Leading contemporary artists, including Bridget Riley, Jeff Koons, Mona Hatoum, Andreas Gursky, and Yoko Ono, explore the ecstatic and the threatening aspects of contemporary visual experience.
New technology enables super vision—both superhuman visual powers and actual supervision by surveillance. In Super Vision, which accompanies the inaugural exhibit at the new Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, a broad selection of important works in a variety of media expresses both the ecstatic and the threatening aspects of vision and reveals visual experience as a source of both pleasure and fear. These works reflect the digital era's profound shift in the nature of visuality itself—as computer graphics and imaging, digitization, and virtuality have transformed both the nature of representation and our relationship to it. Among the leading contemporary artists exploring the changing nature of contemporary visual experience in Super Vision are Bridget Riley, Anish Kapoor, and Gabriel Orozco, with works that bend, twist, and dissolve space, leaving us unsure of the boundaries between inside and outside, surface and depth, self and others. Other works by artists including Jeff Koons, Julie Mehretu, and Andreas Gursky, express aspects of virtuality—some explicitly, some more subtly—and explore the changes in the way we see and understand two-dimensional images. Vision in the twenty-first century is potentially everywhere, all the time; there is no way to escape it. Works by Sigmar Polke, Yoko Ono, Tony Oursler, Thomas Ruff, and others respond in complex ways to this disembodied and penetrating quality of vision. The many full-color images in Super Vision are accompanied by essays by exhibition curator Nicholas Baume, art historian David Joselit, and media theorist McKenzie Wark. Copublished with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
Nicholas Baume is Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the curator of the ICA's Anish Kapoor exhibition. He is the editor of Super Vision (MIT Press, 2006).
Nicholas Baume is Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the curator of the ICA's Anish Kapoor exhibition. He is the editor of Super Vision (MIT Press, 2006).
McKenzie Wark (they/them), awarded the 2019 Thoma Prize for writing in digital art, is the author of A Hacker ManifestoGamer Theory, and The Beach Beneath the Street. Wark's correspondence with Kathy Acker was published by Semiotext(e) as I'm Very Into You.
David Joselit is Distinguished Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center at CUNY. He is the author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910–1941, Feedback: Television against Democracy (both published by the MIT Press), American Art Since 1945, and After Art.
