The Optical Unconscious

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. Rosalind Krauss tells the story of the optical unconscious, an unruly, disruptive force that persistently haunted the field of modernism from the 1920s to the 1950s and continues to disrupt it today. From Max Ernst's collage novels and Marcel Duchamp's hypnotic Rotoreliefs to Jackson Pollock's drip pictures and Eva Hesse's luminous sculptures, she finds artists who offered readymade images of obsessional fantasy in place of modernism's intentionality and unexamined compulsions.