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
1 Bryson, Norman, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds. 1994. Visual Culture: Images and Interpretation. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
2 Dikovitskaya, Margaret. 2005. Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
3 The Editors. 1996. “Visual Culture Questionnaire.” October 77: 25–70.
4 Evans, Jessica and Stuart Hall. 1999. Visual Culture: The Reader. London: Sage Publications in association with the Open University.
5 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed. 1998. The Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge.
6 Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. 2001. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chapter 1 Practices 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.