The first judgment of this book begins with a conjunction--"And what about little John Ruskin .

The first judgment of this book begins with a conjunction--"And what about little John Ruskin . . and his fixed stare?"--as if introducing a relevant recent topic into an ongoing discussion with implied readers. common of these, a few pages later, is imagined asking if it is possible to think of Ruskin "in the same universe as modernism," thus revealing the discussion's topic. The answer explains the allusion to the "fixed stare" in that Ruskin cannot take his estimates from the "sea" and "the sea is a special kind of medium for modernism." by what mode so, the implied reader wants to know, and the answer is that the sea is "a visual plenitude that is in some way heightened and pure, both a limitless expanse and a sameness, flattening it into nothing, the no-space of sensory deprivation." in the same manner the sea is a sort of ready-made monochrome, or perhaps a natural analogue to an all through blue painting, or perhaps to the oblong luminosities of what Rosalind Krauss elsewhere designates "The California Sublime." Or in any case for what she designates here as "the optical and its limits," where a certain kind of positive nothingness is in fact what undivided sees. Then, by an abrupt remembered association, the author recalls being "inducted" on Michael Fried "onto the team" of '60 modernism, when Captain Clem Greenberg pointed his heavy hitters in the direction of a "utopian modernism" in which each discipline, if it be not that paradigmatically the discipline of painting, withdraws into what is unique to it--in the case of painting, into the optical--and between the walls of renunciation of everything extrinsic to the chastely optical finds something positive: like the positive negativity of the sea. And now the true copy makes a swift transit between the sides of a description given by Joseph Conrad of the sea in a less degree than threat of storm, commented concerning by Fredric Jameson, and we make a landfall in Holland with the plus-and-minus paintings of Piet Mondrian. Eleven pages into the volume and we have traversed critics, painters, writers, scientists, and we understand that we are being guided toward a way of construing Modernism in painting as optically defined, like the sight of the sea, which she is going to redefine ("my modernism") and then begin to dismantle from the direction of what Modernism represse ("the optical unconscious").

Krauss is mattered to present Modernism less in seasons of its history than its erection which she seeks to give an account of by means of a kind of diagram: "It |is~ more interesting to think of modernism as a graph or table than a history." The "table" is a square with diagonally be joineded corners, of the kind mostly likely to be familiar to readers as the Square of Opposition, fix in elementary logic texts since the mid-19th hundred The square, as Krauss dioceses it, defines a kind of idealized space "within which to work on the outside unbearable contradictions produced within the real field of history." This she calls, using the inevitable gallicism, "the site of Jameson's Political Unconscious" and then, in art, the optical unconscious, which consists of what Utopian Modernism had to kick downstairs, to repres to "evacuate . . from its field."

Greenberg identified an idealized history of disciplinary purity, which meant that painting, famously, had to expel--she will use the denomination "repress"--whatever does not belong to the optical volatile part of art. In this volume Krauss identifies a "counterhistory" which she speculates perhaps began with Marcel Duchamp, however which "pointed to the way the foundations of modernism were mined by the agency of a thousand pockets of darkness, the blind, irrational space of the labyrinth." in the same manner "the problem of this part will be to show that the profunditys are there, to show that the graph's transparency is barely seeming: that it masks what is beneath it, or to use a stronger season represses it."

The book is a series of extremely lyrical explorations of artists whom Modernism would just as presently consign to oblivion outside its triumphal narrative. Among its dark heroes are the Surrealists, whom Greenberg tirelessly attacked for repudiating the antipictorial (read: antifigure/ground) teachings of Cubism, as well as artists like Jackson Pollock whose achievement Greenberg was obliged to distort in order to claim him for Modernism. Her figures are Duchamp (of course), Max Ernst the Surrealist photographers, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, a Pollock restored to replete stature, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Eva Hesse.

Repression is a solution notion in this history. Krauss cites a passage from Walter Benjamin's "Small History of Photography" (1931): "It is within photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious between the walls of psychoanalysis." Perhaps Benjamin was referring to the fact that when we examine a daguerreotype subject to magnification, we see details of which the inspection would otherwise be unconscious. Or, in dull motion photography, we find intermediate images of which we would not be conscious when viewing the action at regular spe And these might correspond to those stages in the optical systems' processing of visual information of which we have no consciousness at all. It is a nice conceit but none of this could be considered overcomeed any more than could the unconscious proces of metabolism. in like manner Krauss is right in saying that her use of the expression (optical unconscious) "is thus at an angle to Benjamin's." however repression is exactly the confine to use, even if in particular instances it will ne defending, for art that the narratives of Modernism have no way of fitting in. All stories have to omit but repression is a more active practice and ultimately, as with the UC regularity of Freud, bound to cause give occasion for labor to since the contradictions expelled from conscious historical life remain unresolv and continue to raise question s The optical unconscious is thus ultimately subversive: Hesse's "proces elaborate|s~ the space of painting with its modernist laws, sole to sap it from its true center: yet one more avatar of the optical unconscious." With that judgment the book ends.