Tricks of the Light

Essays on Art and Spectacle

Jonathan Crary

• Publisher: Zone Books
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781942130857
• eBook ISBN:
  9781942130864
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

Essays on media systems and contemporary art by a leading theorist of modern visual culture

Tricks of the Light brings together essays by critic and art historian Jonathan Crary, internationally known for his groundbreaking and widely admired studies of modern Western visual culture. This collection features a compelling selection of Crary's responses to modern and 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, J.G. 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 assemblages and networks in the 1980s and 90s. These assess its many-sided role in the reshaping of subjectivity, temporality, and the operation of power. Like all of Crary's work, his writing here is grounded in the acuteness of his engagement with perceptual artifacts of many kinds and in his nuanced reading of historical processes and their cultural reverberations.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Allan Kaprow’s “Activities”
• Marcel Duchamp’s The Passage from Virgin to Bride
• Eleanor Antin’s Nomadic Itineraries
• Ed Ruscha’s Real Estate Opportunities
• Dennis Oppenheim’s Delirious Operations
• Peter Fend’s Global Architecture
• Psychopathways: Horror Movies and the Technology of Everyday Life
• Eclipse of the Spectacle
• J. G. Ballard and the Promiscuity of Forms
• Gretchen Bender’s Total Recall
• Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory
• Notes on Rem Koolhaas and Modernization
• Dr. Mabuse and Mr. Edison
• Dan Flavin and the Desymbolization of Light
• Fitful Tracings: David Hockney on Art and Optics
• Blade Runner, Artifact of the 1980s
• Robert Irwin and the Condition of Twilight
• Cerith Wyn Evans’s Luminous Stagings
• Spinning Histories at the Sydney Biennial
• Bridget Riley’s Activations of the Eye
• Paul Virilio’s Aesthetics of Disappearance
• On Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma
• Uta Barth: The Singularity of the Everyday
• John Berger, Art Critic in Dark Times
• Terminal Radiance
• Color Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Image Credits