http://www.indiana.edu/~wanthro/theory_pages/VAR.

htm

http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/visualarts/intro-visualculture.html

Introducing Visual Culture:

Ways of Looking at All Things Visual

Emergence of a new paradigm for studying all forms of visual culture as parts of a
cross-media system

Some Key Points to Consider

• "Visual Culture" studies recognizes the predominance of visual forms of media,

communication, and information in the postmodern world.
• Has there been a social and cultural shift to the visual, over against the verbal and
textual, in the past 50 years, and has it been accelerating in the past 10 or 20 years?
o Or are our written, textual, and visual systems continuing an ongoing
reconfiguration in a new (recognizable) phase?
• Study of visual culture merges popular and "low" cultural forms, media and
communications, and the study of "high" cultural forms or fine art, design, and
architecture.
• "Visual Studies" intersects with the notion of "mediasphere" in mediology, the
study of media systems and media as a system.
• Getting clear on terms: "visual" | "culture" | "system"
• The "visual culture" approach acknowledges the reality of living in a world of
cross-mediation--our experience of culturally meaningful visual content appears in
multiple forms, and visual content and codes migrate from one form to another:
 print images and graphic design
 TV and cable TV
 film and video in all interfaces and playback/display technologies
 computer interfaces and software design
 Internet/Web as a visual platform
 digital multimedia
 advertising in all media (a true cross-media institution)
 fine art and photography
 fashion
 architecture, design, and urban design
• We learn the codes for each form and code switch among the media and the "high"
and "low" culture forms.
 • The experience of everyday life can be described as code-switching or hacking the
visual codes around us to navigate and negotiate meaning (see William Gibson,
Pattern Recognition).
• But: Important to deconstruct potential visual/textual binary opposition: most of
our experience of media is a hybrid of texts, images, and sounds, rather than pure
states of any one mode. [Barbara Kruger's image/text art strategies: 1|2|3 | Ed
Ruscha's word art | ]
o Challenge is studying visual culture as a system, but not as a pure state of
visuality (i.e. a system of visual meanings that are not purely imagistic--not
formed only of images--but include texts and graphic design, design of
functional object, architecture, logos.
o Cases studies: W and Vogue | Rhizome.org (examples of digital images,
text, design)

Visual Culture and Institutions of Meaning

Visual Culture Produced by / Embedded in Social Institutions

• Social institutions are systems of order that perpetuate, preserve, and legitimize
complex forms of collective identity.
• Institutions are ways for mediating power, policing boundaries, and creating
identities.
• You can recognize a social institution at sites of competition for power, spheres of
control, and definition of identities.
• The Art History Disruption: Art History becomes histories of art
• "The History of Art," like the cultural category of art, is a development from
Western European and American institutions and disciplines.
• While institutional construction of objects continues with Foucauldian inevitablity,
the array of art object competing to get into the system have multiplied far beyond
the earlier boundaries that contained them: works from all levels of high and low
cultures, social class, formerly marginalized identity groups, can now be
championed within the high art and popular art sectors internationally.
• How do these categories operate when applied to, or projected on, non-Western
cultures and global cultures?
• The institutional control of Art History, nominally administered by the triumvirate
of academic institutions (art history disciplinary professionals), art museum
professionals, and an affiliated network of connoisseur patrons and collectors--
began to fragment after the rise of Pop and now globalized art production and art
markets.
• Globalization of markets and cultural categories for fine art followed Western
paradigm, but greatly expanded what counts as Art History
• Now globalized patronage, direct funding, and purchase of art works by
individuals, corporations, and public institutions.
• We live in many institutions, from a macro level (embracing many people) to
micro levels (smaller or elite groups that define a special sphere and influence the
rest of the social order)
o Macro
  Education / Academe / Schooling
 The Family
 Religion, Church
 Governance, the State
 Social class system
o Micro
 Media System and its differentiation of forms and technologies:
controls mediation and is distributed through the various industries
and consumer sectors
 System of Professions (Law, Medicine, Business, etc.): maintains
professional status and boundaries
 Art and the Artworld system: maintains the cultural category of art
 Fashion: replicates codes for desire, fashion as a sign, maintains the
binary of fashion vs. clothing
• Institutions operate through actual organizations and legal entities, which are
themselves defined and legitimized by their dependence on the larger institution.
(Education / Georgetown; Government / the Senate; Fashion / Dior )
• Visual culture is transinstitutional and works across media, but is used to encode
identities in several institutions--personal, national, ethnic, sexual, subcultures.
• The transinstitutional and cross-media aspects of visual culture make it a large site
for contested views of identity, power, and control.

