Visual Culture

Introduction

About This Book

Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn explores the history, theoretical frameworks, methodology, and pedagogy of visual culture in the United States. Visual culture, also known as visual studies, is a new field for the study of the cultural construction of the visual in arts, media, and everyday life.1 It is a research area and a curricular initiative that regards the visual image as the focal point in the processes through which meaning is made in a cultural context. An interdisciplinary field, visual studies came together in the late 1980s after the disciplines of art history, anthropology, film studies, linguistics, and comparative literature encountered poststructuralist theory and cultural studies. Deconstructionist criticism showed that the academic humanities were as much artifacts of language as they were outcomes of the pursuit of truth. The inclusive concept of culture as “a whole way of life” (Raymond Williams) became the object of inquiry of cultural studies, which encompassed the “high” arts and literature without giving them any privileged status. As a result of the cultural turn, the status of culture has been revised in the humanities: It is currently seen as a cause of—rather than merely a reflection of or response to—social, political, and economic processes. The importance of the concept of cultural context in the

humanities has added further momentum to the rise of visual studies. Perception has come to be understood as a product of experience and acculturation, and representations are now studied as one among the other signifying systems that make up culture. Although the new field of visual studies has enjoyed a proliferation in the Anglo-American academy over the past decade, there is no consensus among its adepts with regard to its scope and objectives, definitions, and methods. Recent introductions to and readers of visual culture have spelled out a variety of conceptual perspectives (Bryson, Holly, and Moxey 1994; Jenks 1995; Burgin 1996; Walker and Chaplin 1997; Barnard 1998; Mirzoeff 1998a, 1999, 2002; Evans and Hall 1999; Heywood and Sandywell 1999; Sturken and Cartwright, 2001). Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn endeavors to answer the fundamental question of how to conciliate diverse theoretical positions in order to develop a common ground for working in the field of the visual. This book focuses on both the theoretical underpinnings of visual studies and the institutional implications of establishing a new area of inquiry. In the summer of 1999, Michael Ann Holly and Douglas Crimp suggested to me the possibility of conducting a study of visual culture, a study that might be described by the Foucaultian term “archaeology.” As a result, I began an examination of the fracturing of the discipline of art history and the subsequent emergence of visual studies—a new intellectual formation that has distinct purposes and methodology. My project provides a new perspective on the interdisciplinary nature of visual studies through its interrogation of how art history and cultural studies intersect as they are practiced and taught in academic communities in the United States.2 Lately, visual culture has become the center of various concerns. At the May 2001 Clark Conference, “Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies,” the question was posed as to whether this new field had reached a state of inconsistency by subsuming everything related to the cultural and the visual. Matthew Rampley, participant in the fourth international Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference, is of the opinion that visual culture has no object of study since it commenced with a disapproval of the “traditional histories of art, film, photography . . . [and] their positivist attachment to their object as a discrete given” (2002, p. 3). I envision my task to be to show how visual studies avoids these two ontological perils and negoti-

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ates between the Scylla—the lack of a specific object of study—and the Charybdis—the expansion of the field to the point of incoherence. This study takes on a comparative perspective from which it asks the following questions: What is visual studies and what is its object? What is the relevance of visual culture for art historians? What attitudes do art historians adopt toward visual studies today? What is the relationship between the study of the history of art and the study of the visual and the cultural? Does visual culture require interpretative methodologies that are distinctive from those employed by art history and cultural studies? In order to understand the interplay between art history, cultural studies, and visual studies, it is crucial to examine a range of theoretical standpoints. In 2001, I approached and interviewed the academics who had responded to the “Visual Culture Questionnaire” (October 77, 1996) and faculty members from a number of American universities.3 Historically, the use of conversation—the basis of an interview—as a systematic tool for the creation of knowledge can be traced to Thucydides and Socrates. Today’s social research emphasizes local context and the linguistic construction of a perspectival reality where knowledge is validated through practice. In this framework, the interview is considered a construction site of knowledge (Rubin and Rubin 1995; Kvale 1996). Approaching research questions from different angles and bringing together a range of views has the potential to generate explanations that capture the complexity of theories and debates better than other research procedures. The depth, detail, and richness one seeks in interviews is what anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) called “thick description” in his path-breaking arguments on anthropological method. My aim in the interviews was both to solicit a reflection on issues whose coverage in the existing literature seemed either insufficient or vague and to reveal how the interviewees’ thoughts were related to other statements in the field. I also strove to explore with “the subjects of visual culture” their experiences in the changing academic environment. Three clusters of scholars are represented: The first sees visual studies as an appropriate expansion of art history; the second group views the new focus as independent of art history and more appropriately studied with technologies of vision related to the digital and virtual era; and, finally, the third cluster considers visual studies a field that threatens and self-consciously challenges the traditional discipline of art history.

