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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Blackwell Companions in Cultural Studies
- Sprache: Englisch
Provides an up-to-date overview of the present state Visual Cultural Studies, featuring new original content, topics, and methods
The Wiley Blackwell Concise Companion to Visual Culture brings together original research by both established scholars and new voices in the dynamic field, exploring the history, current state, and possible future directions of visual cultural studies. Organized as a series of non-traditional keyword essays, this innovative volume engages readers with a diversity of ideas and perspectives to broaden and enrich their understanding of visual culture and its operations.
This accessible, reader-friendly volume begins with a brief introduction to the history and practices of visual studies, featuring interviews and conversations with key figures such as W.J.T. Mitchell and Douglas Crimp. The majority of the text explores key concepts within a broad framework of history, ecologies, mediations, agencies, and politics while placing particular emphasis on interdisciplinarity and intersectionality. Essays cover keyword topics including Identities, Representation, Institutions, Architectures, Memes, Environment, Temporality, and many more. Offering a unique approach to the subject, this timely resource:
- Presents new work from a diverse group of scholars with a broad range of social, cultural, and generational perspectives
- Emphasizes the importance of activism and political urgency in humanities scholarship
- Discusses engaging objects and discourses beyond film and art, such as architecture, video games, political activism, and the nonhuman
- Highlights the diverse and interconnecting elements of visual culture scholarship
- Includes case studies and short introductions that provide context and reinforce core concepts
The Wiley Blackwell Concise Companion to Visual Culture is essential reading for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars in the fields of visual studies, art history, film studies, and media studies.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
References
PART I: Scenes from the Institutionalization of the Field
Chapter 1: Practices of Visual Culture Pedagogy
References
Chapter 2: Horizontal Thinking and the Emergence of Visual Culture
New Horizons
Lawrence Alloway and the Long Front of Culture: From the Hierarchical Pyramid to the Horizontal Line
Leo Steinberg and the Emergence of the Flatbed Picture Plane
Rosalind Krauss’s Trajectory and the Hatred of Visual Culture
References
Archival Sources
Notes
Chapter 3: An Interview
References
Chapter 4: A Conversation
References
Chapter 5: A Dialogue
References
Chapter 6: Scene Selection: Objects Lost and Found
References
PART II: Key Concepts
A: Histories
Chapter 7: The Archive
References
Further Readings
Chapter 8: Observance
Introduction: A Minute’s Silence
Observing, Caring, Following, Obeying
The Shoah, Memory, and Memorialization
To Destroy The Evidence
The Memory Industry: Dark Tourism, Shoah Selfies, and Genealogy Websites
Conclusion: Resilience
References
Note
Chapter 9: Temporality
80,000 Hours
TV Guide
and the Televisual Present
Emergence and Genealogy in the Narrative Presents of
Community
and
The Cosby Show
The Present Tense of Television
Acknowledgments
References
Chapter 10: Ephemerality
Restricted Imagery
The Ephemeral Gesture and “Live” Photography
Visibility, Automation, and Autonomy
Becoming an Image
Encoding Bias in Machine Learning
References
Notes
B: Ecologies
Chapter 11: Environment
American Real Estate History
Seeing Real Estate
Real Estate in American Visual Culture
References
Further Reading
Chapter 12: Architectures
The Materiality of the Arts and Crafts
Resource Barons
Teak
The Work of Extraction
Lively Capital
Consolidation of a Global Trade
Global Entanglements
Material Affects
References
Note
Chapter 13: Sites
Object‐Centered Agencies: What Do the Inuksuit Want?
The Genesis of the Toronto Airport Inuksuit
From Sanctioned Theft to Authentic Replicas
Installation, Reception, and Impact
Objects and Agency: Speaking Through Archives, Oral Testimony, and Social Media
References
Further Reading
Note
Chapter 14: Vernaculars
Introduction: New Networked Genres
Always‐On Computing and the Always‐On Image
What the Internet Is “For”: Too Much from the Bomb to Supercuts
Managing Connection by Other Means: Selfies and Animated GIFs
References
C: Mediation
Chapter 15: The Document
1
2
3
Acknowledgments
References
Notes
Chapter 16: Form
Acknowledgments
References
Chapter 17: Play
Playing, Seeing, Doing
The Lens of Playfulness
The Ideology of Play
References
Further Reading
Chapter 18: Memes
Before “LOLcats”
Performative Representation
Memes Cohere and Spread through Illocutionary Force
A Meme’s Existence Results in Allegorical Operations of Doubling
Things out of Information, Information out of Things
The United Fruit Company, the US Government, and the New Left
Acknowledgments
References
D: Agencies
Chapter 19: Subjects
To Capture
To Act and Enact
To Look
To Be Caught
To Cover
To Belong
To Hold
References
Chapter 20: Making
Making Introductions
Making as Activity and Action
Making as Material Transformation
Making as Conceptual Transformation
Making as Causing Effect
Making Identity
Making Distinctions
Making Do
Making as Authorship
Making Politics
Making Visual Culture
Acknowledgments
References
Notes
Chapter 21: Institutions
Exhibiting Power: Display Culture, Museums, and Diplomacy
The Arrival of a New Member in the Community
Masterpieces of the World’s Great Museums
Institutional Maneuvers: The NGC and External Affairs
Masterpieces of European Painting
Dark Matter
References
Archival Sources
Notes
Chapter 22: Species
Slime Mold: Agencies of Meaning Making
Artificial Intelligence: Agencies of Imagining
Microbes/Ghosts: Agencies of Vision and Knowledge
Dependency, Contamination, Failure (or a Species Account of Agency)
References
E: Politics
Chapter 23: The Social
References
Chapter 24: Identities
Two Operations: Post‐Black and Liquid Blackness
Bureaucratized Liberal Tolerance and Its Discontents
Charles Taylor and the Politics of Recognition
Conclusion: Escaping “Diversity”
References
Note
Chapter 25: Representation
References
Further Reading
Chapter 26: Feelings
The Political Isn’t the Personal
Aesthetics without Feelings
The Political in the Personal
References
Further Reading
Chapter 27: Action
Water Is Life
Liberating Institutions
Blockadia
The Great Transition
References
Further Reading
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Sam Lambert, Installation of the exhibition
This Is Tomorrow
, Whi...