Culture(s) of Visualization: Strategies for Analysis

• Visual culture, to borrow Nicholas Mirzoeff's definition, is perhaps best

understood as a tactic for studying the functions of a world addressed through
pictures, images, and visualizations, rather than through texts and words.
• Studying visual culture isolates or brackets "visual mediation" or "visual
representation" for analysis.
• However, most of our experience of media is a hybrid of texts, images, and
sounds, rather than pure states of any one mode.
o The visual is always "contaminated" by the non-visual: ideologies, texts,
discourses, beliefs, intertextual presuppositions, prior experience and
"visual competence" (cf. Eco and Bourdieu).
• Shouldn't it be "visual cultures" (plural)?

Image-Saturated world: visual culture and everyday life

• Experience of images today mainly through photographic means, or images

encoded as photographs.
• Digital images now dominate production of images in every medium.
• The era of "post-photography" photography: images and film that imitate
photography and camera-based images, but are entirely digital in composition and
viewable output.
• What is the role of the visual arts in a mass-mediated visual world?
• Many elements of our visual mediasphere are consumer-culture driven: advertising
 o Viewer in the subject position of consumer: advertising constructs its
viewer.
o "Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote
consumption as a way of life." (Christopher Lasch)

Theory and disciplinary resources for thinking about visual culture

• Visual Culture Theory Map

• Disciplinary construction of objects of knowledge: approaches meet at the
intersection of epistemology and institutional disciplinary professionalization
• "Visual Culture Studies:" can it be defined as an interdisciplinary field?
• How are its objects constituted and subject matter formed? Is there a subject for
this field?s
• Necessity of theory. Legacy of party-line academic orthodoxies in humanities and
social sciences, professionalization of disciplines, boundaries, turf.
• Already a debate about the professional legitimization of the field as intellectually
and institutionally viable.
o Mitchell, Elkins, Mirzoeff, Krauss and October debate

"Visual Cultures": Are Our Modes of Visuality like a Language?

• Social and cultural, not natural

• Rule-governed: use of images form systems of meaning based on a grammar of
learned rules
• Extend levels of function and analysis from linguistics and semiotics
o Minimal signifying units in meaningful strings (syntax, grammar) to
connected discourse.
o Both theory and production rules have already described the visual
grammars of advertising, fashion, design, visual art, film, television genres.

Is There a Language of Visual Culture Visual Media?

• We can now talk about intervisuality, intermediality: cross-image interpretation,

visual literacy
• Viewing images and media as a process of socialization in culture: who gets to
produce images, who gets to consume them, who can do both.
• The codes of the photographic image: index, icon
o Semiotics of images and visual culture: signs and interpretive communities
o Codes of realism and index of the real
o Problem of reference, referentiality, representation
• Language of images is now the language of media
o Is there a visual language analogous to spoke/written language?
o Syntax, syntagmatics, pragmatics of "visual language"?
o Images in "syntagmatic"structures (linear sequences following a code or
pattern like narrative or designed composition) and "paradigmatic" (the
vertical relations among levels or types of signs, like linguistic levels, a
 network protocol "stack," items within menu categories)

"High art" or "fine art," as part of visual culture, competes with popular visual culture for
attention.

• The "high art" world is both a source and destination for the whole of visual
culture.
• Popular forms get rechannelled through artworld validated art genres and venues.
• Visual culture and mediological mix, the always already hybridization of visual
media.
• Case Study: W magazine and appropriation of "high art" styles and content.
o Fashion and design appropriating, and converging with, the codes for high
art.
o Appropriating the "celebrity" code for artists: artists inserted in the
glamour scene with models, fashionistas, rock stars, movie stars, the
wealthy.
• Case study: nudity codes in popular culture and fine art
o The power of context and institutions: the significance of images of the
nude body.
o When is a nude human body received as encoded as art?