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Visual Culture is based on the findings of this study comprising interviews, oral histories, and written responses to questionnaires. I have read, analyzed, and interpreted these materials and have categorized them according to content. The interviewees are quoted at considerable length throughout the text.4 Hans Belting noted that our entire culture has adopted the strategy of statement by quotation (1987 [1983], p. 51). The purpose behind the use of quotations in this text, however, has not been to disguise my position by recalling “another who has spoken with more authority,” but rather to avoid missing points that the interview questions were designed to capture in order to produce an analysis that adheres closely to the subjects’ original presentation of their concepts. The quotations are grouped to create a “polylogue,” in which thoughts are communicated, positions are counterpoised, and meanings are created. I convened this virtual panel hoping not only to make explicit the implicit differences in the views on and approaches to visual studies of its advocates, but also to illustrate how their ideas and arguments may complement each other—in other words, to find points of convergence and productive disagreement. Thus, rather than showing a consensus, such a design allows for a revelation of the subtle aspects of the complex debate and fashions a space where the exchange of opinions on the field’s agenda(s) unfolds. This endeavor was indirectly inspired by the imagined debate between philosopher Martin Heidegger and art historian Meyer Schapiro narrated by Jacques Derrida in “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing” (1978), and by David Carrier’s pairing of art history texts written at different times but dealing with the same art objects or problems in Principles of Art History Writing (1991). Unlike these studies, however, the material for this book was gathered through interviews with conversational partners who are my contemporaries and who are and were aware of my goals. They also knew about the other protagonists, so that they could foresee, address, and actively engage with any likely criticism. Dialogical in its nature, the interviewing process took place over a short period of time to ensure a synchronism of responses.5 This book is a pioneering attempt to present a historiographic account of visual studies entwined with a current polemic of its possible directions. An academic field is defined by three criteria: the object of study, the basic assumptions that underpin the methods of approach to the object, and the history of the discipline itself. Since there are two dimensions

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to this study—disciplinary and institutional—it is arranged in two chapters. Chapter 1 offers a historical overview, discusses the object(s) of visual studies, its assumptions and methods, and evaluates the status of the new field as seen by both faculty and students in American universities. Through its diverse reflections, it brings together the spheres of theory— the methodology of research area—and practice—the experiences of working in the field of the visual. Another innovation in this book is that it answers the need for a discussion of pedagogic practices that has frequently been overlooked in contemporary literature on visual and cultural studies (Striphas 1998). Questions have been raised by the launching of new college and university programs in visual culture and visual studies: Does the appearance of such programs indicate a move from art to visual and from history to culture? Is it a trend that reflects what is going on outside of the ivory tower, or is it internally motivated by the desire to rejuvenate the specialty by linking academic studies with practice? What can one learn from the experience of these programs? While these questions are still being answered through practice, a close examination of the four existing courses and programs in the institutions where they were first designed and implemented in the United States may reveal the complexity of these issues. Chapter 2 exposes and specifies the implications of related theoretical challenges to current developments in higher educational policy and practice through a discussion of the undergraduate courses and graduate programs at the University of Rochester, New York; the University of Chicago; the University of California at Irvine (UCI); and the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook. An analysis of the goals, organization, and curricula of two graduate programs in visual studies, enhanced by an examination and comparison of the objectives and contents of two undergraduate courses, illuminates essential characteristics of visual studies pedagogy that would otherwise remain obscure. This book associates differences in the pedagogy of these programs with the differences in the theoretical positions professed by their founders and instructors, as well as with the institutional nature of these settings. My study makes public a variety of theoretical standpoints and corresponding curricula initiatives, and embarks on a search for criteria by which an interdisciplinary visual culture program might be designed in the twenty-first century.

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The Study of Visual Culture: A Bibliographic Essay

The term “visual culture” first appeared on the covers of books whose topics were neither Western art nor—in the spirit of their time—art with a capital “A”: Towards a Visual Culture: Educating through Television (1969), by Caleb Gattegno; Comics and Visual Culture: Research Studies from Ten Countries (1986), edited by Alphons Silbermann and H.-D. Dyroff;and The Way It Happened: A Visual Culture History of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa (1991), by James McClurken. Before he acquired a black-andwhite television set in 1966, Gattegno had studied the imagery of children’s drawings and worked on films for teachers’ education. Marveling at the efficacy of knowing through sight, in his book he distinguished between “the clumsiness of speech” as a means of expression and “the powers of vision.” “With sight,” Gattegno states, “infinities are given at once; wealth is its description. In contrast to the speed of light, we need time to talk and express what we want to say. The inertia of photons is nil compared to the inertia of our muscles and chains of bones” (1969, p. 4). This position reflects a utopian spirit: Gattegno posits that television would make the greatest contribution in the area of education by “casting away our preconceptions, our prejudices made explicit by the shock of the encounter of a true image and presumably true belief.” As such, it is obviously vulnerable to criticism from all quarters of contemporary scholarship (we need time to see what we gaze upon, and this meaning-making process is unthinkable without language, after all). But Gattegno’s text was among the first that emphasized the formation of subjectivity: “To talk of the medium of television is a way to talk of man the perceiver, the responder, the expander, and the processor of messages” (1969, p. 15). Silbermann and Dyroff, preoccupied with a comparative analysis of how comics were functioning in the United States, the U.S.S.R., the U.K., Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, France, Kenya, and India in both the pretelevision and television eras, advanced the thesis that their contemporaries, both adults and children, learned “more relevant things about culture via comics and comic films than by pure seeing with their eyes” (1986, p. 22). James McClurken’s The Way It Happened used a wealth of visual material—historical photographs, drawings, and paintings—preserved by both individual families and institutions to restore to the written record

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Caleb Gattegno, Towards a Visual Culture: Educating through Television. New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, 1969.

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James M. McClurken, The Way It Happened: A Visual Culture History of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa. East Lansing: Michigan State University Museum, 1991.

