Curious Visions of Modernity - Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred (Paperback)

Haunted by a secret knowledge and a repressed enchantment, Western rationality is not what it seems. Rembrandt's famous painting of an anatomy lesson, the shrunken head of an Australian indigenous leader, an aerial view of Paris from a balloon: all are windows to enchantment, curiosities that illuminate something shadowy and forgotten lurking behind the neat facade of a rational world. In Curious Visions of Modernity, David Martin unpacks a collection of artifacts from the visual and historical archives of modernity, finding in each a slippage of scientific rationality-a repressed heterogeneity within the homogenized structures of post-Enlightenment knowledge. In doing so, he exposes modernity and its visual culture as haunted by precisely those things that rationality sought to expunge from the "enlightened" world: enchantment, magic, and wonderment. Martin traces the genealogies of what he considers three of the most distinct and historically immediate fields of modern visual culture: the collection, the body, and the mapping of spaces. In a narrative resembling the many-drawered curiosity cabinets of the Renaissance rather than the locked glass cases of the modern museum, he shows us a world renewed through the act of collecting the wondrous and aberrant objects of Creation; tortured and broken flesh rising from the dissecting tables of anatomy theaters to stalk the discourses of medical knowledge; and the spilling forth of a pictorializing geometry from the gilt frames of Renaissance panel paintings to venerate a panoptic god. Accounting for the visual disenchantment of modernity, Martin offers a curious vision of its reenchantment.

General

Imprint:	MIT Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Curious Visions of Modernity
Release date:	November 2011
First published:	2011
Authors:	David L. Martin
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 25mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	280
ISBN-13:	978-0-262-52946-4
Categories:	Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > From 1900 > Postmodernism in art & design Promotions
LSN:	0-262-52946-7
Barcode:	9780262529464

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