Tricks of the Light collects essays by the American critic and art historian Jonathan Crary, internationally known for his pioneering and widely admired studies of modern Western visual culture. The book contains a compelling selection of Crary's responses to contemporary art and to the transformations of twentieth-century media systems and urban/technological environments.
These wide-ranging and provocative texts explore the work of painters, performance artists, writers, architects and photographers, including Allan Kaprow, Eleanor Antin, Ed Ruscha, John Berger, Bridget Riley, JG Ballard, Rem Koolhaas, Gretchen Bender, Dennis Oppenheim, Paul Virilio, Robert Irwin and Uta Barth. There are also reflections on filmmakers Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc-Godard, David Cronenberg and others.
The book is enhanced by several expansive essays on the unstable status of television, both amid its beginnings in the 1930s and then during its assimilation into new collections and networks in the 1980s and 90s. These assess the multifaceted role of television in the reshaping of subjectivity, temporality and the functioning of power.
Like all of Crary's work, his writing here is grounded in his engagement with perceptual artefacts of many kinds and in his nuanced reading of historical processes and their cultural resonance.
Jonathan Crary is a professor of modern art and art theory at Columbia University in New York.
Dimensions: 15 x 23 cm
Pages: 272, hardcover
Language: English
Author: Jonathan Crary
Publisher: Zone Books