Rhetoric of the Image

• Positioning the viewer-spectator: media and visual works construct certain kinds
of spectators, carry information about the "implied viewer" (cf. the implied reader
of literary theory).
• Styles and subcultures: every visual sign has a style ("we're never out of
uniform"), and subcultures identify with visual styles.

Range of materials and physical media used in creating/constructing visual artifacts

and images today.

• Artworld embrace of wide range of materials unknown to "serious" art before the
1960s.
• Post-1980s expansion of art media and image technologies.
• Centrality of photography and lens-based art

Warhol, Rauschenberg, Sherman, Kruger, Prince, Wall, Viola, Crewdson, and street
artists: artists teaching us to see visual culture

• Deconstructed and re-presented back in a high-art or artworld context

• Multiple cross-overs between art techniques and design, advertising and fashion,
and popular media images
• A dialogic interplay of high and low cultural forms, cross-media interventions
• Disclosure of visual and photographic codes
Martin Irvine
irvinem@georgetown.edu
© 2004-2009
All educational uses permitted with attribution and link to this page.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/

Matthew Rampley, ed. Exploring Visual Culture: Definitions, Concepts, Contexts.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. 257 pp. $32.50 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7486-
1845-3.

Reviewed by Allen Roberts

Published on H-AfrArts (December, 2008)
Commissioned by Jean M. Borgatti

Musings about Contemporary Studies of Visual Practices

I agreed to review Matthew Rampley's Exploring Visual Culture for this list in 2006, but
as sometimes happens to us all, other responsibilities intervened; aside from copping a
mea culpa, the following thoughts are offered to present the volume in broader
perspectives of conversation about the arts of Africa and its diasporas.

For those of us trained in sociocultural anthropology but interested in visual practices and
what they produce, the word "but" in this sentence has long been a painful signifier. As
British anthropologists Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton put it fifteen years ago, "the
anthropology of art continues in many ways to be marginal to the subject [of
anthropology] as a whole, as if art were considered of secondary importance"--and this,
"despite growing recognition that the very physicality of art offers a prime medium for
beginning the intellectual exploration of other societies."[1] The essays from two
conferences at Oxford in the mid-1980s that Coote and Shelton present in their collection
disprove the wisdom of any such dismissal, and remain significant across the years and
several disciplines: Raymond Firth's cogent overview of art and anthropology with
particular attention to "art and 'beauty"; Alfred Gell's signal paper, "The Technology of
Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology," that spells out his complex theory in
concise prose; Susan Kuchler's piece on "Malangan and the Idiom of Kinship in Northern
New Ireland"; and Howard Morphy's treatise on "The Aesthetics of Spiritual Power
among the Yolngu" of Australia, among others.
If these strong examples seemed to offer hope to a downtrodden lot, disappointment at
the indifference shown by many in the discipline--including, ironically enough, many of
those engaged in what is called visual anthropology in the United States--does not seem
to have been mitigated. So it was worthy of notice that Howard Morphy and Morgan
Perkins introduced their 2006 reader on the anthropology of art with the assertion that
"the anthropology of art has entered an exciting stage in its history. It is in the process of
moving from its place as a minority interest that most anthropologists could neglect
towards a more central role in the discipline."[2] The papers that Morphy and Perkins
assembled are classics rather than recent work, for the most part, and it is useful to have
important pieces such as James Clifford's "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern," Susan
Vogel's introduction to Art/Artifact, Alfred Gell's compelling response in his "Vogel's
Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps," Robert Farris Thompson's "Yoruba
Artistic Criticism," Nancy Munn's "Visual Categories," and Ruth Phillips's "The
Collecting and Display of Souvenir Arts" all in one place. Yet this round-up of earlier
writing leaves this reviewer unconvinced that the disregard for art-oriented research is a
thing of the past in mainstream anthropology. In this regard, I am reminded of a senior
colleague in a major anthropology department here in the United States telling me three
or four years ago that s/he did not feel free to admit an interest in the arts, as such less-
than-serious pursuits would surely detract from chances for salary-increasing promotions.

