Visual culture
Encyclopedia
Visual Culture as an academic subject is a field of study that generally includes some combination of cultural studies
, art history
, critical theory, philosophy, and anthropology
, by focusing on aspects of culture that rely on visual images
.
, psychoanalytic theory
, gender studies, queer theory, and the study of television
; it can also include video game studies, comics
, traditional artistic media
, advertising
, the Internet
, and any other medium that has a crucial visual component.
The field’s versatility stems from the range of objects contained under the term “visual culture,” which aggregates “visual events in which information, meaning or pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology.” The term “visual technology” refers any media designed for purposes of perception or with the potential to augment our visual capability.
Because of the changing technological aspects of visual culture as well as a scientific method-derived desire to create taxonomies or articulate what the "visual" is, many aspects of Visual Culture overlap with the study of science and technology, including hybrid electronic media, cognitive science, neurology, and image and brain theory. In an interview with the Journal of Visual Culture, renowned academic Martin Jay
explicates the rise of this tie between the visual and the technological: “Insofar as we live in a culture whose technological advances abet the production and dissemination of such images at a hitherto unimagined level, it is necessary to focus on how they work and what they do, rather than move past them too quickly to the ideas they represent or the reality they purport to depict. In so doing, we necessarily have to ask questions about . . . technological mediations and extensions of visual experience.”
It also may overlap with another emerging field, that of "Performance Studies." As “the turn from art history to visual culture studies parallels a turn from theater studies to performance studies,” it is clear that the perspectival shift that both emerging fields embody is comparable. "Visual Culture" goes by a variety of names at different institutions, including Visual and Critical Studies, Visual and Cultural Studies, and Visual Studies.
(Ways of Seeing
, 1972) and Laura Mulvey
(Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1975) that follows on from Jacques Lacan
's theorization of the unconscious gaze
. Twentieth-century pioneers such as György Kepes
and William Ivins, Jr.
as well as iconic phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty
also played important roles in creating a foundation for the discipline.
Major work on visual culture has been done by W. J. T. Mitchell
, particularly in his books Iconology and Picture Theory and by the art historian and cultural theorist Griselda Pollock
. Other writers important to visual culture include Stuart Hall
, Roland Barthes
, Jean-François Lyotard
, Rosalind Krauss, Paul Crowther and Slavoj Žižek
. Continuing work has been done by Lisa Cartwright, Margarita Dikovitskaya, Chris Jencks, Nicholas Mirzoeff
and Gail Finney
.
Visual Culture studies have been increasingly important in religious studies through the work of David Morgan, Sally Promey, Jeffrey F. Hamburger
, and S. Brent Plate.
clarifies, “Although images of all kinds have long served as illustrations of arguments made discursively, the growth of visual culture as a field has allowed them to be examined more in their own terms as complex figural artifacts or the stimulants to visual experiences.”
Likewise, W. J. T. Mitchell
explicitly distinguishes the two fields in his claim that visual culture studies “helps us to see that even something as broad as the image does not exhaust the field of visuality; that visual studies is not the same thing as image studies, and that the study of the visual image is just one component of the larger field.”
Cultural studies
Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural...
, art history
Art history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...
, critical theory, philosophy, and anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
, by focusing on aspects of culture that rely on visual images
Image
An image is an artifact, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person.-Characteristics:...
.
Overview
Among theorists working within contemporary culture, this field of study often overlaps with film studiesFilm theory
Film theory is an academic discipline that aims to explore the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large...
, psychoanalytic theory
Psychoanalytic theory
Psychoanalytic theory refers to the definition and dynamics of personality development which underlie and guide psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy. First laid out by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work...
, gender studies, queer theory, and the study of television
Television studies
Television studies is an academic discipline that deals with critical approaches to television. Usually, it is distinguished from mass-communication research, which tends to approach the topic from an empirical perspective...
; it can also include video game studies, comics
Comics
Comics denotes a hybrid medium having verbal side of its vocabulary tightly tied to its visual side in order to convey narrative or information only, the latter in case of non-fiction comics, seeking synergy by using both visual and verbal side in...
, traditional artistic media
Visual arts
The visual arts are art forms that create works which are primarily visual in nature, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, and often modern visual arts and architecture...
, advertising
Advertising
Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...
, the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, and any other medium that has a crucial visual component.
The field’s versatility stems from the range of objects contained under the term “visual culture,” which aggregates “visual events in which information, meaning or pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology.” The term “visual technology” refers any media designed for purposes of perception or with the potential to augment our visual capability.
