Review: Vision Anew: The Lens and Screen Arts, edited by Adam Bell and Charles H. Traub

Abstract

Vision Anew: The Lens and Screen Arts Edited by Adam Bell and Charles H. Traub University of California Press, 2015 292 pp./$34.95 (sb) Vision Anew: The Lens and Screen Arts was published before the November 8, 2016, United States electoral victory of Donald Trump, itself a media event, but after a profusion of other phenomena--including post-internet art (1); the exponential growth of Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Google+ (advent of both ever-cheaper digital photo technologies and augmented reality); the increased availability of 3-D printing; the revelation of unprecedented spying and surveillance technologies by the National Security Agency; the widespread use of drones for warfare, information, and entertainment; and major advances in robotics and Artificial Intelligence that also impact media and media platforms. This host of august changes has often paradoxically stimulated a return to the art object, (2) witnessed in Vision Anew by some authors' probing of traditional values of photography (for instance, Gerry Badger's 2012 essay Keep it Simple Stupid, Just Make a Good Picture: The Basics of Photography). It has led others, such as Lev Manovich, to redefine the terms of the game, as when he writes: is no such thing as 'digital media.' There is only software--as applied to media data (or 'content') (206). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The most obvious prompt for the essays in the book--which range from the historical (such as the opening mini-manifesto from 1961, Photography Is, by Arthur Siegel) to teasing out or proffering new generalizations, if not usually theoretizations, on this rapidly changing visual culture--is the omnipresence of digitally based images, and the nearly equal ubiquity of their use by all sorts of artistic practitioners, professional and nonprofessional alike. The overwhelming acceleration and accompanying logic of barrage (3) highlighted through digital culture, at least in countries like the US, intimate issues far beyond this--that the environment has shifted onto a different register technologically, formally, politically, logistically, ontologically, and demographically, in which once sufficient responses, especially in any realm of aesthetics, will no longer do. Art historian David Joselit had already pointed out years before the Trump debacle in his Feedback Manifesto (2010), As art marches in circles, politicians manipulate images more effectively than the legions of MFA graduates from prestigous schools like Art Center, Cal Arts, Columbia, and Yale (262). Commending the value of Susan Sontag's 1964 essay Against Interpretation (4) to avoid interpretation but rather settle on action or the contagion of gesture, Joselit recommended, among other things, Don't produce art or art history by making a 'new' move in the game of aesthetics you learned in school. Assess the image ecology you live in and respond to it. Learn the system and counter it--make noise. Practice eco-formalism (262). Yet Vision Anew is decidedly unprogrammatic, aided in this by the broad range and roles of its forty-plus contributors, whether primarily artists, educators, critics, journalists, or historians--and their points of view, which include the presentation of configurations from the past (Rebeca Solnit on Eadweard Muybridge, excerpts from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's 1947 Vision in Motion, a 1968 Hollis Frampton lecture), and ones more current (Aaron Schuman's 2012 interview with Trevor Paglen on Machine-Seeing in his work). The reconsideration of medium provides some of the richest content in Vision Anew, whether this is treatment of the resurgence (23) of abstraction in photography (by co-editor Adam Bell), or reevaluation of the position of the photo book (Bell with Ofer Wohlberger and Jason Fulford) or of the changes wrought by HD (the co-editors Bell and Charles H. Traub with Bob Giraldi, Ethan David Kent, and Christopher Walters). …