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This book focuses on the work of several artists, mostly photographers and mostly born in the 1970s. Their age matters because they have lived their entire lives in a world in which aesthetic ambition has been mainly identified with a certain critique of form and meaning (call it postmodernism) and in which the struggle between capital and labor has been mainly won by capital (call it neoliberalism). This book argues that these aesthetic and political conditions are connected, that, for example, the ongoing hostility to the idea of the autonomy of the work of art is related to the ongoing inability to understand what it means for the productivity of labor to rise while its share of income falls. More precisely, the book is about the way in which the critique of form makes the very difference between labor and capital-–the difference of class-–invisible, and about the ways in which the new formal ambitions of the works analyzed here invoke as well a new set of political ambitions. What these artists give us is not quite a class politics but, more important for art, a class aesthetic.

This book examines the significance of traumatic experiences both in the individual lives and works of artists and in contemporary international cultures since World War II. The book considers some of the most notorious art of the second half of the twentieth century by artists who use their bodies to address destruction and violence. The chapters in this book focus primarily on performance art and photography. From war and environmental pollution to racism and sexual assault, the book analyzes the consequences of trauma as seen in the works of artists like Marina Abramovic, Pope.L, and Chris Burden. Assembling rich intellectual explorations on everything from Paleolithic paintings to the Bible's patriarchal legacies to documentary images of nuclear explosions, the book explores how art can provide a distinctive means of understanding trauma and promote individual and collective healing.

This book traces the history of “kinaesthetic knowing,” a form of knowledge associated with the movements of the body, in Imperial Germany. The figures that play central roles in the book invented new pedagogical techniques with the conviction that there existed a non-discursive, non-conceptual way of knowing that could nonetheless compete in its rigour with reasoning realized through language, concepts, or logic. In doing so, they drew on the findings of the new discipline of experimental psychology. The book is structured around four techniques: a practice of comparative looking in which the eye was assumed to draw its own conclusions independently of the mind; a method of beholding that prioritized automatic and affective response rather than intellectual contemplation; a manner of drawing that abandoned the principles of imitation and composition and gave free rein to the movements of the body; and, finally, the practice of designing, a constellation of artistic techniques whose goal was to manipulate form, line, colour, and space rather than follow academic rules regarding orders, proportions, and composition. Some went so far as to argue that this alternative epistemological principle could become the basis of the human sciences at large. The faith in the epistemological value of kinaesthesia was short-lived but proved crucial: it was upon the foundation of this other way of knowing that many concepts and practices central to twentieth-century modernism were established. Primary amongst them was the formalist thrust of modern design education.

The Pensive Image introduces a new artistic category of “pensive images” that asks viewers to philosophize instead of calling for interpretation. While before the 19th century, art and philosophy were seen as sister arts, with the birth of art history as a discipline, the philosophical dimension of art has since been largely ignored. This book argues that art is a form of thinking, and that images trigger thought rather than offering a meaning or narrative. Coupling early modern works to modern and contemporary art, the book gives in five chapters an in-depth, transhistorical account of how art has assisted in shaping philosophical concepts: how interior painting mirrors interiority; how landscapes provide mental trajectories, and how mirroring in painting leads to self-reflection. Its ultimate aim is to call for a philosophical art history on the basis that all art, in Wunderkammern or elsewhere, evoke wonder, which is the origin of all thinking.