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the history of the Odawa people. This book shifted the positions of the historical object and the historical agent in its expository discourse. It did not so much tell a story of what happened to Native Americans as narrate, in the First Nations’ voice, the actions taken by them in response to the many social and political challenges they have faced since the arrival of the Europeans in North America. The concept of visual culture’s significance in transforming the discipline of art history originated in art historian Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (1972), which introduced the notion of a “period eye” and related the production of art to social history. According to this text, the beholder brings to the painting a mass of information and assumptions drawn from general experience. Viewers’ interpreting skills vary from one generation to the next. Moreover, the work of art is sensitive to the kinds of interpretative skills—patterns, categories, inferences, analogies—the mind brings to it: Some of the mental equipment a man orders his visual experience with is variable, and much of this variable equipment is culturally relative, in the sense of being determined by the society which has influenced his experience. Among these variables are categories with which he classifies his visual stimuli, the knowledge he will use to supplement what his immediate vision gives him, and the attitude he will adopt to the kind of artificial object seen. The beholder . . . is likely to use those skills his society esteems highly. The painter responds to this; his public’s visual capacity must be his medium. (Baxandall 1972, p. 40) The concept of “period eye” formulated by Baxandall identifies habits of vision and modes of cognitive perception as they are related to pictorial styles. As Norman Bryson noted in Art in Context (1992), such a concept stands for the unity of culture rather than revealing the difference in receptions of different groups—gender, social, religious—of historical viewers, and, therefore, it has its own difficulties. Bryson claims that members of various groups possess different codes for viewing the same work, and the very access to the codes is uneven among them. Analysis of reception should therefore account for these varying degrees of access in order to avoid presenting the ideal case.6

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Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.

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Svetlana Alpers—also an art historian by training—first used the term “visual culture” in The Art of Describing (1983) while focusing on notions of vision, image-making devices, and visual skills as cultural resources related to the history of Dutch painting. The study dealt with a culture in which images, as opposed to texts, emerge as central to the representation of the world. Alpers has acknowledged that her use of the term was different from Baxandall’s because of the nature of the cases they were studying—she “was not only attending to those visual skills particular to Dutch culture, but claiming that in that place and at that time these skills were definitive” (1996, p. 26). On Alpers’s the difference between image and text was basic, and visual culture, as distinguished from a textual one, was a discriminating notion rather than an encompassing one. More recently, two summer institutes on theory and interpretation in the visual arts, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and held at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1987 and at the University of Rochester in 1989, aimed to locate art history within the context of theoretical debates taking place in other fields. To this end, they examined new interpretative strategies developed by semiotics, linguistics, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer studies, and cultural theory. The participants came from a variety of educational enterprises across the United States. These institutes resulted in the publication of two books edited by Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey: Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (1991) and Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (1994). These anthologies gather texts written by the lecturers and brought “theory” on board. In the introduction to Visual Culture, the editors suggest that since the collected essays strive for “a broader understanding of their [artworks’] cultural significance for the historical circumstances in which they were produced, as well as their potential meaning within the context of our own historical situation,” they could be understood as contributions to a history of images rather than a history of art (Bryson, Holly, and Moxey 1994, p. xvi). Holly and Moxey are especially interested in importing poststructuralist theory widely employed in other humanities into the emerging field of visual studies. They see deconstruction not as an end in itself, but rather as a flexible mode leading to a reorientation, as opposed to the destruction, of art historical perspectives. Holly asserts that visual culture should study not objects, but “subjects caught in the congeries of cultural

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Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (eds.), Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation. Cambridge: Polity in association with Blackwell, 1991.

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Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (eds.), Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

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meanings” (1996b, p. 40). She argues that whereas art history writing recognizes only linear time and aims at revealing the hidden “truth,” there is an awareness in the new field that all historical narratives are invested with the values of the present. Self-reflexive visual studies preoccupies itself with the way in which the objects under scrutiny reveal the ethical and political commitments of those who study them (Moxey 1994b, 1999b). Visual studies makes it clear that interpretation should be distinguished from the search for the meanings “concealed” within images; instead, this new field breaks down established systems of interpretation in order to find new meanings in the work of art. Moxey charts two possibilities for the new research area: it could become the study of all images “without making qualitative distinctions” between them, or, preferably, it might concern itself with “all images for which distinguished cultural value has been or is being proposed” (1996, p. 57). The use of the past perfect tense along with the present tense in the last statement is not accidental: It spells out Moxey’s idea that aesthetic criteria do not exist outside a specific historical context, and what was worth studying yesterday might not be considered so today. This consciousness helped to undermine the theory of universal response that has animated art history; indeed, it is the absence of this universal epistemological basis for art historical activity that makes the new academic field of visual studies possible.7 Yet, although Moxey rejects the concept of immanent aesthetic value, he does not deny its existence as a social construct: aesthetic value had been ascribed to the work of art by the culture of the European Enlightenment and has been modified with the times. Far from supporting the canon, Moxey argues that visual studies should reenact a contestation between different forms, genres, and mediums of visual production as the embodiments of different cultural values. Hence, this new field will have a selective focus, which will change over time. There has been no unanimity among scholars about either the relation of art history to the study of image or the role of the image. For instance, Moxey suggests that visual studies has revived the discipline of art history through the study and “the recognition of [images’] heterogeneity, the different circumstances of their production, and the variety of cultural and social functions they serve” (2001, p. 109). On the other hand, art historian Thomas Crow does not welcome visual culture, claiming that “a panicky, hastily considered substitution of image history for art history