To some of us--and I readily admit to being jaded in this regard--anthropology seems to

have been passed by of late by several initiatives located elsewhere in academia.
Interdisciplinary efforts in still-emerging fields like cultural studies, performance studies,
and religious studies have left much humanistic anthropology in a lurch, its fire stolen (to
mix metaphors). Theory has moved to other buildings. Comp lit. lights up, and language
departments are filled with a buzz once heard elsewhere. There are many exceptions to
such gross generalizations, of course, and it would seem that visual anthropology, with its
subset society in the American Anthropological Association, its prominent journal, and
the several Olympian figures around which it has been constructed, would provide the
grist for new perspectives. Yet British scholar Sarah Pink outlines the future of such work
in quite telling ways.

As Pink puts it, "during the latter part of the twentieth century the dominant practice in
visual anthropology was ethnographic filmmaking," felt to be a "glamorous practice"
celebrated through festivals and awards.[3] She notes that some theoretically inclined
cineastes--and notably David MacDougall, whose Film, Ethnography, and the Senses:
The Corporeal Image (2006) is well worth a read--turned to "questions of the body,
phenomenology and experience." "The relationship of film to anthropological writing"
was also interrogated, especially as "the bastions of scientific anthropology were
crumbling in favor of a subjective and reflexive approach." Although Pink asserts that
"resistance to the visual in anthropology is now a problem of the past," the fact that she
feels impelled to say so leaves the door open to doubt, especially when, for her, "the
future of Visual Anthropology" lies in "new experimentation with illustration and
drawing," an "applied visual anthropology," and "new possibilities for digital media in
research and representation."[4] These are worthy pursuits, needless to say; but what is
curiously understated or ignored completely is "art" itself, as understood and made by the
people among whom visual anthropologists conduct their research. Such a deduction is
reinforced by the introduction and essays in the collection edited by Sarah Pink, László
Kürti, and Ana Isabel Afonso, Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in
Ethnography (2004). There are strong contributions here, including Cristina Grasseni's
consideration of the "skilled vision" of Italian cattle breeders achieved through "an
'education of attention,'" and Gemma Orobitg Canal's own artistic use of photography to
express a sense of "wakefulness" versus the dream world of Pumé people of Venezuela.
But again, the point is "putting film to work," as Paul Henley titles his paper, in order to
effect a more evocative ethnography. In other words, despite statements to the contrary,
visual anthropology remains locked in debates about documentary processes by
anthropologists for anthropologists rather than engaged in close consideration of the
visual epistemologies of those we study.

Visual culture is another field to be considered here, that has continued to grow in
prominence since the burst of works in the 1990s with Nicholas Mirzoeff leading the
charge through his Introduction to Visual Culture (1999) and his various collected
volumes including The Visual Culture Reader (1998). Recent collections join this latter
to establish a baseline for inquiry. Matthew Rampley's Exploring Visual Culture is useful
in this regard, and although its British focus will leave American students scratching their
heads about distinctly English television programs and advertisements for products they
have never encountered, Rampley's collection of brief essays can provide a basis for
introductory undergraduate teaching in combination with choices from Mirzoeff's reader.
Rampley himself sets forth provocations: "Art long ago ceased to be the most important
visual expression of cultural identity" (p. 1). One is left to peruse the articles of the
volume to discover what may (or may not) have taken its place.

The topics of Rampley's chapters suggest the sweep of visual culture, at least at a
particular moment in a particular place as conceived by particular scholars. Broad essays
on "the meanings of culture," "definitions of art and the art world," "concepts of craft,"
"representation and the idea of realism," "the ideology of the visual," "visual practices in
the age of industry," and "visual culture and its institutions," are complemented by more
particular discussions of "design and modern culture," fashion, photography, architecture,
"visual rhetoric," "the rise and fall of the author," technical reproduction, mass media,
and cyber culture. A number of insouciant photographs are among the illustrations,
proving to readers how hip the writers must be, especially as the images may be derived
from advertising or other domains of little interest to more formal "art" studies. The focus
of the book, however, is almost entirely upon the visual culture of G-8 nations, to the
exclusion of China and India as well as the visualities of Africa and the rest of the "less-
mainstream" world. Such a perspective is not unusual to this book (although the naïveté
of ignoring China and India is there to be contemplated), for a foundational argument of
visual culture as a "tactic, rather than an academic discipline"--at least as articulated by
Nicholas Mirzoeff (1998)--is that the postmodern "visual turn" evidenced in the limitless
and intrusive advertising and consumerism dominates Western lives in ways never before
imagined (pp. 4, 11).

