Krauss revisits Benjamin’s theory of the ‘optical unconscious’ and its importance to modernism, I feel this text is useful to my work as it deals with the eye of the camera and medium specificity. Benjamin’s work appears in most of the texts I have studied with reference to time and duration. Krauss looks at Benjamin from a new angle and scrutinises his theory in terms of psycho-analysis.
Where this particular text really interests me is its look on art and artists who diverged from reality into fantasy and compulsion, which may be more akin to the sort of imagery I am dealing with, looking in a way we are not familiar with.
“To see so fast that the blur of that white smudge could be exploded into pure contact, pure simultaneity, pure optical pattern: vision in touch with its own resources.” (p7)
Krauss is comparing the modernist painting of Frank Stella and Clement Greenberg to the act of hitting a baseball, vision is key to our connectivity with the world and our physicality.
Krauss explores the way we see and paint landscapes, the sea and the sky are a mechanism for showing all that we can see, while some may challenge this idea, it is interesting to see that she is actually referring to the abstract painting of Mondrian and the Great War. (p12) However, Krauss makes clear that this view of the world “as a totalized image” is created by a “frame of exclusions” and “is the work of ideological construct.” (p12) Whether abstract or realist, images are constructed in a certain way, while we may perceive them to show us all that exists, the reality is that they do not, and cannot.
The camera is the “surgeon’s knife that can operate dispassionately on the human body”. (p179) Seeing “in fragments” somehow it reaches a greater reality that our own vision. The camera, may see what we cannot, but it still lacks the power to present us with everything. If the photograph cannot see everything, is it not our imagination which sees or does not see – just as the frame can cause us to see differently so can time. Krauss argues this point, explaining that while technology allows us to closely examine the world, it does not mean the world has an unconscious in the same way as Freud suggests we do. I feel Krauss is somewhat overstating this point through her text, what is unconscious to Freud and Benjamin is different, and what Benjamin describes as the optical unconscious is what is hidden from the naked eye.