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can only have the effect of ironing out differences” (quoted in Heller 1996, p. A8). For Crow, the study of art acknowledges that art is a social category, but asks that it cannot be equated with visual culture as a whole. Another question of scholars was, “Where to look for the location of art in this new lunapark of visual culture?” (Sauerländer 1995, p. 391).8 W. J. T. Mitchell attempts to answer these difficult questions, and in the early 1990s he developed a syllabus for the first academic course on visual culture in the United States. The syllabus, for the University of Chicago, was published in Art Bulletin (Mitchell 1995a). In earlier works— Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986) and Picture Theory (1994)—Mitchell questions the difference between images and words, while also questioning the systems of power and canons of value that underwrite the possible answers to these questions. Picture Theory was provoked by a report of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities in America, which expressed anxieties about the “neglected” values and texts of the Western tradition and feared that the American culture was becoming “a product of what we watch rather than what we read” (Cheney 1988, p. 17). Mitchell begins his book by pointing out some contradictions: the report criticizes the devotion of the humanities to issues of race, class, and gender over “beauty and truth,” and at the same time, charges academia for its isolationist stance in society. He also points out the report’s oversimplification of the subject matter, and stresses that all media must be considered mixed media. Mitchell is interested in showing how the conventional answers to the questions of what pictures are and how they relate to words work in practice. He describes the difference between word and images as being “linked to things like the difference between the (speaking) self and the (seen) other . . . between words (heard, quoted, inscribed) and objects or actions (seen, depicted, described); between sensory channels, traditions of representation, and modes of experience” (Mitchell 1994, p. 5). He calls a purist’s desire to separate the two “an ideology, a complex of desire and fear, power and interest” linked to particular institutions, histories, and discourses (ibid., p. 96). As a public intellectual, Mitchell wants to address in Picture Theory the tension between visual and verbal representations, suggesting this tension to be inseparable from struggles in cultural politics;and he also desires to build a curriculum that would emphasize the importance of visual culture and literacy in its relation to language and literature.

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We can see how Mitchell’s interests are similar to issues in cultural studies. Cultural studies assumes that capitalist industrial societies are divided unequally along ethnic, gender, and class lines. It treats culture as neither an autonomous nor an externally determined field, but rather as a site of social differences and struggles: “not an organic expression of a community . . . but a contested and conflictual set of practices of representation bound up with the processes of formation and re-formation of social groups” (Frow and Morris 1996, p. 356). Engaged cultural studies is academic work on contemporary culture from nonelite or counterhegemonic perspectives. It is preoccupied not with the texts per se but with what discursive practices do in the world—with the ways in which these practices construct and participate in people’s lives.9 Mitchell’s understanding of the image stems from the general notion that the world is held together with figures of knowledge. In Iconology he suggests that an image is not just a particular kind of sign, but a parent concept—image as such. He treats textuality as a foil to imagery, a significant other or rival mode of representation. Within this framework, the history of culture is the story of the struggle between pictorial and linguistic signs, a history that reflects the relations we posit between symbols and the world, signs and their meanings. The image is the sign that pretends not to be a sign, masquerading as (or, for the believer, actually achieving) natural immediacy and presence. The word is its “other,” the artificial, arbitrary production of human will that disrupts natural presence by introducing unnatural elements into the world—time, consciousness, history, and the alienating intervention of symbolic mediation. (Mitchell 1986, p. 43) According to Mitchell, the word–image difference can be likened to the relation between two languages that have been interacting for a long time: an ongoing dialogue between verbal and pictorial representations. In “What Is Visual Culture?” (1995a), Mitchell condemns the current separation of the academic humanities into verbal and visual factions. He posits that “from the standpoint of a general field of visual culture, art history can no longer rely on received notions of beauty or aesthetic significance to define its proper object of study,” and he makes the case for

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popular imagery (p. 209). Again, this is reminiscent of cultural studies, which began as a reaction against the analysis of high cultural forms already taking place in the universities and whose meaning is based on difference. “Visual Culture:Signs, Bodies, Worlds,” a course at the University of Chicago, generalizes the institutional and technological conditions of the visible, including both the arts and the vernacular understanding of ordinary visual experience. In Mitchell’s mind, visual studies is an inside-out phenomenon in its relation to art history because it is “opening out the larger field of vernacular images, media, and everyday visual practices in which a ‘visual art’ tradition is situated, and raising the question of the differences between high and low culture, visual art versus visual culture. On the other hand, visual culture may look like a deep ‘inside’ to art history’s traditional focus on the sensuous and semiotic peculiarity of the visual” (1995b, pp. 542– 543). In this light, visual representations are seen as part of an interlocking set of practices and discourses. I find that the relation of visual studies to art history, as seen by both Moxey and Mitchell, parallels the relation of cultural studies to literary studies. The implications of this latter relationship, summed up by Cary Nelson, include “giving up” the hierarchizing cultural memory that has dominated the field throughout the century: “The search for masterworks has to be replaced with an effort to understand . . . [them] as part of wider discursive formations. That entails deriving their meaning primarily from an analysis of those relations rather than from an ahistorical and largely immanent formalism of thematics” (Nelson 1996b, p. 65). The “Questionnaire on Visual Culture” was an important milestone in the history of visual studies. It was sent out to a number of art and architecture historians, film theorists, literary critics, and artists, and then appeared, along with their responses, in the summer 1996 issue of the magazine October. This influential journal was concerned with the role of cultural production within the public sphere and focused on the intersections of cultural practices with institutional structures. The questionnaire comprises four open-ended questions. In a manner openly unsympathetic to visual studies, the anonymous author (or authors) suggests that visual culture was organized on the model of anthropology with the result that visual culture has positioned itself as antagonistic to art history. Arguing that the precondition for visual culture is a “conception of the

