ABSTRACT
The role of vision as access to a reality denied by modernity has been a central concern for art and politics in the twentieth century. Modernity and its industrial processes of production have transformed the conditions of both work and the look, expanding enormously the scope and scale of productivity through labour as well as the imaging of the world through photography, cinematography and video. Yet each is also subject to a continuing and intense ambivalence. A conflict or opposition has been perceived between the new freedoms offered by these developments in modes of production and in the mechanical and electronic forms of imaging and the dehumanization produced by modernity's regulation and exploitation of the worker and the gaze through mass industrial processes. 'Modernism' names the movement in the arts and literature which has challenged tradition in culture and society, not only demanding that we see anew but also devising new ways of seeing whereby such seeing anew would also be a truer 'seeing'. At the same time, modernism has opposed the alienation of modernity, attacking 'the loss of reality, which makes experience ever emptier and reality itself ever more impenetrable'.1