Figure 2.2 Robert Rauschenberg,
Small Rebus
. Oil, graphite, paint swatches, ...
Figure 2.3 Robert Rauschenberg,
Bed
. Oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sh...
Figure 2.4 Rosalind Krauss,
As a Horizontal Field, Like a Desktop
. Video sti...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Matchbook. The Tool Box, c. 1963.
Figure 5.2 Rudy Lemcke, Glinda, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 36 × 30 in.
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Man Ray,
Dust Breeding
(
Duchamp’s Large Glass with Dust Motes
...
Figure 7.2 Maurice Jarnoux, photograph of André Malraux with the photographi...
Figure 7.3 Susan Hiller,
From the Freud Museum
. 1993.
Figure 7.4 Susan Hiller,
Witness
, 2000.
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 Listings from
TV Guide
1975, November 2, p. A31.
Figure 9.2 Grid from
TV Guide
1986, March 27, pp. A118–A119.
Figure 9.3 “Vital Statistics” in the listings from
TV Guide
1986, March 27, p...
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 Cassils,
Becoming an Image
, Performance Still No. 3 (Pennsylvani...
Figure 10.2 Cassils,
Becoming an Image
, Performance Still No. 4 (National Th...
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1 “Can’t Ye Just See It?”
Judge
, January 16, 1926.
Figure 11.2 Alfred Hoffy, after William Strickland,
Prospective View of the
...
Figure 11.3 James Henry Beard,
The Ohio Land Speculator
, 1840. Purchased wit...
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 Blacker House, c. 1915. Photo Leroy Hulbert.
Figure 12.2 Teak‐lined entry hall, Blacker House.
Figure 12.3 Girdling teak, c. 1920.
Figure 12.4 “Elephant laborers piling timber in one of the great riverside y...
Figure 12.5 Foucar Bros. Sawmill in Rangoon, from
Timber and Plywood
, vol. 2...
Chapter 13
Figure 13.1 Kiakshuk,
Three Inukshuks
, 1962. Stone. Pearson International Ai...
Figure 13.2 Kiakshuk,
Stone Images Mark the Western Route
, 1960. Stencil pri...
Figure 13.3 Photo of Toronto Airport inuksuit after construction in Cape Dor...
Figure 13.4 Taro Okamoto,
Tower of the Sun
, 1970. Osaka.
Chapter 15
Figure 15.1 Tim Hetherington. Eye Clinic in Bo, Sierra Leone.
Figure 15.2 Tim Hetherington, Sergeant Aaron Hijar Sleeping.
Chapter 16
Figure 16.1 A coordinate grid from
Killer of Sheep
(directed by Charles Burn...
Figure 16.2 Movement and flow from
Killer of Sheep
(directed by Charles Burn...
Figure 16.3 Counting from
Killer of Sheep
(directed by Charles Burnett, 1977...
Chapter 17
Figure 17.1 Player Eyes, Spider, and Corridors.
Figure 17.2 Runner’s Vision, Highlighted Suggested Route and Objects.
Chapter 18
Figure 18.1 LOLcats Memes.
Figure 18.2 Advertisements appearing in the
Berkeley Barb
. Clockwise, from t...
Figure 18.3 “Sun bananas: ‘Wholesome and then‐some!’”
Ann Arbor Sun
, April 1...
Chapter 19
Figure 19.1 Jesse and Arnold Friedman in Friedman home movie. Included in An...
Figure 19.2 Photograph taken in 1987 at the district court in Mineola, New Y...
Figure 19.3 Former student in Arnold and Jesse Friedman’s computer class. St...
Figure 19.4 The Friedman family in the early 1970s: from left, Jesse, in fro...
Chapter 20
Figure 20.1 Sara Thompto, “I Make Shit and It’s Awesome,” 2018. Sticker.
Figure 20.2 Wim Delvoye, Cloaca Professional, 2010. Mixed media. Permanent c...
Figure 20.3 Wisconsin School of Engineering Makerspace.
Figure 20.4 In our work as Spatula&Barcode, our art is sometimes indistingui...
Chapter 25
Figure 25.1 Francis Galton,
The Jewish Type (Full Face)
, 1885. Source: Karl ...
Figure 25.2 Trevor Paglen,
Machine Readable Hito
, 2017. Detail. Adhesive wal...
Figure 25.3 Trevor Paglen,
Fanon (Even the Dead Are Not Safe), Eigenface
, 20...
Figure 25.4 Trevor Paglen,
Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism): Adversa
...
Chapter 27
Figure 27.1 Dylan Miner, “No Pipelines on Indigenous Land,” 2016.
Figure 27.2 Liberate Tate,
The Gift
, 2012. Performance at Tate Modern. On 7 ...
Figure 27.3 The Zad. “Against the Airport and Its World,” c. 2015.