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visual as disembodied image,” the questionnaire warns that visual studies is helping “to produce subjects for the next stage of globalized capital” (“Questionnaire on Visual Culture,” October 1996, p. 25). This final assertion reveals that the author is working within the assumption of a universal principle of the historical development of capitalism—or imperialism. From this perspective, culture is a maidservant (as Marx called it) of the economic condition. The author, writing anonymously, relies on a Marxist metanarrative and avoids analysis of his or her own status and assumptions in the current context—whether of capitalism or of “art.” The response of academics varied greatly—from the condemnation of visual culture as being “anamorphic, junk-tech aesthetics of cybervisuality,” through a moderate resistance considering it to be a “levelling of all cultural values,” to the acceptance of visual culture as “an updated way of talking about postmodernism” (ibid., pp. 26–70).10 Perhaps, this baptism of fire was necessary: conceived as an attack on the new research area, the questionnaire did not eliminate the increasing interest among its students, but rather helped proponents of visual culture to articulate their positions and thus contributed to the theoretical growth of the new field. The experience also demonstrated that, since the issue of visual culture’s relation to anthropology, history, and postmodern theory has very material effects on the perceived place of scholars of the visual in the university and publishing spheres, there was increasing pressure within visual studies to define itself as valuable, relevant, and distinct from other fields. Diverse opinions, as well as their roots, demanded further reflection, and I conceived of this book project as a follow-up to the debate: in particular, its provisual stand. In the three years that followed the October publication, several compilations of readings emerged: Routledge’s The Block Reader in Visual Culture (1996), edited by Jon Bird et al.; The Visual Culture Reader (1998), edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff; and Sage’s Visual Culture: The Reader (1999), edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall. The Block Reader brought together writings that initially appeared in the influential British journal Block between 1979 and 1989—the essays in which a conventional understanding of art history was challenged by addressing the problems of the social and ideological dimensions of the arts in society. In a key essay entitled “Visual Representation and Cultural Politics,” Nicolas Green and Frank Mort criticize art history: “[it] is not only discreetly organised around a set of

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Jon Bird et al. (eds.), The Block Reader in Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

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aesthetically defined objects, but also operates within an internal, objectbased focus which serves to reproduce categories of aesthetic pleasure, spiritual value and a particular notion of sensuous enjoyment” (1996, p. 227; first published in 1982). What the authors offer instead is a concept of visual culture—or a “materialist analysis” of art—that could account for particular societal practices in relation to specific forms of production and reception within different historical circumstances and regimes of power.11 Green and Mort wish in this essay to go beyond the notion of the object as art and are concerned about the continued practice of text-based disciplines that focus on single texts of visual arts, film, literature, and so on. These scholars want to return the text to the context that gave it birth. As Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux put it, the idea of context “may not be equated with that in the older literary history, in which social life was taken principally as ‘background’ but the work itself retained its privileged position as a nonreducible artifact whose intrinsic meaning was exemplified by its mythic or symbolic signifiers” (Aronowitz and Giroux 1991, p. 141). It is interesting, however, that major themes in The Block Reader are announced as “Art History,” “Design History,” and “Cultural History,” thus contributing to the old disciplinary protocols by maintaining a distinction between art, design, and culture. Categorizing something as part of “art history” implies that it has the distinct and privileged status of an art object, thus imbuing it with aesthetic quality and the authority of the canon. Such distinctions could simply be the editors’ way of sorting out essays and distinguishing groups according to subject matter, but the categories nevertheless undermine the very premise of visual culture itself. In the end, The Block Reader, through its selection of articles, provided a retrospective of new art history’s exposure of conservative ideologies that had structured discourses of art. New art historians in both the U.K. and the United States paid close attention to three issues related to representation and centered around the relationship between individual subject (the artist, the art historian) and social and power relations: (1) ideology; (2) subjectivity; and (3) the relationship between subjectivity and interpretation, specifically in reexaminating the notions of artistic authority, uniqueness of the individual work, and priority of painting.12 The Visual Culture Reader (1998a), edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff and accompanied by his Visual Culture: An Introduction (1999),13 aims to trace

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Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), The Visual Culture Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

