Rembrandts 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.
#4136909 in eBooks 2010-04-02 2013-08-08File Name: B00551KQ6M
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