Guide
Cover Page
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Index
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Wiley Blackwell Companions to Cultural Studies
Advisory editor: David Theo Goldberg, University of California, Irvine
This series provides theoretically ambitious but accessible volumes devoted to the major fields and subfields within cultural studies, whether as single disciplines (film studies) inspired and reconfigured by interventionist cultural studies approaches, or from broad interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives (gender studies, race and ethnic studies, postcolonial studies). Each volume sets out to ground and orientate the student through a broad range of specially commissioned articles and also to provide the more experienced scholar and teacher with a convenient and comprehensive overview of the latest trends and critical directions. An overarching Companion to Cultural Studies will map the territory as a whole.
A Companion to Postcolonial Studies
Edited by Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray
A Companion to Cultural Studies
Edited by Toby Miller
A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies
Edited by David Theo Goldberg and John Solomos
A Companion to Media Studies
Edited by Angharad Valdivia
A Companion to Art Theory
Edited by Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde
A Companion to Film Theory
Edited by Toby Miller and Robert Stam
A Companion to Gender Studies
Edited by Philomena Essed, David Theo Goldberg, and Audrey Kobayashi
A Companion to Literature and Film
Edited by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo
A Companion to Asian American Studies
Edited by Kent A. Ono
A Companion to African American Studies
Edited by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon
A Companion to Museum Studies
Edited by Sharon Macdonald
A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies
Edited by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry
A Companion to Latina/o Studies
Edited by Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo
A Concise Companion to American Studies
Edited by John Carlos Rowe
A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism
Edited by Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani
A Companion to Sport
Edited by David L. Andrews and Ben Carrington
A Companion to Popular Culture
Edited by Gary Burns
A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting
Edited by Aniko Bodroghkozy
A Companion to Television, 2nd Edition
Edited by Janet Wasko
A Concise Companion to Visual Culture
Edited by A. Joan Saab, Aubrey Anable, and Catherine Zuromskis
A Concise Companion to Visual Culture
Edited by
A. Joan Saab
Aubrey Anable
Catherine Zuromskis
This edition first published 2021© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The rights of A. Joan Saab, Aubrey Anable, and Catherine Zuromskis to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the law.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication DataNames: Saab, A. Joan, editor. | Anable, Aubrey, editor. | Zuromskis, Catherine, 1971– editor.Title: A concise companion to visual culture / edited by A. Joan Saab, Aubrey Anable, Catherine Zuromskis.Description: First edition. | Hoboken : Wiley‐Blackwell, [2021] | Series: Wiley Blackwell companions to cultural studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2020024720 (print) | LCCN 2020024721 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119415404 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119415442 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119415473 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Art and society. | Culture. | Visual perception. | Visual communication. | Popular culture. | Communication and culture.Classification: LCC N72.S6 C59235 2020 (print) | LCC N72.S6 (ebook) | DDC 701/.03–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024720LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024721
Cover Design: WileyCover Image: Courtesy of Meggan Gould
For Douglas
Acknowledgments
This book would not be possible without the support, encouragements, cooperation, and patience of our colleagues, collaborators, friends, and family members. We wish to thank our many brilliant contributors, who confirmed our suspicions that visual studies is alive and well and as relevant as ever. For the beautiful image on the cover of this book, we thank Meggan Gould, whose work offers the perfect distillation of how historical, material, playful, and alluring technologies of vision can be. Janey Fisher made our index. Juliet Booker, Sophie Bradwell, Emily Corkhill, Catriona King, Jake Opie, Sarah Peters, Richard Samson, and Manuela Tecusan at Wiley Blackwell provided guidance over the long process of bringing this volume together.
We thank our institutions—the University of Rochester, Carleton University, and the Rochester Institute of Technology—for their ongoing support. Martin Collier and Lorna Maier in the Art and Art History Department at the University of Rochester helped facilitate our writing retreat in the summer of 2019, and funds from the Dean’s Office helped offset the cost of the index. And Cat’s colleagues in the School for Photographic Arts and Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology (most especially Therese Mulligan) made it possible for her to start a new book project and a new job at the same time and still feel on top of things.
Most of all, we want to thank our loved ones. Joan would like to thank Steve, Finn, and Wilson Brauer for their love and support—and for being mostly quiet when she was skyping with her co‐editors. Aubrey thanks Marc Furstenau for his sage editing advice, companionship, and humor during the process of pulling this book together. Cat is inspired every day by her two favorite people in the world: Daniel Worden and sweet Clementine.
Notes on Contributors
Kate Palmer Albers is associate professor of art history at Whittier College in Los Angeles. Her research interests include the role of ephemerality in photographic experience; narrative, biography, and archive in relation to visual art; mapping and landscape; and emerging technologies of computer vision and machine learning. Albers is the author of Uncertain Histories: Accumulation, Inaccessibility, and Doubt in Contemporary Photography (2015) and co‐editor, with Jordan Bear, of The Night Albums: Visibility and the Ephemeral Photograph (forthcoming, 2021).
Aubrey Anable is associate professor of film studies in the School for Studies in Art and Culture at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is the author of Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2018. Her research on digital media history and aesthetics, video games, and theories of affect has appeared in the journals Feminist Media Histories, Afterimage, Television & New Media, Ada, and various edited collections.
Ross Barrett is associate professor of art history at Boston University. He is the author of Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth‐Century American Art (2014), and co‐editor, with Daniel Worden, of Oil Culture (2014). His current book project examines five American artists who painted and speculated on real estate during the nineteenth century.