The fact that Mirzoeff and others consider that the "tactic" of visual culture needs no
plural is particularly significant. All this is too well known to deserve elaboration here;
yet if the anthropology of art, visual anthropology, or visual culture do not offer sustained
attention to non-Western visual practices, where can one look for new insights
concerning African visual cultures? Any such question can only solicit idiosyncratic
responses. Here is a list of works in no particular order, that I might suggest to graduate
students with whom I work on visual practices. They are offered here as suggestive rather
than in any way exhaustive.

Collections of essays that stretch definitions of anthropologies of art include Arnd

Schneider and Christopher Wright, eds., Contemporary Art and Anthropology (2006) and
Mariet Westermann, Anthropologies of Art (2005). Both offer strong papers, the latter
including work by Africanists Ikem Okoye, Suzanne Blier, and Sarah Brett-Smith, as
well as "Toward an Anthropology of the Image" by Hans Belting that anticipates the
translation of his brilliant book of this title from the original in German and its first
translation into French.

Works that address Religious Studies and the efficacy of images include three works by
David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images
(1998); The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (2005); and
The Lure of Images: A History of Religion and Visual Media in America (2007).
Morgan's focus is upon Protestant visual practices in the United States, but his central
thesis in Visual Piety--that sacred pictures often actively structure rather than only
passively illustrating devotion--is of direct application to many African visual contexts
including but not restricted to those of Christianity.

Byzantine arts provide a provocative comparison for Africanists, particularly those works
by Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art
(1994); Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm
(2000); and Oleg Tarasov, Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia (2002).
These and related studies give a sense of the active presence of divinity that inheres in
arts and visual practices, and so provides its efficacy. Using African analogies, the
Tarasov book describes how the prolific use of icons was meant to transform Mother
Russia into one huge nkisi with a great deal of ashe to spare!

South Asian Studies suggest where African visual studies might be taken, and I suggest
Image Journeys: Audio-Visual Media and Cultural Change in India, edited by Christiane
Brosius and Melissa Butcher (1999); Richard Davis, Lives of Indian Images (1997); Kajri
Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (2007); and Christopher
Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (1997), as well as his
"Photos of the Gods": The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (2004). The
boundless insights of these and related works simply must be taken into consideration by
next-generation Africanists, since there are parallel circumstances and topics, and our
South Asianist colleagues are especially progressive with regard to what questions to ask
about contemporary, popular, and traditional arts, and how to ask them.

Finally, I suggest as both useful and important such critical studies of photographies,
vernacular and otherwise, as Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing Photography
History (2002); Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, eds., Photographs Objects Histories:
On the Materiality of Images (2004); Jean-Bernard Ouédraogo, Arts Photographiques en
Afrique (2003); Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson, eds., Photography's Other
Histories (2003); Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, Modernity: A Visual Economy of an
Andean Image World (1997); and Krista Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism,
Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (2006). Over the last two decades
or more, some of the most progressive thought in art history has been in the critical study
of photographies (with Geoffrey Batchen to be thanked for attention to "vernacular" ones
of the sort that Jean-Bernard Ouédraogo discusses so thoughtfully), with the plural
suggesting that even this most "indexical" medium is a cultural construction. Elizabeth
Edwards and her colleagues consider the material histories of photographs as things, that,
like other objects, possess "social lives" of their own. The Pinney and Peterson collection
offers compelling studies of "image ethics" that might be applied to African
circumstances. Deborah Poole's well-known work has lost none of its luster, and deserves
direct application to African image worlds, as does Thompson's evocative narrative of
how "tropical" images have become the basis for understanding (by tourists) and living
(for local people) an exotic Caribbean.

Notes

[1]. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton, "Introduction," in Anthropology, Art, and
Aesthetics, ed. J. Coote and A. Shelton (Oxford: Clarendon, Oxford University Press,
1994), 3.

[2]. Howard Morphy and Morgan Perkins, The Anthropology of Art: A Reader (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2006), 1.

[3]. Sarah Pink, The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses (New York:
Routledge, 2006), 11-12.

[4]. Ibid, 12-20.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list
discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.

Citation: Allen Roberts. Review of Rampley, Matthew, ed, Exploring Visual Culture:
Definitions, Concepts, Contexts. H-AfrArts, H-Net Reviews. December, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=15694

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