CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

Visual Culture Studies: Theoretical Frameworks and Pedagogy I

Organiser: Margaret Dikovitskaya

Rusted, Brian (University of Calgary, Canada) RETRIEVING THE CULTURAL IN VISUAL CULTURE
During the last decade, the phrase 'visual culture' has come to identify a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of visual aspects of everyday life. While analytic perspectives may come from gender, race, media theory, political economy, psychoanalysis, and so forth, there is an apparent agreement about the critical objectives of research and the relation of the visual to subjectivity and social organization. The travelling of critical and cultural theory across traditional disciplinary boundaries has given 'visual culture' an institutional form through new degrees, programs, cross-faculty appointments, courses, introductory textbooks, and research publications. This paper has three goals: 1) to comment of the intellectual history of 'visual culture'; 2) to identify cultural aspects of visual research that have been understated in recent formulations; and 3) to assess the research potential of such an interdisciplinary formation. This paper argues that the current institutional form of visual culture research has resulted in the disappearance of anthropological and specifically cultural study of the visual. These goals will be developed in relation to a case study involving popular photography and the image of the Canadian north.

Rampley, Matthew (Edinburgh College of Art, United Kingdom) WHATEVER HAPPENED TO MATERIAL CULTURE?
The rise of the study of visual culture is frequently seen as echoing that of Cultural Studies in the 1970s. As Cultural Studies critiqued the values underpinning the traditional Humanities, so visual culture undertaking a parallel critique of the exclusions and ideological of Art History. This paper will dispute such a reading, examining the absence of material culture within Visual Cultural Studies. It argues that Visual Culture, dependent on discourses primarily concerned with representation, has replaced one set of exclusions with another; though Art History was tied to a 'museographical' impulse (Preziosi), it nevertheless considered the semantics of material objects. Within Visual Culture, broader questions of visual meaning have been eclipsed. Consequently, theorists of material culture have criticised the dominance of the problematics of representation. This paper considers these issues in detail, concluding with questions regarding the function of Visual Culture and the possibilities of its redefinition.

Peltomäki, Kirsi (independent scholar, Finland) CRITICAL INTENTIONS, CRITICAL EFFECTS: SUBJECTING VISUAL CULTURE
Critical intentions, social advocacy and the political effectivity of recent artistic/cultural practices remain closely debated among scholars of visual culture, art history, and cultural studies. In these debates, the criticality of art and culture is often fastened on the object (a.k.a 'culture' or 'the visual'). The scope of this object ranges from discrete works of art or culture to modes of representation, technology, and cultural practices. Yet, in most accounts of the visual, the object is positioned through particular constructions of the subject: the making, producing, viewing, interpreting, consuming, receiving subject. For cultural studies, the position of this subject is often a complex combination of psychic identification, social construction, and discursive position. These positions of the subject are indispensable for thinking about criticality in art and culture. In this paper, I will examine how particular models of the subject inform ideas of criticality in art and culture.

Prior, Nick (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom) TRANSFORMATIONS OF VISION IN THE HYPERMODERN MUSEUM
In the new terrain of hyperactive visual culture, the museum is caught in a bind. It can't turn itself into a successful 'distraction machine' - providing accelerated visual diversion in a world already saturated with entertainment - without, it seems, threatening the aura of its grand traditions and a culturally elevated audience. This paper will assess the image of a museological endgame, signalling commentaries on the new perceptual conventions brought to the museum and the rise of a trans-aesthetics of sensation. Whilst museums are certainly at a crucial juncture in their history, this paper suggests a more complex diagnosis involving the rise of hybridised 'hypermodern' organizations. The most successful of these tap into a key feature of modern cultural trends, that of double-coding, where expansion of the visual art complex is combined with residues of the museum's auratic history, drawing on whilst transforming aspects of the pure gaze.

Gardiner, Kyoko (University of Tokyo, Japan) POSTCOLONIAL ARTISTS IN THE COLONIAL ART GALLERY
This paper attempts to reconfigure the art gallery as a 'colonial' sphere, and suggests ways in which to discuss artists and art practices that seem willing to challenge the 'colonising' forces of the domain of visual art. Here I discuss how art galleries can be described as specifically 'colonial' in relation to characteristics of the act of seeing (contrasted with the action of touching) and the subsequent division of 'the day-to-day' into the body-seen, the viewer and the self. I introduce and discuss some artists who find themselves 'in the middle of' this division, especially Sonia Boyce and her 1993 exhibition Do You Want To Touch? and conclude by suggesting that such questions of vision, popular in European poststructuralism and Cultural Studies, may be crucial to contemporary thinking on visual art and art history.