Jane Blocker is professor of art history at the University of Minnesota. Her most recent book is Becoming Past: History in Contemporary Art (2015). She has published articles in Performance Research, Grey Room, Art Journal, Camera Obscura, Cultural Studies, Visual Resources, and Performing Arts Journal and contributed essays to anthologies including Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History; The Aesthetics of Risk; After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance; and The Ends of Performance.
Eugenie Brinkema is associate professor of contemporary literature and media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her first book, The Forms of the Affects, was published in 2014, and her articles have appeared in numerous journals such as Angelaki, Camera Obscura, Criticism, differences, Discourse, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Journal of Visual Culture, LIT, Polygraph, qui parle, and World Picture.
Margot Bouman is assistant professor of visual culture at the New School. Her research addresses the interplay between the neo‐avant‐garde and broadcast television, as well as sampling in contemporary art. Her monograph, Cut, Shift, Paste: Recursive Systems in Contemporary Art is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. It addresses sampling’s structural affinities with knowledge production systems such as serialism, the grid, and online information distribution. Bouman’s work has appeared in Parachute, Etc. and the Journal of Curatorial Studies.
Joel Burges is associate professor of English and director of the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, where he is also faculty in Film and Media Studies and Digital Media Studies. He is the author of Out of Sync & Out of Work: History and the Obsolescence of Labor in Contemporary Culture (Rutgers UP, 2018) and co‐editor, with Amy J. Elias, of Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (NYU Press, 2016). He is at work on two books. The first is Television and the Work of Writing, which focuses on the figure of the television writer from Carl Reiner and Rod Serling to Issa Rae and Michaela Coel; the second is Late Bourgeois Unities: Class Morbidity and Racial Informality in the 21st Century World. He also recently co‐edited “Black Studies Now and the Countercurrents of Hazel Carby” with Alisa V. Prince and Jeffrey Allen Tucker for InVisible Culture.
Lisa Cartwright is professor of visual arts, communication and science studies at the University of California at San Diego, where she heads the Program in Speculative Design. She is the author of Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (1995) and Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child (2008), and co‐author, with Marita Sturken, of Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (3rd edn. 2018). She works at the intersection of art and media studies and feminist science and technology studies.
Irene Cheng is an architectural historian and theorist and associate professor of architecture at the California College of the Arts. She co‐edited, with Bernard Tschumi, The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century (2003) and, with Charles L. Davis II and Mabel O. Wilson, Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (2020).
Laurie Beth Clark is an artist, scholar of trauma tourism, and professor of art at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison. Together with Michael Peterson, she co‐founded the arts collaborative Spatuala&Barcode (www.spatulaandbarcode.net), which has produced social practice participatory projects around the world. The two of them have published in diverse journals and collections and co‐edited a special issue of Performance Research titled “On Generosity.”
Douglas Crimp was an art critic and the Fanny Knapp Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester. He was the author or editor of numerous books, including Pictures, AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, On the Museum’s Ruins, “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol, Before Pictures, and the forthcoming Dance Dance Film.
Jon Davies is a PhD candidate in art history at Stanford University. He has a background in film and queer studies, and worked as a contemporary art curator in Toronto for several years. His writing has been published widely, including in C Magazine, Canadian Art, Criticism, Fillip, Frieze, GLQ, and Master Drawings; he also co‐edited issue #5 of Little Joe magazine with Sam Ashby. He wrote a book about Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s film Trash (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009), and his edited anthology More Voice‐Over: Colin Campbell Writings is forthcoming from Concordia University Press. His dissertation research focuses on the intertwining of artistic and sexual experimentation and queer pedagogy in San Francisco from 1945–1995.
T. J. Demos is a cultural critic, professor of visual culture at University of California, Santa Cruz, and director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He is the author of numerous books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017), Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (2016), and most recently, Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (2020).
Chad Elias teaches at Dartmouth College and publishes on contemporary art. In his research he looks expansively across geographies and media to engage with debates about archival knowledge, the epistemological status of images, the political claims of contemporary visual cultures, and speculative and conceptual futures. Through an attention directed not only to social conflicts, but also to planetary‐scale environmental and technological transformations, his work reconsiders the role of humans within emergent systems of image production and exchange.
Meggan Gould is a photographer living and working outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she is associate professor of art at the University of New Mexico. Her work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally and is part of many private, corporate, and public collections, for example the DeCordova Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art, Light Work, and the University of New Mexico Art Museum. Her multifaceted practice uses photography, drawing, sculpture, and installation in an open‐ended dissection of vision and photographic tools.
James J. Hodge is associate professor in the Department of English and in the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University. His essays on digital aesthetics have been published in Critical Inquiry, Film Criticism, Postmodern Culture, ASAP/Journal, and elsewhere. He is the author of Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art (2019).
Louis Kaplan is professor of history and theory of photography and new media at the University of Toronto. He is the author of numerous books and essays including Photography and Humour (2017) and, most recently, At Wit’s End: The Deadly Discourse on the Jewish Joke (2020). His article “Did you hear the one about Žižek and The Aristocrats?” is forthcoming in CR: The New Centennial Review. Kaplan also collaborates with artist Melissa Shiff on research‐creation projects in augmented and virtual reality.
Gloria C. S. Kim is assistant professor of media and culture at the University of California‐Riverside. Her research specializes in the areas of visual culture, the environmental humanities, and science and technology studies. She has published articles in Configurations, ASAP/J, and Consumption, Markets and Culture.
