Jonathan Crary is an American art critic and essayist and is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University. His first notable works were Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (1990), and Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (2000). He has published critical essays for more than 30 exhibition catalogues, mostly on contemporary art. His style is often classified[citation needed] as observational mixed with scientific, and a dominant theme in his work is the role of the human eye.
Crary attended high school at the Putney School in Vermont. He graduated from Columbia College, where he was an art history major. In 1987, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia as well. Crary also earned a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he studied film and photography.
He first taught in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. In 1989, he began teaching at Columbia. He received a 1991 Guggenheim Fellowship.[1]
Crary's 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep explores the nonstop pace of the modern world and its effects on human psychology and physiology, with an emphasis on sleep patterns.
His Suspensions of Perception focuses on the period from about 1880 to 1905, exploring the second half of the nineteenth century in which a new way of seeing was introduced. Crary describes this shift as an emergence of subjective vision. In addition, Crary discusses how attention became a “new object within the modernization of subjectivity...”.[2] Crary's book examines how the perceptions of various cultures were reconstructed and uncertainties were argued. This new development of vision created controversy because it implied that seeing was dependent upon one's subjective thoughts, which were based on what the observer saw. Therefore, this new way of seeing was thought of as unclear, unreliable, and always questioned among a large population of people. Suspensions of Perception published in 2000, was the winner of the 2001 Lionel Trilling Book Award.[3]
Crary's Techniques of the Observer gives a unique study on the origins of modern visual culture. Techniques of the Observer was published in 1990 and translated into twelve foreign languages.
Crary has also written on present day “art and culture for publications including Art in America, Artforum, October, Assemblage, Cahiers du Cinéma, Film Comment, Grey Room, Domus and Village Voice.”[4] Crary is also a critic and wrote critical essays for more than thirty exhibition catalogs. Crary has contributed to the Film Theory and Criticism anthology. eds Braudy & Cohen 7th edition.
Crary was one of the founders of Zone Books in 1986, which is a press known for publications in “History, art theory, politics, anthropology and philosophy".[5] In addition, literature by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, and others are included. Crary was co-editor of the 1992 volume Incorporations (Zone Books). Today Crary continues to be a co-editor of Zone Books.[6]