David L. Martin presents a fascinating and complicated history of attempted erasures and concealed embraces. Spanning the early modern through the postmodern periods, Martin focuses on collections, images, and taxonomies as he traces the persistent—and highly ambivalent—presence of heterogeneity within systems of scientific knowledge, and their corresponding impact on the formations of discourses and subjects. In so doing, he examines where and how beliefs become stored in key cultural and discursive locations that potentially show us where modernity still keeps its magic.
Marcia Brennan, Department of Art History, Rice University; author of Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum
David Martin is the ultimate collector, and his Curious Visions of Modernity functions like a 21st-century Wunderkammer. The exhibits include Charlemagne's reliquary, Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp, Andrea Pozzo's trompe-l'œil ceilings, rare mappaemundi, and even a Christian labyrinth housed in Chartres Cathedral. This book—erudite and beautifully written—is an Arcades Project for our postmodern times.
Ruben Gallo, author of Freud's Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis and Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution
David Martin is a consummate scholar who has uncovered a treasure trove of captivating hidden associations that weave a compellingly eloquent and critical account of his topic. This is a very pleasurable read that makes us consider more deeply our understandings of the very structures that underpin Western modernity.
Natalija Subotincic, artist and Professor of Architecture, University of Manitoba
In his archaeology of the visual, Martin brings back to life the wonderment and enchantment that characterized those earlier forms of knowledge and representation that modern, 'rational' knowledge defined itself against, and sought to extirpate. This repression, he shows, never fully succeeded. Along the way the reader encounters curiosity cabinets, practices of vivisection, iconography and cartography, in a book that is learned, quirky, imaginative, original—and immensely readable.
Sanjay Seth, author of Subject Lessons
In discovering traces of…magic beneath our systems of knowledge, Martin does more than provide an alternative history of rational progress, but points to moments of curiosity remaining among us. Martin's joy in this modern magic… is winning. It's as if he'd seen a statue move.
Evan McMurry
Bookslut