Eve Meltzer is associate professor of visual studies at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Art History. She is the author of Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (2013). Her current book project, Not‐Me, Mine, Ours: Belonging and Psychic Life after Photography, wagers that the relationship between the psyche and the camera is more intimate and important than we have yet to describe, particularly as it pertains to claims of belonging.
Richard Meyer is Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University and author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth‐Century American Art and What Was Contemporary Art? With Peggy Phelan, he wrote Contact Warhol: Photography without End and co‐curated the exhibition of the same title. With Catherine Lord, he is the author of Art and Queer Culture (an updated edition of which appeared in 2019 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots). He is currently writing Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered, the first book‐length study of a Brooklyn tailor and slipper‐maker who, against all odds, achieved international recognition as a self‐taught painter in the 1940s. A Hirshfield retrospective organized by Meyer will open in October 2022 at the American Folk Art Museum in New York.
W. J. T. Mitchell is the author of numerous books and articles on visual culture, media aesthetics, and iconology. He teaches literature, film, and the visual arts at the University of Chicago, where he is the editor of Critical Inquiry. His books include Iconology, Picture Theory, What Do Pictures Want?, and Image Science. He is currently at work on a book entitled Seeing Through Madness: Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture.
Derek Conrad Murray is an interdisciplinary theorist specializing in the history, theory, and criticism of contemporary art and visual culture. He is professor of history of art and visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Murray is the author of Queering Post‐Black Art: Artists Transforming African–American Identity after Civil Rights (2016) and Mapplethorpe and the Flower: Radical Sexuality and the Limits of Control (2020).
Franny Nudelman is professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Carleton University in Ottawa, where she teaches US culture and writes about war, protest, and documentary. She is the author of John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War (2004) and Fighting Sleep: The War for the Mind and the US Military (2019) and coeditor, with Sara Blair and Joseph Entin, of Remaking Reality: US Documentary Culture after 1945 (2018).
Michael Peterson is an artist and a scholar of performance and popular cultures. He is professor of art and founding member in Interdisciplinary Theater Studies at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison. Together with Laurie Beth Clark, he co‐founded the arts collaborative Spatuala & Barcode (www.spatulaandbarcode.net), which has produced social practice participatory projects around the world. The two of them have published in diverse journals and collections and co‐edited a special issue of Performance Research titled “On Generosity.”
Lane Relyea is an art historian and critic who has written about contemporary art for more than thirty‐five years for a variety of books, journals, and museum catalogues. He is a member of the College Art Association and from 2012 to 2015 served as editor‐in‐chief of its quarterly publication Art Journal. His book Your Everyday Art World was published in 2013.
Scott C. Richmond is associate professor in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, where his work focuses on film and media theory, experimental media practice, and the history of computational media. He has published in Cinema Journal, the Journal of Visual Culture, and Discourse. He is the author of two books: Cinema’s Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating (2016), and Find Each Other: Networks, Affects, and Other Queer Encounters (forthcoming).
A. Joan Saab is the Susan B. Anthony Professor of Art and Art History and vice provost of academic affairs at the University of Rochester. She is the author of For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars (2004, 2nd edn. 2009); Searching for Siqueiros, written on the digital publishing platform Scalar; and Objects of Vision: Making Sense of What We See (2020).
Marquard Smith is a founder and the editor‐in‐chief of Journal of Visual Culture, programme leader of the Museums and Galleries in Education MA at the UCL Institute of Education, London, and professor of artistic research at Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania.
Sarah E. K. Smith is assistant professor in communication and media studies at Carleton University in Canada. Her research examines contemporary art, cultural labor, museums, and cultural diplomacy. Recent publications include General Idea: Life and Work (2016). She is co‐founder of the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative, a Fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, and in 2015 held the Canada‐US Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.
Braxton Soderman is assistant professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He researches digital media, video games, new media aesthetics, the history of technology, and critical theory. He is the author of Against Flow: Video Games and the Flowing Subject (2021). He has published articles in the Journal of Visual Culture, Space and Culture, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Games and Culture, Transformative Works and Cultures, and elsewhere.
Marita Sturken is professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she teaches courses in visual culture, cultural memory, and consumerism. She is the author of Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (1997) and Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism From Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (2007) and co‐author, with Lisa Cartwright, of Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (3rd edn. 2018).
Norman Vorano is associate professor and Head of the Department of Art History and Art Conservation at Queen’s University in Canada. His work focuses on Indigenous arts of North America, museum culture, and material studies. He edited Inuit Prints, Japanese Inspiration: Early Printmaking in the Canadian Arctic (2011) and curated Picturing Arctic Modernity: North Baffin Drawings from 1964 (2017–19). From 2005 to 2014 he was the Curator of Contemporary Inuit Art at the Canadian Museum of History, Canada’s national museum.
Sharon Willis is professor of art history and visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. A co‐editor of Camera Obscura, she is the author of Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body; High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Films; and The Poitier Effect: Racial Melodrama and Fantasies of Reconciliation.
Catherine Zuromskis is associate professor in the School for Photographic Arts and Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the author of Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images (2013), and The Factory (2012). Her writings on photography, film, and visual culture have appeared in American Quarterly, Archives of American Art Journal, Art Journal, The Velvet Light Trap, Photography & Culture, Criticism and various edited volumes.
Introduction
A. Joan Saab, Aubrey Anable, and Catherine Zuromskis
This volume brings together the work of established and emerging scholars working across visual studies. Also called visual culture, and sometimes visual culture studies, visual studies is an interdisciplinary field that takes as its subject visual objects and practices of vision and visuality. For our purposes here, we identify visual studies as the interdisciplinary field that takes as its object the diverse and dynamic arena of visual culture. Whatever terminology one uses, we contend that the field and its objects of study are necessarily bound up with each other in ways that are inherently political. This interrelation is one of the fundamental premises on which visual studies was founded: that acts of looking and acts of making things visible (or invisible) matter.
