Product Details
Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses

Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses
By Caroline A. Jones

List Price: $35.00
Price: $28.20 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com

20 new or used available from $28.17

Product Description

One of the most influential and provocative art critics of the twentieth century, Clement Greenberg propelled Abstract Expressionist painting—in particular the monumental work of Jackson Pollock—to a leading position in an international postwar art world. Here, Caroline Jones’s magisterial study widens Greenberg’s fundamental tenet of opticality—the 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 Alone offers 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.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #643049 in Books
  • Published on: 2008-04-15
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 544 pages

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap
Even a decade after his death, Clement Greenberg remains controversial. One of the most influential art writers of the twentieth century, Greenberg propelled Abstract Expressionist painting—in particular the monumental work of Jackson Pollock—to a leading position in an international postwar art world. On radio and in print, Greenberg was the voice of “the new American painting” and a central figure in the postwar cultural history of the United States.
Caroline A. Jones’s magisterial study widens Greenberg’s fundamental tenet of “opticality”—the 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. Greenberg’s modernist discourse, Jones argues, 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. Working through these historical developments, Jones brings Greenberg’s theories into contemporary philosophical debates about agency and subjectivity.
Eyesight Alone offers artists, art historians, philosophers, and all those interested in the arts a critical history of this generative figure and brings his work fully into dialogue with the ideas that shape contemporary critical discourse, shedding light not only on Clement Greenberg but also on the contested history of modernism itself.

About the Author
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.