Stable URL:

Transcription

1 Visual Culture: A New Paradigm William Innes Homer American Art, Vol. 12, No. 1. (Spring, 1998), pp Stable URL: American Art is currently published by Smithsonian American Art Museum. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Sun Jan 27 11:27:

2 Commentary Visual Culture A New Paradigm William Innes Homer Within the past three or four years, the phenomenon known as visual culture (often capitalized) has come into its own as a fresh approach to objects and images-a kind of "new, new art history," to borrow from art historian Marsha Meskimmon. The rise of this novel approach suggests that there is something wrong with art history as it has been practiced, a field traditionally concerned with "transhistorical truths, timeless works of art, and unchanging critical criteria." Visual culture has already replaced the typical chronological art history survey at places like Harvard, Swarthmore, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. At Harvard, for example, the new course (dating from 1994) treats the material thematically and "introduces students to the history of methods and debates in the field, rather than asking them to memorize names, dates, and works of art." Books on visual culture, such as Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (1994), edited by Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey; Good Looking Essays on the Virtue of Images (1996) by Barbara Stafford; and Languages of Visuality (1996), edited by Beate Albert, are beginning to roll from the presses. And this new approach is starting to make inroads in the sessions held at the annual meeting of the College Art Association. Significantly, W. J. T. Mitchell's book Picture Tbeo y: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (1994) won the Charles Rufus Morey Prize offered by its namesake organization in Yet, in spite of this recognition, visual culture pursued to its logical conclusion "is not a tweaking of art history," as Anne Higonnet has pointed out. It is, rather, "a fundamental disruption."' But unlike traditional art history, it has as yet no theories and no master narrative. It is a youthful, amorphous medium that is still trying to find its own identity. In his book and in two recent articles, Mitchell has characterized visual culture better than anyone to date. He points out that the new field-"the study of the social construction of visual experiencen-represents a "pictorial turn" that permeates a whole variety of fields and disciplines. It requires, he says, "conversations among art historians, film scholars, optical technologists and theorists, phenomenologists, psychoanalysts, and anthropologists." The construction of visual culture is thus interdisciplinary, but he warns us that its practitioners should avoid a fashionable, glib interdisciplinarity for its own sake. Mitchell prefers the idea of "indiscipline," his code word for remaining faithful to one discipline while probing new areas of inquiry like visual culture. Mitchell, however, consistently tips his hat to a variety of disciplines to which visual culture should be responsive-"art history, literary and media studies, and cultural studies."' 6 Spring 1998

3 Thomas Eakins, Perspective Drawingfor "The Pair-Oared Shell, " Pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper, x cm (31 % x 47 5/s in.). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Thomas Skelton Harrison Fund Like the rationalized visual field in Eakins's drawing, the multidimensional nature of visual culture has challenged many art historians to take a more penetrating look at art. Visual culture, unlike traditional art history, may concern itself with mass culture and the popular arts (it shares this interest with cultural studies, but Mitchell cautions us not to regard visual culture as the "visual front" of cultural studies). For this reason, visual culture finds a natural home in film studies programs and departments. Yet visual culture, unlike the orientation of film programs to contemporary or recent materials, can easily address itself to the remote past. Image versus text has become the central issue among advocates of what I call the new visuality. Because we live in a world filled with images, we should, Mitchell contends, address pictures in our studies with the kind of reverence we traditionally hold for texts. The new discipline offers an antidote to the preoccupation with textuality associated with the structuralism and poststructuralism of the 1970s and 1980s, when everything became a text and much critical theory was dominated by the internal dialogue between one text and another. Visual culture, by contrast, relies in large part on sensory experienceparticularly the visual-and this reliance provides a welcome relief to the self-referential world of linguistic relations. Barbara Stafford aptly articulated this tension when she wrote in her 1996 book: "I am arguing that we need to disestablish the view of cognition as dominantly and aggressively linguistic. It is narcissistic tribal compulsion to overemphasize the agency of logos [the word] and annihilate rival imaginarie~."~ Stafford is perhaps the most vehement and vocal advocate for the visual. She feels that far too much attention has been given to word-text-oriented thinking and that the visual 7 American Art