Visual studies emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a way to connect Marxist, feminist, poststructural, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial theories to the study of art, film, and media and to visual objects and the practices of visuality itself, broadly conceived of. Its genesis was informed by a number of revolutionary developments in humanities scholarship in the late twentieth century, including the cultural studies of the Birmingham School for Social Research (demonstrated in the work of scholars such as Stuart Hall, Angela McRobbie, and Raymond Williams), psychoanalytic film theory (as exemplified by Laura Mulvey and Christian Metz), the Marxist and feminist turns in art history (embodied in the work of Meyer Schapiro, T. J. Clark, Griselda Pollack, and Linda Nochlin, among others), the translation and popularization of key texts in French cultural theory (such as those of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan) and Frankfurt School philosophy (represented by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Juergen Habermas, and Sigfried Kracauer). Pioneers of visual studies similarly imagined it as a renegade field, pushing at the boundaries of formal disciplines to challenge established paradigms of looking and seeing. Also central to the foundation of visual culture as a field of inquiry was the political project of postmodernism. Theorists of postmodernity (among them Jean Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Frederic Jameson) highlighted the demise of grand narratives, the importance of identity and relative subject positions, and the contingency of art and culture on the economy and politics. The sense of urgency to contextualize and politicize culture, to understand our own agencies and biases as authors, and to construct histories alternative to those written within traditional disciplines led to a sense of progressive political possibility in the study of media, art, and culture.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, visual studies began to become institutionalized. Academic programs were established in the United States and England, and the publication of foundational textbooks and readers helped to delimit the parameters of the field and to establish the key tropes of visual culture (see, for example, Bryson, Holly, and Moxey 1994; Mirzoeff 1998; Evans and Hall 1999; Sturken and Cartwright 2001). These concerns include the dynamics of the gaze, technologies of vision, the politics of representation, conceptions of space and surveillance, and changing notions of the body, subjectivity, and identity. By the turn of this century, professional organizations such as the College Art Association and the American Studies Association had established visual culture caucuses to showcase emerging work in the field, and visual studies saw strong representation at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Modern Language Association as well. In 2011 the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture was developed, transforming scholarly communications and publishing platforms for born‐digital and performance‐based material.
The collaboration that produced this volume is itself a product of the institutionalization of visual studies as an interdiscipline. We, the editors, met in the Visual and Cultural Studies (VCS) program at the University of Rochester in the early years of the twenty‐first century. VCS was founded in 1989 as a program in Comparative Arts (the name was changed to Visual and Cultural Studies program in 1991). Drawing together faculty from the departments of Art History, English, Modern Languages and Cultures, and Anthropology, the program’s founders shared an interest in poststructuralism. Founding faculty member Michael Ann Holly presents the genesis of the program as organic—a congregation of like‐minded scholars who, as D. N. Rodowick, another former faculty member, put it, sought to “get outside one’s field and exploit other resources” (Rodowick, quoted in Dikovitskaya 2005, 93).
Joan Saab joined the VCS program in 1999 as a junior faculty member with degrees in American studies and material culture studies. Aubrey Anable and Catherine Zuromskis came to it as doctoral students with backgrounds in women’s studies and film studies and in art history and cultural studies respectively. VCS was a space for all three of us to pursue avenues of inquiry that might not have been possible in more traditional programs. This experience informs our current teaching and writing on film, studio art, art history, media studies, game studies, material culture, performance, and space and the built environment. Because of our shared background, we come to the study of visual culture with a particular perspective, one shaped by the influential ideas of key faculty members in the VCS program—some of whom contributed to this volume—and nurtured through our participation in this dynamic scholarly community. This perspective emphasizes the infusion of activism and political urgency into humanities scholarship, the importance of engaging objects and discourses beyond film and art, and the necessity of interdisciplinarity to the study of certain kinds of visual objects and practices. We bring this perspective to the construction of the present volume.
Over the past thirty years, visual studies has matured and moved away from the margins. It is today an academic field established nationally and internationally, and is represented in the work of an increasingly diverse group of scholars with a broad range of social, cultural, and generational perspectives. This is in part due to a growing understanding, in a variety of disciplines (art history, literary studies, film and media studies, etc.), of the limitations of conventional cultural categories and traditional modes of disciplinary inquiry. Consequently, visual studies has intersected in vital ways with fields such as queer theory, critical race theory, disability studies, new materialism, and posthumanism. Yet the broader acceptance of visual culture as an intellectual project has also generated resistance within the academy. In 1996, the journal October published its now notorious “Visual Culture Questionnaire,” which was deeply critical of visual studies, suggesting that it was “helping, in its own modest, academic way, to produce subjects for the next stage of globalized capital” (October 1996, 25). Relatedly, the very concept of interdisciplinarity has become fraught. While it offers sites of tremendous potential for exciting and transformative scholarship, it is also an all‐too‐convenient excuse for the neoliberal restructuring of university curricula without the infusion of new resources. Visual studies as a field is no exception. Some understandably wonder whether the institutionalization of the field has dulled its critical bite. As W. J. T. Mitchell argues in this volume, “I am all for visual culture studies serving as a source of ideas and tactics for the critical exposure of the spectacle. But I don’t see it as uniquely positioned as a form of political action—not any more than other disciplines of the social sciences and humanities.”
