Essays on media systems and contemporary art by a leading theorist of
modern visual culture
Tricks of the Light brings together essays by critic and art historian
Jonathan Crary, internationally known for his groundbreaking and widely
admired studies of modern Western visual culture. This collection
features a compelling selection of Crary's responses to modern and
contemporary art and to the transformations of twentieth-century media
systems and urban/technological environments. These wide-ranging and
provocative texts explore the work of painters, performance artists,
writers, architects, and photographers, including Allan Kaprow, Eleanor
Antin, Ed Ruscha, John Berger, Bridget Riley, J.G. Ballard, Rem
Koolhaas, Gretchen Bender, Dennis Oppenheim, Paul Virilio, Robert Irwin,
and Uta Barth. There are also reflections on filmmakers Fritz Lang,
Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc-Godard, David Cronenberg, and others. The book
is enhanced by several expansive essays on the unstable status of
television, both amid its beginnings in the 1930s and then during its
assimilation into new assemblages and networks in the 1980s and 90s.
These assess its many-sided role in the reshaping of subjectivity,
temporality, and the operation of power. Like all of Crary's work, his
writing here is grounded in the acuteness of his engagement with
perceptual artifacts of many kinds and in his nuanced reading of
historical processes and their cultural reverberations.
