Visual Subconscious

Author: Wang Fengzhen
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-01-01
Features: With the development of the post-industrial society, or in the postmodern period, computers and cyberspace have fundamentally transformed culture. Human subjects are bombarded with thousands of images daily, beginning to experience an entirely different relationship with space and time, as well as with existence and cultural consumption. In this new phase, 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—shopping, occupational activities, various leisure pursuits frequently featured on television, market production, and the consumption of market products, and so on, actually 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 intermittently fragmented in perpetual contradiction, even becoming subconscious. The Visual Unconscious collects articles that reflect this transformation through the inherent logic embodied by images.
Pop culture is a significant aspect of cultural studies today. It is well-known that in contemporary society, due to the rapid development of media, pop culture increasingly permeates all aspects of life. The study of pop culture is driven by a tension: on one hand, there is a desire to reclaim or reinforce pop culture as an expression of the people, or to give a voice to the cultural expressions of marginalized groups; on the other hand, pop culture is viewed as something imposed by ideology, as a constituent of oppressive ideology. On one hand, the key to studying pop culture lies in connecting it to the important aspects of ordinary people's lives, in opposition 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 pop 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 selected articles in Pop Culture Studies are based on this consideration, including country music, basketball games, the Madonna phenomenon, and cultural analyses of sex trafficking.
This book compiles articles on curators, avant-garde art, Third World art, ethnic minorities, and contemporary art institutions, 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.