Also at issue are the limitations of vision as a framework for cultural inquiry. With the increasing ubiquity of images as a phenomenon of contemporary digital life, the sheer volume of visual culture in the present moment is so vast and its content so ephemeral and mutable as to almost defy comprehension. Visuality can seem at times too broad and overdetermined a concept through which to grasp the present. Some media scholars, for example, have rejected visual studies, arguing that computers are fundamentally non‐optical technologies and that attention to the visual distracts us from the “real” sources of power, which are in the opaque, or even invisible realms of code, or in datasets so vast that they exceed human perception (see for example the work of Alexander Galloway and Friedrich Kittler). Given these critiques and important insights, we might well ask: why visual studies now? What is the urgency of a visual culture reader in the present moment?
Our answer is this: given the challenges and complexities of these new realities, the intellectual and political project of visual studies is especially necessary. Many of the political goals that drove the study of visual culture remain unfulfilled. Even as scholars mark the end of postmodernism as a set of historical conditions, it is apparent that many of the issues that postmodern criticism found to be most urgent are still awaiting resolution. At the time of this writing, we are witnessing the resurgence of hypernationalist demagoguery on a global scale, a looming climate change disaster, the escalation of anti‐immigrant rhetoric, the revitalization of white power, increasing economic disparities in first‐world nations, the co‐opting of poststructuralism and postmodernism to promote “alternative facts,” and, most recently, the widespread effects of a global pandemic. We cannot begin to address these threats, much less combat them, without understanding how they operate through visual (and other) forms of culture.
Moreover, while the rapid proliferation of new kinds of digital platforms and technologies in recent years has made the study of visual culture more challenging than ever, we believe that turning away from visual analysis reinforces the problematic idea that digital media are distinct from other forms of human cultural production. By contrast, we believe that these contemporary conditions underscore the continuing relevance of the questions that have always animated visual studies: What is the relationship between seeing and knowing? How do looking and visibility structure power relations? The chapters in this volume bear out the ongoing urgency of these questions. And while visual culture, particularly in the present moment, works both for and against us, we cannot retreat from visuality just because it makes us vulnerable. To paraphrase the words of Douglas Crimp, visual culture continues to offer a site of possibility for getting the culture that we deserve, as scholars and, more broadly, as cultural consumers. It is the playing field, and it is crucial that we understand how it operates, for good and for ill.
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This book is organized as a series of non‐traditional keyword essays (Part II) preceded by an introductory Part I, which we call “Scenes from the Institutionalization of the Field.” The preliminary material in Part I offers a brief history of the formation of visual studies; and it does so through a series of essays, interviews, and personal reflections from key figures in its foundation, dissemination, and critique. These “scenes” present various accounts of the influences, interests, and conflicts that determined the emergence and establishment of the field and shaped it over the past thirty years.
The keyword essays in Part II are grouped into five sections whose subject headings are “History,” “Ecologies,” “Mediations,” “Agencies,” and “Politics.” These subject headings and the keywords grouped under them as chapter titles are intended to be neither mutually exclusive nor comprehensive. Instead, these terms highlight the fertile and interrelating elements of visual culture scholarship in the present moment. The keywords are intentionally broad and, in choosing them, we sought to avoid jargon or particular scholarly trends. Rather than presenting traditional keyword essays that offer surveys of the existing literature or seek to conclusively define their terms, we invited contributors to approach their topics creatively, to propose their own takes, or to present case studies that connect a given keyword to their own scholarly interests. Ultimately, we hope that these essays will produce a dialogue between ideas and areas of inquiry that will enrich and expand our understanding of visual culture and its operations, from its historical origins to its present manifestations and its possible futures.
References
Bryson, Norman, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds. 1994.
Visual Culture: Images and Interpretation
. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Dikovitskaya, Margaret. 2005.
Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn
. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
The Editors. 1996. “Visual Culture Questionnaire.”
October
77: 25–70.
Evans, Jessica and Stuart Hall. 1999.
Visual Culture: The Reader
. London: Sage Publications in association with the Open University.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed. 1998.
The Visual Culture Reader
. London: Routledge.
Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. 2001.
Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture
. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
PART IScenes from the Institutionalization of the Field
Chapter 1Practices of Visual Culture Pedagogy
Lisa Cartwright and Marita Sturken
In this chapter we approach visual culture pedagogy through an account of our academic training and work histories as they informed our book Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture in its three very different editions (2001, 2008, 2018). Our experience was unusually broad, spanning art and media practice, cultural studies, critical theory, cultural history, and media activism. Through this mixed approach we helped to introduce a range of images and image‐making cultures and technologies, beyond art and film, to the then nascent visual culture field. In the account we give here of that process we aim to show how, in the 1990s, visual culture was not just a new direction in art history or a merger between art history and film studies. Rather the field’s emergence was also motivated by political movements and their multimodal forms of practice, as well as by a commitment to recognizing and studying images and imaging technologies at work in a host of institutions and practices beyond fine art, popular media, and art cinema during a period of extraordinary technological transformation around the visual.
Our initial project, launched in the mid‐1990s, was to respond to the complex and messy ways in which the visual, in all of its historicity, was becoming integral to all aspects of everyday life. We hoped to draw together a combined yet flexible set of theories and methods through which readers might approach and interpret the lived and practiced relationship among visual modalities in social interaction across a spectrum of contexts—including fine art, cinema, television, advertising, and emergent new media. The visual took on new urgency in the 1990s, the decade during which visual and time‐based graphic systems became ubiquitous in personal computing and in art, science, and medicine. The book was launched during a global health crisis (the ongoing AIDS pandemic) and on the cusp of the release of specialized and consumer‐accessible digital visual and time‐based computer imaging and graphics systems, image archive digitization tools, mobile phone cameras, and a host of other visual technologies. These changes impacted not only the arts and consumer cultures but also education, medicine, science, and law, fields through which imaging and visuality were becoming more central to the practice of everyday life as well as to systems of knowledge and power.
