In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision. Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s. Jonathan Crary is Assistant Professor of Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University. He is a founding editor of Zone and Zone Books.

Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (October Books)

Arts & Photography

Crary, Jonathan

Decorative Arts & Design

Mit Pr

Winner, 2000 Lionel Trilling Award given by Columbia College. 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.

Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (October Books)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This analysis of the historical formation of the observer is a compelling account of the prehistory of the society of the spectacle.
In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity.
Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision.
Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.

History

MIT Press]

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.
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.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Often blurred or with only one element rendered sharply, clinging to the margin of the composition, Uta Barth's deceptively simple photographs of ordinary, ambiguous places are both elegant and challenging. Walls, windows, patches of light on a rug, the glow of an out-of-focus glance toward the horizon: all these provoke phenomenological reflections on perception and subjectivity, often suspending a viewer in the midst of the customary attempt to make sense of what is being seen, to reduce it to an accessible package of associations and meaning. "Certain expectations are unfulfilled: expectations of what a photograph normally depicts, of how we are supposed to read the space in the image, of how a picture normally presents itself on the wall," Barth has said. "This kind of questioning and reorientation is the point of entry and discovery, not only in a cognitive way, but in an almost visceral, physical and personal sense." This comprehensive monographic volume presents a definitive overview of Barth's works, fully illustrated with more than 300 full-color reproductions, spanning from her earliest photographs to her most recent. New texts by Russell Ferguson, former Chief Curator of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; Holly Myers, art critic and writer; and renowned scholar Jonathan Crary provide critical perspectives on the work of this visionary artist. Born in Berlin in 1958, and now resident in Los Angeles, Uta Barth is represented in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Tate in London. In 2007 Barth was named a Broad Art Foundation Fellow.

Uta Barth: The Long Now

Myers, Holly

Photography & Video

Gregory R. Miller & Co.

At the intersection of science and art, documentary and fantasy, the beautiful and the grotesque lies the work of Alexis Rockman, whose meticulously rendered paintings fascinate, amuse, and alarm -- often simultaneously -- as they explore the relationship between humanity and nature. A native New Yorker who frequented the American Museum of Natural History as a boy, Rockman is inspired by botanical and zoological illustrations, as well as early-twentieth-century murals and dioramas. Yet his work goes beyond those genres to portray, with dark humor, a variety of mutated and mutant animals (such as square cows and featherless chickens), interspecies couplings, and macabre visions of a future world. This richly illustrated volume is the first to offer a comprehensive overview of Rockman's oeuvre, from his early works, such as the fascinating yet disquieting Aviary, in which birds perch against a blood-red sky, to his more recent Expedition series, inspired by the artist's field studies in the rain forests of Brazil and Guyana. Important large-scale works, such as A Recent History of the World and Evolution, are reproduced as dramatic fold-out pages. Complementing the visual documentation of Rockman's work is commentary by the artist himself. Three incisive essays further elucidate the scientific and artistic influences on Rockman's art and show how, at the same time, he has broken with those traditions to create a unique, powerful, and at times haunting vision of the collision between humankind and the natural world.

Alexis Rockman

QUAMMEN, DAVID

Gould, Stephen Jay.

The Monacelli Press

Luc Tuymans: Nice

Cohen, Joshua

TILLMAN, Lynne

Tuymans, Luc

de Chassey

David Zwirner Books

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep explores some of the ruinous consequences of the expanding non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism. The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression, damaging the fabric of everyday life. Jonathan Crary examines how this interminable non-time blurs any separation between an intensified, ubiquitous consumerism and emerging strategies of control and surveillance. He describes the ongoing management of individual attentiveness and the impairment of perception within the compulsory routines of contemporary technological culture. At the same time, he shows that human sleep, as a restorative withdrawal that is intrinsically incompatible with 24/7 capitalism, points to other more formidable and collective refusals of world-destroying patterns of growth and accumulation.

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Verso

Business & Money

Economics

Refusing the digital world of late capitalism\nIn this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our “digital age” is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialisation of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. Scorched Earth surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support.\nThis polemic by the author of 24/7 dismantles the presumption that social media could be an instrument of radical change and contends that the networks and platforms of transnational corporations are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth or with the human interdependence needed to build egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life.

Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World

Computers & Technology

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Books by Crary, Jonathan