Editor's Statement: The Political Unconscious in Nineteenth-Century Art

Abstract

The session on the Political Unconscious in Nineteenth-Century Art at the 1986 Annual Meeting of the College Art Association, which served as the basis of this issue of Art Journal, owed its genesis to two rather different sources. First, the notion of an unconscious as opposed to a conscious inscription of the political in the work of art or in artistic institutions or within the processes of art making seemed to me to provide a necessary antithesis to those consciously formulated political programs or commissions which had been considered in the volume Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, edited by Henry Millon and myself in 1978 (Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T Press). Second, I had been inspired by a reading of Fredric Jameson's magisterial text, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1981).