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how a critical examination of vision and the gaze over the preceding fifteen years has led to the development of visual studies. Mirzoeff groups extracts from key studies into thematic sections addressing “Visual Culture and Everyday Life,” “Virtuality,” “Race and Identity in Colonial and Postcolonial Culture,” “Gender and Sexuality,” and “Pornography.” As Irit Rogoff points out in “Studying Visual Culture” (chapter 2 of the reader), what is being analyzed by the reader is a “field of vision version of Derrida’s concept of differance” organized around the following sets of queries: “Whom we see and whom we do not see, who is privileged within the regime of specularity, which aspects of the historical past actually have circulating visual representations and which do not, whose fantasies of what are fed by which visual images?” (Rogoff 1999, p. 15; see also Rogoff 2000, p. 29). Mirzoeff, as editor, criticizes those art historians for whom “visual culture is simply ‘the history of images’ handled with a semiotic notion of representation (Bryson et al. 1994: xvi)” as well as those for whom it is “a means of creating sociology of visual culture that will establish a ‘social theory of visuality’ ( Jenks 1995: 1)” (Mirzoeff 1999, p. 4). To Mirzoeff, visual culture is both an approach to the study of contemporary living from the standpoint of the consumer rather than producer and a means of understanding the consumer’s response to visual media. Accordingly, visual culture should concern itself with “events in which information, meaning, or pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology,” embracing all apparatuses designed either to be looked at or to enhance natural vision, from fine arts to cinema and the Internet. Mirzoeff further suggests that although heightened visualizing is an attribute of our era, visual culture does not depend on pictures themselves, but on the modern tendency to picture or visualize existence. He supports his claim by giving an example of drivers on North American highways who are able to maneuver their cars and read numerous visual signs (both traffic signs and advertisements) and even turn on a radio or a CD player—in order to avoid boredom—all at the same time. While Mirzoeff calls this “new remarkable ability to absorb and interpret visual information” the basis of industrial society (1999, p. 5), I tend to think that this example says more about the drivers’ ease with informational flow, or the ability to function while being distracted, than about a new, learned skill of visualizing in all circumstances.

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Chris Jenks (ed.), Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

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Mirzoeff is convinced that “the disjunctured and fragmented culture that we call postmodernism is best imagined and understood visually, just as the nineteenth century was classically represented in the newspaper and the novel” (1999, pp. 3–4, italics added). He is of the opinion that the new academic field should address the gap between the wealth of visual experience in postmodern culture and our inability adequately to analyze observations, and should also concentrate on the determining role of the visual in our present condition. The field is new because of its focus on the visual as a place where meanings are created as opposed to the written word, an idea that prevailed in nineteenth-century culture. In order not to overestimate such a broad claim, however, one should refer to Mitchell’s earlier words:“Books have incorporated images into their pages since time immemorial, and television, far from being a purely ‘visual’ or ‘imagistic’ medium, is more aptly described as a medium in which images, sounds, and words ‘flow’ into one another. . . . The interaction of pictures and texts is constitutive of representation as such . . . the impulse to purify media is one of the central utopian gestures of modernism” (Mitchell 1994, pp. 3–5, italics added). Visual Culture: The Reader (1999), prepared by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, provides a set of readings for a sixteen-week course entitled “The Image and Visual Culture,” presented by the Open University Master’s of Art in the Cultural and Media Studies Program. Having realized that visual culture was overlooked in the rapid expansion of cultural studies in the 1990s, the editors came up with a collection composed of three parts:“Cultures of the Visual,” “Regulating Photographic Meanings,” and “Looking and Subjectivity.” In the introduction, they pointed to the reasons visual culture had been neglected:Mainly, “the privileging of the linguistic model in the study of representation led to the assumption that visual artefacts are fundamentally the same, and function in just the same way, as any other cultural text” (Evans and Hall 1999, p. 2). It is doubtful, however, that the introduction and prevalence of a linguistic model and the textualization across the humanities and social sciences took as much of a toll on the study of visual imagery as Evans and Hall would have us believe. In fact, far from being lost in the endless chain of signification, artwork has come to be seen as a “thing” (to use philosophical jargon) in its own right. I argue that this is a result of the semiotic approach:For the first time in art studies, the work of art is talked about as having its own specificity;

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Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall (eds.), Visual Culture: The Reader. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage, 1999.

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that is, as being neither an autonomous entity nor a mere reflection of social and political processes but a maker of culture. As Keith Moxey puts it: The adoption of a socially and historically specific notion of the sign implies that the study of visual representations will approach visual signs as if they were contiguous to and continuous with the signifying systems that structure all other aspects of the historical horizon. . . . There is no attempt to look through the network of signs in order to reify or fetishize the intentions of the artists involved in their production. . . . A semiotic approach would attempt to define the ways in which works of art actively worked to generate meaning and thus to define the values of the society. (1991, pp. 991–995) Indeed, the semiotic approach provides an analysis of the artwork’s specificity based not on some questionable inherent qualities but on its performance, distinct from any other text’s, in a social setting. Even more ambiguous is Evans and Hall’s suggestion that visual culture has been overlooked because of “matters of a substantive kind . . . connected with the nature of the objects of study. . . . It is quite clear, for example, that ‘photography’ is not a unified practice, but a medium utterly diverse in its functions” (1999, p. 2). It seems that these authors consider art practices within the framework of the productionist model and, at the same time, go further to recognize the challenge presented by the attempt to analyze the tremendous variety of such practices with this single model. If this is the case, then rather than reject a semiotic approach we should take an approach to art “which integrates textual analysis with the sociological investigation of institutions of cultural production” (Wolff 1992, p. 713). Evans and Hall also express a concern about losing the specific rhetoric, genres, and uses of visual imagery in the “more global identification of cultural trends and their epic narratives of transformations of consciousness in the rubric of ‘postmodern culture’” (Evans and Hall 1999, p. 2). This concern seems particularly dubious, especially when considered in light of Mirzoeff’s highly acclaimed book published in the same year—a text in which visual culture is equated with postmodernism. Although I agree in general with Evans and Hall that visual culture has not received proper attention within cultural studies, I disagree with

