Eyesight Alone

by Jones, Caroline A.

• ISBN13: 9780226409535
• ISBN10: 0226409538
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-04-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

One of the most influential and provocative art critics of the twentieth century, Clement Greenberg propelled Abstract Expressionist paintingin particular the monumental work of Jackson Pollockto a leading position in an international postwar art world. Here, Caroline Jones's magisterial study widens Greenberg's fundamental tenet of opticalitythe idea that modernist art is apprehended through "eyesight alone"to a broader arena, examining how the critic's emphasis on the specular resonated with a society increasingly invested in positivist approaches to the world. Jones argues that Greenberg's modernist discourse developed in relation to the rationalized procedures that gained wide currency in the United States at midcentury, in fields ranging from the sense-data protocols theorized by scientific philosophy to the development of cultural forms, such as hi-fi, that targeted specific senses, one by one. Greenberg's attempt to isolate and celebrate the visual was one manifestation of a large-scale segmentation or bureaucratization of the body's senses. Eyesight Aloneoffers artists, art historians, and twentieth-century art lovers a critical history of this essential thinker that brings his work into dialogue with contemporary critical discourse, illuminating the contested history of modernism itself.

Author Biography

Caroline A. Jones is professor of the history of art, and director of the History, Theory, and Criticism section in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Table of Contents

Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgments

Statements

Becoming Greenberg

Formalism

Abstraction

Sweating out Cubism

Visibilities

Customs Inspector (Greenberg's Pollock, Part 1)

Eyes in the Heat (Greenberg's Pollock, Part 2)

Tyranny of the Eye

Regimes

Postmodernism's Greenberg

The Modernist Sensorium

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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