Krauss Rosalind E Optical Un

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 Frank Stella, Louisiana Lottery Company, 1962. “So be hits the ball right out of the park. That’s why Frank thinks ht’s a genius ...” (p. 7) Piet Mondrian, Dune III, 1909. On the site of the rationalization of painting around the laws of color theory ... (p. 11) sat contentedly motionless, counting the holes in his carpet, or watching him squeeze his paint out of its bladders,—a beautiful operation, indeed, to my way of thinking;—but I do not remember taking any interest in Mr. Northcote’s application of the pigments to the canvas.” The obligatory comment about the stare’s detachment from the field of purpose is there, of course; but added to it is the final, perfect touch, where the whole thing comes full circle and the motionless, silent, disembodied subject of the stare becomes its equally disincarnated object, becomes, that is, himself an image: “My quietude was so pleasing to the old man that he begged my father and mother to let me sit to him for the face of a child which he was painting in a classical subject; where I was accordingly represented as reclining on a leopard skin, and having a thorn taken out of my foot by a wild man of the woods.” So here is this little boy, no toys, beaten if he cries or is “troublesome,” no sweets of any kind, not even soft white bread—though his father is in the sherry trade and is quite exacting about matters of table—his every movement restricted lest he happen to hurt himself, his days an untiring cycle of reading scripture from one end to the other and of memorizing the verses set for him by his mother. And his one release: the family pleasure, the exquisite luxury of travel. Mamma and Papa in the beautifully fitted coach, with little John in the dickey, and Salvador riding courier. Paris, Brussels, the Black Forest, the Bay of Uri, the Bernardine Pass, Lake Como, Milan. It’s the courier of course who books rooms in the inns, arranges for the fresh teams of horses, orders the meals, and bargains over the fees. For beyond a smattering of French, the Ruskins are strictly limited to English. Travel is thus not a release from but a luxuriating into the same rapt stare that is the medium of John Ruskin’s daily life. And he glories in it, calling their style of passing through foreign lands a mode of “contemplative abstraction from the world.” Naturally he has nothing but praise for the advantage of this abstraction. “There is something peculiarly delightful— nay delightful inconceivably by the modern German-plated and French- polished tourist, in passing through the streets of a foreign city without understanding a word that anybody says! One’s ear for all sound of voices then becomes entirely impartial; one is not diverted by the meaning of syllables from recognizing the absolute guttural, liquid, or honeyed quality of them: while the gesture of the body and the expression of the face have the same value for you that they have in a pantomime; every scene becomes a melodious opera to you, or a picturesquely inarticulate Punch.” I think of the Bergman film The Silence, the one where they are traveling through a foreign city where there seems to be a revolution going on but they don’t understand a word of the language.

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