From Publishers Weekly
From Baudelaire's confrontation with the specter of art photography to the present age of mirror shades, Pentium-envy and ambient dance tracks, Rutsky provides a fairly comprehensive, though sometimes fluidly categorized, overview of the development of the modern "aesthetic of technology." For Rutsky, technology, once clearly defined as "other" than what is human, has perhaps replaced religion and psychology as the main source of metaphors for how the mind (and soul) work. Citing a range of modern philosophers and thinkers from Heidegger, Benjamin and Duchamp to the inevitable William Gibson and the doyenne of cyber-aesthetics, Donna Haraway, the book covers a lot of ground--Shelley's Frankenstein, the constructivist films of Vertov, a reading of William Gibson via Frederic Jameson, a long section on Fritz Lang's film Metropolis and a detour into a theory of Nazism and Hitler fascination as the fervid fetishizing of an androgynous leader. Rutsky falters a bit when it comes to contemporary art and cultural practices, where some fieldwork and reportage would have given his examples more punch. Like George Landow's paean to cyberculture, Hypertext, the book is best on how thinking about technology helps resolve certain philosophical conundrums--organic vs. mechanic; rational vs. irrational; masculine vs. feminine--that have plagued the West, perhaps even providing the ground for a total unified field theory. Lucid and cogent in its presentation of highly complicated issues, this study will reward those interested in the fatal attraction of art and culture. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
