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).