Akdag, Alkim Almila (Istanbul Technical University, Turkey) VISIBILITY VERSUS VISUALITY: WORLD AS MUSEUM
Times change, and so do their scents, sights, and cultural values. What was once in demand can now be forgotten. Especially, if it was something not quite tangible - perfume, for example. But even a perfume leaves traces behind. In my presentation, I will follow their imprints in order to recreate the relation between flacons and their designers. Based on the qualities of flacons one can uncover the connections of art and designed works. To catch this diversity of frameworks in today's theoretical questions I will enlarge my focus from flacons to the designed objects in general. Although designed objects constitute an important part of visual culture, they have been neglected. By doing this I also will bring forward a new point of view on the distinctions between contemporary 'designer' and 'artist,' that inspired the topic of my paper on visibility versus visuality.

Visual Culture Studies: Theoretical Frameworks and Pedagogy II

Notaro, Anna (University of Nottingham, United Kingdom) THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES AND ACADEMIC PRACTICE: VISUAL CULTURE STUDIES IN NOTTINGHAM
Over the past four years I have been involved in the '3Cities project,' an inter- and multi-disciplinary study of the iconography, spatial forms and literary and visual cultures of New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles in the period 1870s to 1930s. The project has recently culminated in the production of an electronic book City Sites, a net-based publication linking new work written by ten European and American authors with photographs, films, maps, prints and paintings - some static, many animated - other published work, other web sites and a conventional bibliography. City Sites has been identified as an important landmark publication in the field of Visual Culture. This paper will look at my personal encounter with visual theory and the attempt to avoid the heightened semiology of modern urbanism that privileges, even as it distorts, vision and the visual. The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of new visual technologies, forms and texts. This proliferation affected the ways in which the urban landscape was represented and the ways in which the constructed landscapes were inhabited. Visual representation may be said to bring the city into focus: it frames recognition of urban forms; it offers legibility through the reproduction of what is seen; it unites aesthetic and spatial apprehension of the urban scene; it mediates scopophilic and voyeuristic desires; it technologises the act of seeing; and it alters ways in which people negotiate the urban environment. The new forms of visual representation and apprehension accentuated the growing abstractions of space and inaugurated the 'society of the spectacle' in urban form.

Malafaia, Teresa (University of Lisbon, Portugal) READING GENDER IN ART: MORRIS'S GUINEVERE
Guinevere and other heroines represented by Pre-Raphaelitism in new visual languages contribute still nowadays for our understanding of women's condition in diverse scenarios. The artists' commitment in revealing significant features of Victorian transgressions is also shown in recurrent images of enclosure and escape. Bearing the above-mentioned assertions in mind, it is possible to argue that the way the Pre-Raphaelites were animated to portray their models corresponded not only to an unconventional sense of beauty but also to the art of creating lifelike representations. Moreover, these women who were essential to visual culture and had the courage to model for uncommon men became, in a paradoxical way, archetypes of passive femininity. When examining the stunners' silenced identities and how they contributed to create male fantasies we perceive rather complex constructions of femininity which are relevant to explore new fields of research on gender issues.

Paatela-Nieminen, Martina (University of Art and Design, Finland) ON THE THRESHOLD OF INTERCULTURAL ALICES
This paper introduces an intertextual method for use in visual arts. The term 'texts' means both visual and verbal signs. The model has been taken from linguistics, in particular the ideas about intertextuality of Gérard Genette and Julia Kristeva. The method is applied, in this paper, to children's literature, specifically to English and German (intercultural) Alice in Wonderland texts. Genette's theory of paratexts offers a means of studying the history and culture of hypotexts in a way that brings historical facts in relation to a subjective and open-ended reading. The hypertextual source materials are read palimpsestically, in accordance with Genette. In particular, Kristeva's terms, genotext and phenotext, are applied to the cultural and poetic meaning of texts for the researcher-subject. This paper discusses a hypermedia application, a researcher's tool in the form of Intercultural Alices.

Cameron, Sheila (De Montfort University, United Kingdom) NINETEENTH-CENTURY VISUAL TEXTS FROM MATABELELAND
Starting from Eleven Years in Central Southern Africa, I explore the role of author and artist as cultural interpreters. I hypothesise that visual texts reveal memes from both African and European cultures, providing early evidence about s-interaction in an arena ruled by a black king. The illustrations are interrogated in terms of fidelity (reliability of information); accuracy (is technology limiting?); readers' perception (indications of expectations); artist's assumptions (bias, playing to audience); intention (why use illustrations?) impact (affect on readers?); meme retention (can memes be identified?). What was their role in the construction of identity myths? By selecting what he regards as significant, the artist is identifying certain memes, ensuring their retention; publication contributes to their dissemination and retention at higher levels. Power relations, overturned by the Occupation of 1893 and again reversed when Zimbabwe gained Independence in 1980, can be illuminated by a memetic approach.