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their reasons and suggest a simpler alternative. Over a long period of time, the study of images has been monopolized by art history departments, which have assumed authority over both the methods of study and the training of specialists. Those working outside of these departments have rarely engaged in this exclusive discourse, for a number of reasons. The early 1990s was a time of ambiguity. On the one hand, in the wake of cultural studies, the approaches deployed by traditional art history were seen to be inadequate. But on the other hand, cultural studies scholars felt (wrongly, in my opinion) that they did not have a mandate (or sufficient expertise) and could not compete in the analysis of the arts with graduates of, for example, the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and other such universities. Some art historians and scholars of the visual (in particular, of the new genre of television) chose to work in the territory of cultural studies—Irit Rogoff, Victor Burgin, John Tagg, and Peter Wollen, to name just a few. Moreover, a handful of “the outsiders,” such as Norman Bryson, W. J. T. Mitchell, and Kaja Silverman, brought fresh insights into art history.14 However, almost no conversation existed between art historians and cultural studies researchers in the professional magazines or at the disciplinary conventions, even between those under the roof of the same institution of higher learning.15 With an increased interest in the visual came the need for something more sustainable than an unstable ensemble of interactions—namely, a new academic field and adequate training for it. In Interpreting Visual Culture, editors Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell (1999) set out to explore the hermeneutics of the visual and discern four orders of visual phenomena: the levels of meaningful practices in the life-worlds of everyday life . . . the emergence of recent interpretative problematics (theoretical narratives which advocate different “ways of seeing”) . . . the historical formation of the theoretical sciences and the role of critical thought in reflecting upon the social construction of their practices . . . and the emergence of critical discourses concerned to question and deconstruct the history and implications of visually organized paradigms . . . these have legitimated. (Heywood and Sandywell 1999, p. x)

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Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell (eds.), Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

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The essays in this collection are divided into three groups and discuss accordingly the status of the visual in modern theory, the impact of recent theorizing on the significance of the visual dimensions of visual art, and connections between the visual and the ethical. Sandywell, whose article “Specular Grammar: The Visual Rhetoric of Modernity” forms the core of the first section, conceives of the project’s task as being to answer Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993). He intends to bring to light those aspects of modern European philosophy that might have relevance to the new field (from Descartes via Hegel to Gadamer and Heidegger). The second, more eclectic section includes essays on Bonnard, feminist art, and contemporary art criticism. The final section is grouped around Heywood’s “‘Ever More Specific’: Practices and Perception in Art and Ethics,” which, true to its title, interrogates the specific subject of the ethical value of successful artwork. The editors place text of the original project—what they call “the map” of the hermeneutics of visual culture, which had been circulated to contributors—in the appendix, giving readers the opportunity to see how far the final product diverged from and outgrew the embryo. I find this indicative of the current situation in the field of the visual: in an attempt to expand boundaries by bringing together heterogeneous and diverse subjects, the result is often a lack of focus or agenda. At the same time, Heywood and Sandywell’s book is a genuine effort to move away from what had become a staple feature of the literature presenting visual culture: a series of negations of traditional art history, sociology, anthropology, and so on.16 Interpreting Visual Culture is a success because it makes an attempt to “ground” the new field by showing the persistent philosophical interest in the visual throughout history, and as such it is a viable response to those who contend that it is only a twentieth-century phenomenon. In addition to these collective efforts, there have been several attempts by individual authors to define the new field. In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (1996) is a book of essays written by Victor Burgin between 1987 and 1994. The essays presented share a common object, which is the space and time of visual representations, and a common methodology, which is psychoanalytic theory. Burgin is convinced that the space and time of visual representations, or the shifting coordinates in which imaginary identities are fixed, should become the object of

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Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996.

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contemporary studies of the image. The subject of his investigation is not singular forms of visual representation such as photography, television, or cinema, but the “‘teletopological puzzle’ of these together —‘together’ not as a totality but as a constantly shifting constellation of fragments” (p. 22). Burgin puts forward the thesis that it is no longer plausible to separate culture into such distinct realms as mass culture, popular art, and high art because at the levels of production and distribution, all cultural workers today actually or potentially rely on much the same technologies and institutions, and all cultural products are equally subject to commodification. . . . At the level of reception, the meanings of all products of contemporary culture tend to be cut from much the same cloth: woven from intertextually interrelated but institutionally heterogeneous strands of sense, originating in disparate times and spaces. As there are no longer any definitely separate realms of cultural production, it follows that there can be no islands of counter-hegemonic purity. (Burgin 1996, p. 20) Working against the grain of cultural studies, which celebrates the resistance of popular culture to mass culture while sometimes neglecting their interrelationship, Burgin suggests that, far from suppressing popular aspirations and desires, mass visual culture is involved in the production and articulation of such aspirations in the time following the emergence of mass media. In the contemporary situation, culture can no longer be divided into and studied as three antagonistic sectors, as a majority of cultural studies scholars would like to think.17 Mass culture acquired its mass character precisely because it appealed to the taste of the widest public possible by imitating features of popular culture. Burgin’s book is a significant breakthrough in modern visual cultural studies because he was one of the few scholars who grasped the complexity of the relationship between popular culture and mass culture. Burgin’s method conflicts with the ideas professed by Malcolm Barnard, the author of Art, Design and Visual Culture (1998). In his book, Barnard discerns three cultures: (1) the dominant European groups corresponding to an elitist, unilinear conception of culture; (2) dominant masculine mass culture; and (3) multilinear popular subculture produced by