We were initially inspired by John Berger’s (1972) Ways of Seeing, a classic that, despite its continued popularity, by the mid‐1990s had fallen out of sync with the times. We wanted to write a short work, evocative and readable, that would update Berger’s seemingly timeless text. We aimed to expand its focus from photography and fine art not only to film and popular media but also to media’s new uses in the nascent digital era—uses that went beyond art and popular culture. The cultural context of the 1990s seemed to demand such a widening of scope. AIDS activism had politicized art practice and critical theory in ways that made clear the role of art and the media, and of art and media theory, in contemporary queer, feminist, and radical movement politics. And they also made clear the extent to which imaging was becoming increasingly indispensable not only to voicing rights, but also to the critical interrogation and remaking of knowledge discourses and treatment practices. Public health media and biomedical research, information, and knowledge were increasingly being produced via visual and audiovisual formats. In addition, critical communication studies, with its emphasis on information systems and popular media channels and flows, became conversant with art theory at this very time, in part to theorize this new shift toward visual knowledge and practice in the public sphere and in institutional contexts.
Volume 43 of October, a 1987 issue edited by Douglas Crimp and titled AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, was a watershed in this regard. The arts journal included work by Paula A. Treichler, a feminist linguistics and communication studies scholar whose analysis deftly spanned advocacy for and theory of activist video art, popular media critique, and interpretation of knowledge production in biomedical research and public health. By the mid‐1990s, video and digital media forms, which were new at the time, had been introduced as objects of study not only in art history but also in communication studies. Queer and feminist visual artists and theorists were taking on media cultures and technoscience. Yet there was not yet a cohesive primer through which to introduce to readers the tactical alliances and intersections available and enlisted into action across those fields and across the divide between criticism or theory on the one hand and research‐based art practice and activism on the other. We hoped to speak to artists, activists, and theorists as well as to scholars by bridging these areas with the help of a mix of theories and methods that would bring out the stakes of working on the visual in a cohesive yet syncretic way.
In research‐based art practice during this time, drawing, photography, film, media, and performance were being used in ways that moved beyond the closed frameworks of structuralism and formalism. This was evident in the work of the “pictures generation” artists and new narrative filmmakers, as well as in a number of other 1990s approaches to practice that incorporated criticism and theory. This suggested to us the need for a rethinking of the mix of critical theories that could support this poststructuralist movement away from dogmatic adherence to form. At the same time, the dogmatism of poststructural deconstructive and psychoanalytic critical theory of the 1980s and early 1990s came into question as theorists took stock of the unintended impact of totalizing theories of power and knowledge. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick noted, totalizing criticism made it harder rather than easier to account for local and contingent relationships among knowledge, experience, and its forms of explanation, exchange, interpretation, representation, criticism, and experience (Sedgwick 2002, 123–151). Picture‐generation appropriation politics reigned as art practitioners such as Barbara Kruger took up proto‐social media forms to do theory by other means. The redirecting of modernist practice and theory toward postmodernist tactics such as irony, parody, nostalgia, and appropriation was a turn we wanted to contextualize historically and to examine in ways that remained open to tactical experimentation with older modernist and formalist methods and theories, which we also aimed to introduce in the book. Our goal was not so much to unify and streamline theory around the “now” of postmodern formations as it was to capture this mix in all its messy yet productive contradictions and future possibilities, which required accounting for the potentiality and failures of theory in modernity.
In retrospect, this description of our approaches can perhaps make our initial foray sound more systematic than it was. In fact our aim was largely shaped by the work we had done as practitioners and early career scholars, and were currently doing—in part through writing and curating and, importantly, through what we were teaching and wanted to teach in our classes: the kinds of images and practices that we wanted to interpret with our students, and the kinds of connections across social arenas and domains of practice that we wanted our students to make. Our particular institutional placements demanded a kind of bridging work and explanatory labor that was somewhat unusual in its scope, for that time. Focus on everyday image cultures or on biomedical imaging practice was not common in film and media studies or in art history of the era. Teaching across history/theory and practice was relatively new. American cultural studies was largely organized around the popular. In conceptualizing Practices of Looking, we hoped to account for an emergent field that crossed art history, film studies, media studies, cultural studies, and critical, research‐based, and activist practice‐based art and media and to provide a resource, on the cusp of the digital turn, that would offer a flexible set of tactics for approaching the visual—without mandating particular interpretations or a de rigueur set of methods. We were aiming for flexible means of theorization that would work across forms. Whereas the visual culture methods emerging around the new art history emphasized semiotics, film studies was forwarding psychoanalytic and narrative interpretive methods in parallel conversations. Yet few options were in place if one wanted to make sense of the differences or to work across these discourses in cultures of convergence—an activity that includes the traditional academic disciplines and not just media formats.
While we were writing the first edition of our book, the historical images under discussion in art and photography history classes were not yet digitized, and not yet available on the Internet or in searchable databases. Easy access to digital reproduction through licensing—at a cost, from private image brokers, and in some cases for free, from public institutional collections—was still just over the horizon. Imaging and image reproduction were themselves becoming more
