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.
|