4 has been disparaged or ignored. The seen world, she says, is a vibrant source of information, ranking with and often surpassing the semiotic as a source of knowledge about a given time and place. Unlike Mitchell, who hesitates to endorse a fully interdisciplinary approach to art history, Stafford embraces every imaginable field-from optics to natural history-as long as it sheds light on the object of her inquiry. And while Mitchell advocates a balanced interchange between image and text, Stafford opts for the primacy of the visual. She thus seems more emphatically avant-garde than Mitchell in her views. Or perhaps she is more retardataire:she looks backward to late-nineteenth- and In spite of the recent eforts to define visual culture, it remains - a slippery concept. early-twentieth-century art history, when visual and aesthetic experience and broad cultural contexts were cherished, separately or together, by the art historical community. If Stafford is leaning toward the past, perhaps she is caught up in postmodern nostalgia. But unlike so many linguistic postmodernists, she does not deconstruct earlier times, but rather mines them for their affirmative, positive value. In recent conversations with friends, I have often said that encountering visual culture is something like rediscovering the wheel-the wheel being the discipline of art history as it was practiced before it was politicized as the new art history some fifteen or twenty years ago. The new art history opened up the field to a panoply of approaches-marxism, feminism, gay and lesbian theory, postcolonialism, deconstructionism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis. In different ways, these varied modes helped break down the exclusive canon of great masterpieces fabricated by white Western European males, as well as the privileging of the fine over the popular arts. In the new art history, art was seen at one extreme as a text, without an "author," or at the other, as a political instrument for social, gender, or class justice. At both poles and anywhere in between, the visual played a small part or none at all. Indeed, "scopic regimes" (as described by Martin Jay) or the power of the "gaze" (as articulated by Norman Bryson) were to be avoided. The advent of visual culture, however, changed all that. Looking and feeling-experiencing through the visual and other senses-are on their way back. It is no longer a crime to speak of the author as the maker of a work of art or of the spectator as a sentient being, capable of experiencing a full range of sensations. In spite of the recent efforts to define visual culture, it remains a slippery concept. Perhaps it is too new to have clear-cut boundaries, or possibly it defines itself principally by what it is not. Mitchell seized upon visual culture's elusive nature: It names a problematic rather than a well-defined theoretical object. Unlike feminism, gender studies, or studies in race and ethnicity, it is not apolitical movement, not even an academic movement like cultural studies. Visuality, unlike race or gender or class, has no innate politics. Like language, it is a medium in which politics (and identzfcation, desire, and sociability) are conducted * From one point of view, visual culture may be a postmodern tool that deconstructs what is outdated and useless. But it also offers new opportunities to those seeking to reform art history. Through visual culture, we may once again revel in visual sensations and experiences, welcome the interdisciplinary, rejoice in the profundity of high art as well as the vitality of mass or popular culture, and view culture nonpolitically, almost from an anthropological perspective. The multidimensional Erwin Panofsky, in recent years seen 8 Spring 1998

5 as a dinosaur of art history, now enjoys renewed popularity, especially for his studies of Renaissance perspective. Mitchell calls him "an inevitable model and starting point for any general account of what is now called 'visual cult~re.'"~ Visual culture may only be a passing fad. But given the inevitability of change in the fashions of art historical theory, I would estimate that visual culture's time has come and that both semiotic poststructuralism and socially based approaches may begin to lose ground. As with any movement-artistic or theoretical-this change will take time, but at the moment visual culture has a great deal of momentum and offers fresh new fields for discovery and insight. 1 Marsha Meskimmon, "Visuality: The New, New Art History?" A n Hirtory20 (June 1997): 331; for quotation on traditional history, see Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds., Ksual Culture: Images andintetpretations (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994),p. xv; for quotation on Harvard course, see Scott Heller, "What Are They Doing to Art History?"A n News 96 (January 1997): 102; and Higonnet, quoted in Heller, p W. J. T. Mitchell, "Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture," Art Bulletin 77 (December 1995): Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue oflmages (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 19961, p Mitchell, "Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture," p W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994),p American Art