Spectacular Optical

by Kathy Acker, Judith Butler (contributor), Amresh Sinha (contributor)

SPECTACULAR OPTICAL is a book published by TRANS> arts.cultures.media to accompany the exhibition bt the same name held at Thread Waxing Space. The book takes as a point of departure the cultural fascination with violence, atrocity, mutation and the ways that they are depicted (some would say gentrified) as entertainment. The essays examine the ways in which opticality has become so spectacular, how this bedazzlement with entertainment is engineered in the larger sphere of cultural production. From feminism to fetishism, from simulation to stimulation, the book takes as an example David Cronenberg's work which deals with corporeality, aggravated biology, technology, spectacle, media, and violence.

79 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1998

About the author

Born of German-Jewish stock, Kathy Acker was brought up by her mother and stepfather (her natural father left her mother before Kathy was born) in a prosperous district of NY. At 18, she left home and worked as a stripper. Her involvement in the sex industry helped to make her a hit on the NY art scene, and she was photographed by the newly fashionable Robert Mapplethorpe. Preferring to be known simply as 'Acker' (the name she took from her first husband Robert, and which she continued to use even after a short-lived second marriage to composer Peter Gordon), she moved to London in the mid-eighties and stayed in Britain for five years.

Acker's writing is as difficult to classify into any particular genre as she herself was. She writes fluidly, operating in the borderlands and junkyards of human experience. Her work is experimental, playful, and provocative, engagingly alienating, narratively non sequitur.

Reviews

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book reminds me of Chris Kraus “in a good way”.

[nocturne89 · Rating 5 out of 5]

�jeez!