Because of the changing technological aspects of visual culture as well as a scientific method-derived desire to create taxonomies or articulate what the "visual" is, many aspects of Visual Culture overlap with the study of science and technology, including hybrid electronic media, cognitive science, neurology, and image and brain theory. In an interview with the Journal of Visual Culture, renowned academic Martin Jay
Martin Jay
Martin Jay is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a renowned Intellectual Historian and his research interests have been groundbreaking in connecting history with other academic and intellectual activities, such as the Critical Theory of...
explicates the rise of this tie between the visual and the technological: “Insofar as we live in a culture whose technological advances abet the production and dissemination of such images at a hitherto unimagined level, it is necessary to focus on how they work and what they do, rather than move past them too quickly to the ideas they represent or the reality they purport to depict. In so doing, we necessarily have to ask questions about . . . technological mediations and extensions of visual experience.”
It also may overlap with another emerging field, that of "Performance Studies." As “the turn from art history to visual culture studies parallels a turn from theater studies to performance studies,” it is clear that the perspectival shift that both emerging fields embody is comparable. "Visual Culture" goes by a variety of names at different institutions, including Visual and Critical Studies, Visual and Cultural Studies, and Visual Studies.
History
Early work on visual culture has been done by John BergerJohn Berger
John Peter Berger is an English art critic, novelist, painter and author. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text.-Education:Born in Hackney, London, England, Berger was...
(Ways of Seeing
Ways of Seeing
Ways of Seeing is a 1972 BBC four-part television series of 30 minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. Berger's scripts were adapted into a book of the same name. The series and book criticize traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about...
, 1972) and Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London...
(Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1975) that follows on from Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
's theorization of the unconscious gaze
Gaze
Gaze is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan to describe the anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be viewed. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses some sense of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object...
. Twentieth-century pioneers such as György Kepes
György Kepes
György Kepes was a Hungarian-born painter, designer, educator and art theorist. After emigrating to the U.S. in 1937, he taught design at the New Bauhaus in Chicago...
and William Ivins, Jr.
William Ivins, Jr.
William Mills Ivins, Jr. was curator of the department of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from its founding in 1916 until 1946, when he was succeeded by A. Hyatt Mayor.The son of William Mills Ivins, Sr...
as well as iconic phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...
also played important roles in creating a foundation for the discipline.
Major work on visual culture has been done by W. J. T. Mitchell
W. J. T. Mitchell
William J. Thomas Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is also the editor of Critical Inquiry, and contributes to the journal October....
, particularly in his books Iconology and Picture Theory and by the art historian and cultural theorist Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock is a prominent art historian and cultural analyst, and a world-renowned scholar of international, post-colonial feminist studies in the visual arts. She is best known for her theoretical and methodological innovation, combined with deeply engaged readings of historical and...
. Other writers important to visual culture include Stuart Hall
Stuart Hall (cultural theorist)
Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of...
, Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
, Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition...
, Rosalind Krauss, Paul Crowther and Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, critical theorist working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis....
. Continuing work has been done by Lisa Cartwright, Margarita Dikovitskaya, Chris Jencks, Nicholas Mirzoeff
Nicholas Mirzoeff
Dr. Nicholas Mirzoeff is a visual culture theorist and professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He is best known for his work developing the field of visual culture and for his many books and his widely used textbook on the subject.-Affiliations:*...
and Gail Finney
Gail Finney
Gail Finney is a Democratic member of the Kansas House of Representatives, representing the 84th district. She has served since 2009....
.
Visual Culture studies have been increasingly important in religious studies through the work of David Morgan, Sally Promey, Jeffrey F. Hamburger
Jeffrey F. Hamburger
Jeffrey F. Hamburger is an American art historian specializing in medieval religious art and illuminated manuscripts. In 2000 he joined the faculty of Harvard University, where in 2008 he was appointed the Kuno Francke Professor of German Art and Culture...
, and S. Brent Plate.
Differentiating Between Visual Culture Studies and Image Studies
While the image remains a focal point in visual culture studies, it is the relations between images and consumers that are evaluated for their cultural significance, not just the image in and of itself. Martin JayMartin Jay
Martin Jay is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a renowned Intellectual Historian and his research interests have been groundbreaking in connecting history with other academic and intellectual activities, such as the Critical Theory of...
clarifies, “Although images of all kinds have long served as illustrations of arguments made discursively, the growth of visual culture as a field has allowed them to be examined more in their own terms as complex figural artifacts or the stimulants to visual experiences.”
Likewise, W. J. T. Mitchell
W. J. T. Mitchell
William J. Thomas Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is also the editor of Critical Inquiry, and contributes to the journal October....
explicitly distinguishes the two fields in his claim that visual culture studies “helps us to see that even something as broad as the image does not exhaust the field of visuality; that visual studies is not the same thing as image studies, and that the study of the visual image is just one component of the larger field.”
