User:Tommylong07

Jonathan Crary
Jonathan Crary, a Meyer Schapiro professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University is a critic and an essayist. He achieved nobility for his two very famous works Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (1990), and Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (2000). He has also published critical essays for over 30 exhibition catalogs.

Crary graduated with a B.A. from Columbia College where he was an art major. Later in 1987 he received his Ph.D from Columbia as well. Crary also earned a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute where he studied film and photography.

He first began teaching at the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego. Then in 1989 he began to teach at Columbia.

Much of his writing is set on contemporary art. His style is often classified as observational mixed with scientific, and a dominant theme in his work is the role of the human eye.   '''

Suspensions of Perception:Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture Jonathan Crary’s Suspension of Perception focuses on the period from about 1880 to 1905, exploring the second half of the nineteenth century in which a new way of seeing was introduced. Crary describes this shift as an emergence of subjective vision. In addition, Crary discusses how Attention became a “new object within the modernization of subjectivity...”(17). Crary’s book examines how the perception of various cultures were reconstructed and uncertainties were argued. This new development of vision created controversy because it implied that seeing was dependent upon one’s subjective thoughts, which were based on what the observer saw. Therefore this new way of seeing was thought of as unclear, unreliable, and always questioned among a large population of people.

In the section titled Modernity and the Problem of Attention, Crary discusses how modernity a “crisis of attentiveness” (14) became an issue. Paying close attention to something in particular led to “perceptual disintegration.” Crary incorporates three artist: Manet’s In the Conservatory, Seurat’s Parade de Cirque, and Cezanne’s Pines and Rocks, illustrating that they had their own approach when painting, and therefore was not a product of attentiveness. Their approach was based on their perception. “Each of them engaged in a singular confrontation...within a perceptual field...”(1). Many were highly focused on exploring this new modern world in which “people were emersed with endless sequences of new products, sources of stimulation, and streams of information”(14). As a result people responded with regulated perceptions.

Although modern attention led to an increase in creativity, freedom, and the emerging spaces of mass consumption,” Suspensions of Perception illustrates how “unstable the nature of perception can be in psychology, philosophy, early cinema, and photography.” This book provides a basis for the modernized culture today.

'Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century'(1990)

Crary's Techniques of the Observer gives a unique study on the origins of modern visual culture. Techniques of the Observerwas published in 2000 and translated into nine foreign languages. Proving to be Crary's most notable work, the book was the winner of the 2001 Lionel Trilling Book Award.

Through a study of the camera obscura as it appears in the work of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholars such as RenŽ Descartes, Etienne de Condillac and John Locke, Crary suggests that the camera obscura was a dominant metaphor for human vision. It was also a crucial and consistent representation of the relation of a perceiving subject to an external world. Crary demonstrates this shift by studying an extensive range of physiological and philosophical texts from the early nineteenth century. He particularly concentrates on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's use of the familiar camera obscura metaphor in his Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours ) of 1810. "Goethe's instruction to seal the hole ... announces a disordering and negation of the camera obscura as both an optical system and epistemological figure. The closing off of the opening dissolves the distinction between inner and outer space on which the very functioning of the camera (as apparatus and paradigm) depended...the optical experience described here by Goethe presents a notion of vision that the classical model was incapable of encompassing"(Techniques of the Observer, 68-69).

"The corporal subjectivity of the observer, which was a priori excluded from the camera obscura, suddenly becomes a site on which the observer is possible. The human body, in all its contingency and specificity, generated "the spectrum of another color", and thus becomes the active producer of optical experience"(Techniques, October 4).

The stereoscope was, according to Crary, 'the most significant form of visual imagery in the nineteenth century, with the exception of photographs'. In most accounts the stereoscope is regarded as yet another of those optical toys that directly prefigured and then came to be dominated by the invention of photography. Crary strongly disagrees with this view, arguing that 'its conceptual structure and the historical circumstances of its invention are thoroughly independent of photography'.

Other Works

Jonathan Crary has also written on present day “art and culture for publications including Art in America, Artforum, October, Assemblage, Cashiers du Cinema, Film Comment, Grey Room, Domus and Village Voice.” Crary is also a critic and wrote critical essays for more than thirty exhibition catalogs. Crary has contributed to the Film Theory and Criticism anthology. eds Braudy & Cohen 7th edition.

Crary created Zone Books in 1986, which is a press known for publications in “History, art theory, politics, anthropology and philosophy. In addition, literature by “Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, and others are included. Crary was co-editor of the 1992 volume Incorporations (Zone Books). Today Crary continues to be co-editor of Zone Books.

References Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT, 2000. Print.

Crary, Jonathan, and Sanford Kwinter. Incorporations. New York, NY: Zone, 1992. Print.

Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1990. Print.

Crary, Jonathan. "Origins of Modern Visual Culture | Department of Art History | Columbia University." Visual Media Center | Columbia University in the City of New York. Web. 13 Apr. 2011. .

Virilio, Paul, and Jonathan Crary. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2009. Print. (INTRODUCTION TO TEXT)

Barth, Uta, and Jonathan Crary. Uta Barth, The Long Now. New York: Miller, 2010. Print.

Cooke, Lynne, Karen J. Kelly, and Jonathan Crary. Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art. New York: DIA Art Foundation, 2004. Print.

Crary, Jonathan. IDubai. Göttingen: Steidl, 2010. Print.

Riley, Bridget, Anne Montfort, Nadia Chalbi, Hélène Studievic, and Jonathan Crary. Bridget Riley Rétrospective: Musée D'art Moderne De La Ville De Paris, 12 Juin-14 Septembre 2008. London: Ridinghouse, 2008. Print.

Lee, Ellen Wardwell., Jonathan Crary, and William M. Butler. Seurat at Gravelines the Last Landscapes. Indianapolis, IN: Indianapolis Museum of Art in Cooperation with Indiana UP, 1990. Print.

Turner, J. M. W., Mark Francis, and Jonathan Crary. J.M.W. Turner: the Sun Is God. Liverpool: Tate Gallery, 2000. Print.