Visual subconscious

Author: Wang Fengzhen
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2002-01-01
Features: With the development of post-industrial society, or in the postmodern period, computers and cyberspace have fundamentally transformed culture. Humanity's subjectivity is bombarded with thousands of images daily, beginning to experience an entirely different relationship with space and time, with existence, and with cultural consumption. At this new stage, the domain of culture itself has expanded and has started to intersect with market society. Culture is no longer confined to traditional or experimental forms but is consumed entirely through everyday life, including shopping, occupational activities, various leisure activities frequently featured on television, market production, and the consumption of market products, and so on—essentially encompassing the hidden corners of everyday life. Under these conditions, aesthetic attention shifts to observation and perception itself, abandoning the previously organized objects and returning to subjectivity, as if it would provide a spontaneous and broad experience of sensation, including the emotions and excitement triggered by sensory data. However, this is not a proactive way to restore the body in any sense but rather transforms it into a passive and mutable "recorded" realm, where the perceivable parts of the world are discontinuously fragmented in eternal contradiction, even becoming subconscious. The Visual Unconscious collects articles that reflect this transformation through the inherent logic embodied by images.
Popular culture is a significant aspect of cultural studies today. It is well-known that in contemporary society, due to the rapid development of media, popular culture increasingly permeates all aspects of life. The study of popular culture is driven by a tension: on one hand, there is a desire to reclaim or reinforce popular culture as an expression of the people or to give voice to the culture of marginalized groups; on the other hand, popular culture is viewed as something imposed by ideology, as a constituent of oppressive ideology. On one hand, the key to studying popular culture lies in connecting it to important aspects of ordinary people's lives, in contrast to what elites call "culture." On the other hand, there is a strong drive to explain how the masses are influenced and controlled by cultural forces. The study of popular culture aims to explore to what extent people are dominated by cultural forms, to what extent or in what ways they can utilize cultural forms, to what extent they can become subjects responsible for their actions, and to what extent their life choices are constrained by uncontrollable cultural forces. The articles selected in Popular Culture Studies are based on this consideration, including country music, basketball games, the Madonna phenomenon, and cultural analyses of sex trafficking.
This book collects articles on curators, avant-garde art, Third World art, ethnic minorities, and the contemporary art system, attempting to reveal certain profound theoretical issues in the field of visual arts from a single perspective. At the same time, as a "case study" in cultural research, it also serves as a record of how people perceive the sensory world, offering a spontaneous and broad experience of the perceptible world.