Searchlight: Consciousness at the Millennium

This book is an unprecedented exploration of the nature of consciousness and its embodiment in many forms of contemporary art including painting, sculpture, installation, video, film, and computer media. At what is possibly the most portentous moment in recent history--the turn of the millennium--Searchlight reveals the threads of a new aesthetic, reaching from the early nineteenth century through its extraordinary fulfillment in the art of the present. Consciousness is the bedrock of all experience, the foundation of all perception and interaction, the source of meaning. As such, it may be said to have been the primary subject of art for the past 125 years, ever since the Modernist revolution of the nineteenth century shifted artists' goals from the direct representation of the seen world to the expression of felt experience. As art increasingly focused on the perceiver rather than the perceived, the consciousness of the artist and the viewer moved to the foreground of the artistic event. The book features essays by writers in the fields of art history, philosophy, cognitive science, theology, and linguistics. Over one hundred illustrations show some of the most extraordinary works of art made over the past twenty years by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt, Bill Viola, Yoko Ono, Stan Douglas, Gillian Wearing, Adrian Piper, and Gary Hill. The volume also includes classic reflections on consciousness by such renowned scholars as William James, Thomas Nagel, the Dalai Lama, Francisco J. Varela, John R. Scarle, and Nobel Laureate Francis Crick. Searchlight complements an ambitious, groundbreaking exhibition of the same title organized by the CCAC Institute of the California College of Arts and Crafts. It includes a comprehensive essay by Lawrence Rinder, director of the CCAC Institute, and George Lakoff, professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and texts by Mark Bartlett, Franck Andre Jamme, Steve Kolpan, Alva Noe, D. J. Pughe, and Yvonne Rand.