On Not Looking: The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture (Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies)

On Not Looking: The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture focuses on the image, and our relationship to it, as a site of "not looking." The collection demonstrates that even though we live in an image-saturated culture, many images do not look at what they claim, viewers often do not look at the images, and in other cases, we are encouraged by the context of exhibition not to look at images. Contributors discuss an array of images--photographs, films, videos, press images, digital images, paintings, sculptures, and drawings--from everyday life, museums and galleries, and institutional contexts such as the press and political arena. The themes discussed include: politics of institutional exhibition and perception of images; censored, repressed, and banned images; transformations to practices of not looking as a result of new media interventions; images in history and memory; not looking at images of bodies and cultures on the margins; responses to images of trauma; and embodied vision Cover Title Copyright Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction PART I Images that Don’t Look 1 Not Looking into the Abyss: The Potentiality to See 2 The Rest Is Noise: On Lossless 3 The Men in the Bathroom: Reflections on William E. Jones’s Tearoom PART II The Privilege of the Other Senses 4 Peripatetic Sculpture: The Exhaustion of Looking in the Presence of Richard Serra’s Promenade 5 Burrowing under the Apparent: The Blindfold Drawings of Claude Heath PART III Not Looking at Bodies and Cultures on the Margins 6 ©AMOUFLAGE 7 The Horizon to Come: Planetary Aesthetics in William Kentridge’s Felix in Exile and Galileo Galilei’s Moon Drawings 8 Between Looking and Not Looking: Race, Spectacular Scenes, and Counter-Spectacular Effects in Paul Pfeiffer’s Long Count Series PART IV Institutions Overpower Images 9 Looking at the West Looking Away: Khmer Rouge, Western Blindness, and Documentary Images 10 The “Coffin,” the Camera, and the Commodity: Visualizing American Military Dead at Dover 11 Lessons from the Life of an Image: Malcolm Browne’s Photograph of Thich Quang Duc’s Self-Immolation Contributors Index Pt. 1. Images that don't look -- pt. 2. The privilege of the other senses -- pt. 3. Not looking at bodies and cultures on the margins -- pt. 4. Institutions overpower images