear
ornament. It’s the stare’s relation to pattern, and its withdrawal from
purpose. His boyish connection to the sea is just one more example of
what we could only call the modernist vocation of this stare.
Listen to him saying, “But before everything, at this time, came my pleasure
in merely watching the sea. I was not allowed to row, far less to sail, nor
to walk near the harbor alone; so that I learned nothing of shipping or
anything else worth learning, but spent four or five hours every day in
simply staring and wondering at the sea,—an occupation which never failed
me till I was forty. Whenever I could get to a beach it was enough for me
to have the waves to look at, and hear, and pursue and fly from.” And of
course he does not forget to assure us that there’s nothing useful, nothing
instrumental in this look; for right away he adds, “I never took to natural
history of shells, or shrimps, or weeds, or jelly fish.”
Is it possible, I imagine someone asking, to think of Ruskin—who could
never produce a thought about art that was not at the same time a ser­
mon—in the same universe as modernism? Ruskin, who held that High
Renaissance painting was bad because its makers could not have been very
moral; who could never stop badgering and preaching and thinking about
instruction.
Yet for all that, Ruskin cannot take his eyes from the sea. And it functions
for him in the same way it does for Monet in Impression: Sunrise or
Conrad in Lord Jim. The sea is a special kind of medium for modernism,
because of its perfect isolation, its detachment from the social, its sense of
self-enclosure, and, above all, its opening onto a visual plenitude that is
somehow heightened and pure, both a limitless expanse and a sameness,
flattening it into nothing, into the no-space of sensory deprivation. The
optical and its limits. Watch John watching the sea.
And then there’s the moment when Ruskin is four and sitting for his
portrait. “Having,” he says, “been steadily whipped if I was troublesome,
my formed habit of serenity was greatly pleasing to the old painter; for I