See also
- Art educationArt educationArt education is the area of learning that is based upon the visual, tangible arts—drawing, painting, sculpture, and design in jewelry, pottery, weaving, fabrics, etc. and design applied to more practical fields such as commercial graphics and home furnishings...
- Art historyArt historyArt history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...
- Asemic writingAsemic writingAsemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means "having no specific semantic content". With the nonspecificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would...
- Media influenceMedia influenceMedia influence or media effects are used in media studies, psychology, communication theory and sociology to refer to the theories about the ways in which mass media affect how their audiences think and behave....
- MediascapeMediascapeThe term mediascape describes the way that visual imagery impacts the world.Such imagery comes from books, magazines, television, cinema, and, above all, advertising that can directly impact the landscape and also subtly influence, through persuasive techniques and an increasingly pervasive...
- Visual anthropologyVisual anthropologyVisual anthropology is a subfield of cultural anthropology that is concerned, in part, with the study and production of ethnographic photography, film and, since the mid-1990s, new media...
- Visual rhetoricVisual rhetoricVisual rhetoric is the fairly recent development of a theoretical framework describing how visual images communicate, as opposed to aural, verbal, or other messages. The study of visual rhetoric is different from that of visual or graphic design, in that it emphasizes images as sensory expressions...
- Visual literacyVisual literacyVisual literacy is the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image. Visual literacy is based on the idea that pictures can be “read” and that meaning can be communicated through a process of reading....
- Visual artsVisual artsThe visual arts are art forms that create works which are primarily visual in nature, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, and often modern visual arts and architecture...
- Visual ethicsVisual ethicsVisual ethics is an emerging interdisciplinary field of scholarship that brings together religious studies, philosophy, photo and video journalism, visual arts, and cognitive science in order to explore the ways human beings relate to others ethically through visual perception...
- GazeGazeGaze is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan to describe the anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be viewed. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses some sense of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object...
- SublimeSublime (literary)The sublime is a form of expression in literature in which the author refers to things in nature or art that affect the mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power. It is calculated to inspire awe, deep reverence, or lofty emotion, by reason of its beauty, vastness, or grandeur...
- Visual Culture CaucusVisual Culture CaucusThe Visual Culture Caucus is a membership organization formed to promote and advance the discussion of visual culture in both critical and artistic practice and interdisciplinary contact with those working to similar ends in other visual media. The caucus represents academics and artists in the...
- Visual sociologyVisual sociologyVisual sociology is an area of sociology concerned with the visual dimensions of social life. This subdiscipline is nurtured by the , which holds annual conferences and publishes the journal, ....
- Visual Studies
- Visual communicationVisual communicationVisual communication as the name suggests is communication through visual aid and is described as the conveyance of ideas and information in forms that can be read or looked upon...
Further reading (Books)
- Jay, Martin (ed.), 'The State of Visual Culture Studies', themed issue of Journal of Visual Culture, vol.4, no.2, August 2005, London: SageSAGE PublicationsSAGE is an independent academic publisher of books, journals, and electronic products in the humanities and social sciences and the scientific, technical, and medical fields. SAGE was founded in 1965 by George McCune and Sara Miller McCune. The company is headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California,...
. ISSN 14704129. eISSN 17412994 - Plate, S. Brent, Religion, Art, and Visual Culture. (New York: Palgrave MacmillanPalgrave MacmillanPalgrave Macmillan is an international academic and trade publishing company, headquartered in Basingstoke, Hampshire, England, United Kingdom and with offices in New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Hong Kong, Delhi, Johannesburg. It was created in 2000 when St...
, 2002) ISBN 0-312-24029-5 - Smith, Marquard, 'Visual Culture Studies: Questions of History, Theory, and Practice' in Jones, AmeliaAmelia JonesAmelia Jones is an American art historian, art critic and curator specializing in feminist art, body/performance art, video art and Dadaism. Her written works and approach to modern and contemporary art history are considered revolutionary in that she breaks down commonly assumed opinions and...
(ed.) A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. ISBN 9781405135429
External links
- Journal of Visual Culture | Publisher's Website
- Visual Studies journal
- Culture Visuelle social media
- Kenyan Art Gallery
- viz.: Rhetoric, Visual Culture, Pedagogy
- William Blake and Visual Culture: A Special Issue of the Journal Imagetext
- Material collection from Introduction to Media Theory and Visual Culture, by Professor Martin Irvine
- Visual Culture Collective
- Duke University Visual Studies Initiative
- Visual Studies @ University of Houston
- International Visual Sociology Association
- Visual Studies @ University of California, Irvine
- Centre for Visual & Cultural Studies, Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland
- Visual Culture in Britain, Journal
- Visual Studies @ University of California, Santa Cruz
- Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture book series
- Contemporary International Visual Culture