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Malcolm Barnard, Art, Design, and Visual Culture: An Introduction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

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marginalized or subordinate cultural groups. He postulates that various cultural and social groups have different conceptions of the visual and the cultural, differences that are themselves used to constitute distinctions between these groups. Consequently, concludes Barnard, there are different visual cultures. But W. J. T. Mitchell cautions against the easy pluralism of the view that “there are only different and diverse visual cultures, no such thing as ‘visual culture.’ This is very like insisting that there is no such thing as language, only languages” (1995b, p. 543). Moreover, holds Mitchell, one should not graft an established concept of culture (from cultural studies) on an established concept of the visual in order to understand visual culture, which is what Barnard does by dividing visual culture into two halves. Barnard uncritically adapts a definition of the cultural form from Raymond Williams (1958), that is, “‘the everyday objects and practices of a group of people, or of an entire way of life,’ or ‘anything that is meaningful to more than one person” (Barnard 1998, p. 19). As John Frow points out in Cultural Studies and Cultural Values (1995), “something curious happens in these two sentences: culture both is the ‘way of life’ and is the ‘meanings and values’ in that way of life; the ‘way of life’ and the ‘culture’ are at once identical and in an expressive relation based on some ontological distinction between them. . . . The problem that arises . . . is that it then becomes so inclusive as to lose any structure of its own” (pp. 8–11). Barnard also oversimplifies the issue when he refers to the visual as the visual object, or “anything visual produced, interpreted or created by humans, which has, or is given, functional, communicative and/or aesthetic intent” (1998, p. 18). The question arises, does he actually mean visible instead of visual? In his most recent book, Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture (2001), Barnard goes on to distinguish between a strong sense and a weak sense of visual culture. The former “stresses the cultural side of the phrase” and is concerned with institutions of production and consumption, whereas the latter concentrates on the different approaches to understanding “a wide variety of images and artefacts” (pp. 1–2). Such an account seems to me even more mechanistic than his earlier one (1998). Instead of contending with the specificity of visual culture (which might be compared with a centripetal force), it disperses our attention along the imagined axes of the visual and the cultural, and the disciplines that made these two their objects (a centrifugal force).

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Malcolm Barnard, Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), The Visual Culture Reader, second edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

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Barbie Zelizer (ed.), Visual Culture and the Holocaust. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

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Jane Kromm,The Art of Frenzy: Public Madness in the Visual Culture of Europe, 1500–1850. London and New York: Continuum, 2002.

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Amelia Jones (ed.), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge, 2003.

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Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (eds.), Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies. Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, 2002.

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Fiona Carson and Claire Pajaczkowska (eds.), Feminist Visual Culture. New York: Routledge, 2001.

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Gen Doy, Black Visual Culture: Modernity and Postmodernity. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2000.

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Karen Jacobs, The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.

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David Crouch and Nina Lübbren (eds.), Visual Culture and Tourism. New York: Berg, 2003.

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In an analysis of art and design, Barnard (1998) employs such opaque categories as external signs and internal signs. According to him, external preparatory signs indicate the presence or existence of art or design in some specific time and place, and the nature of experiences that viewers are expected to undergo (for example, the art gallery is a sign that what is to be found inside is art as opposed to non-art). On the other hand, internal conventional signs indicate a relationship between form (the shape, color of an object) and social structure (gender, class, race). In this way, Barnard’s argument proceeds, the conventions—what different cultures see as their visual culture—are linked to social structures, which are produced and reproduced through this interaction between artistic form and the social structure itself. In my opinion, this division is arbitrary. I find it particularly odd that an author who seems to adhere to the materialist view of culture speaks of form as if it were transcendental and quickly reverts to nondialectical connections between form and social structure. The most recent introduction to visual culture, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright’s Practices of Looking (2001), gives an overview of various theories of visuality while exploring diverse genres of visual culture, ranging from fine arts to advertising. The book’s aim is to reveal the emergence of a shared understanding among these forms of the connection between image, power, and politics in contemporary society. The authors are the first to employ such a synthetic approach, focusing on the intersection of the visual with the aural and tactile media. There are several indications that the field of visual studies has matured: two electronic forums (one was initiated by Nicholas Mirzoeff, and the other by the American Studies Association); a visual culture caucus at the College Art Association annual meetings; the Journal of Visual Culture from Sage Publications (launched in April 2002); the Visual Studies journal from Routledge (retitled in 2002);18 the second edition of The Visual Culture Reader (December 2002); and a constellation of publications in 2001–2003 of books related to visual culture, on topics as diverse as drapery, romanticism, the Holocaust, American religions, urbanism in 1920s Germany, the English novel, Arab culture in the diaspora, literary modernism, and Renaissance England. Visual culture is in the making. Therefore, an exploration of its theoretical frameworks, as well as related pedagogical issues, seems appropriate toward an understanding of this field’s potential for future research.

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