Visual Culture Questionnaire Svetlana Alpers

48 Pages·2007·1.16 MB·English

VisualCultureQuestionnaire
SvetlanaAlpers;EmilyApter;CarolArmstrong;SusanBuck-Morss;TomConley;Jonathan
Crary; ThomasCrow;TomGunning;MichaelAnnHolly;MartinJay;ThomasDacosta
Kaufmann;SilviaKolbowski;SylviaLavin;Stephen Melville;HelenMolesworth;KeithMoxey;
D.N.Rodowick;GeoffWaite;Christopher Wood
October,Vol.77.(Summer,1996),pp.25-70.
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Visual Culture Questionnaire*
1. It has been suggested that the interdisciplinary project of
"visual culture" is no longer organized on the model of history (as
were the disciplines of art history, architectural history, film history,
etc.) but on the model of anthropology. Hence, it is argued by some
that visual culture is in an eccentric (even, at times, antagonistic)
position with regard to the "new art history" with its social-historical
and semiotic imperatives and models of "context" and "text."
2. It has been suggested that visual culture embraces the same
breadth of practice that powered the thinking of an early generation
of art historians-such as Riegl and Warburg-and that to return the
various medium-based historical disciplines, such as art, architecture,
and cinema histories, to this earlier intellectual possibility is vital to
their renewal.
3. It has been suggested that the precondition for visual studies as an
interdisciplinary rubric is a newly wrought conception of the visual as
disembodied image, re-created in the virtual spaces of sign-exchange
and phantasmatic projection. Further, if this new paradigm of the
image originally developed in the intersection between psychoanalytic
and media discourses, it has now assumed a role independent of specific
media. As a corollary the suggestion is that visual studies is helping, in
its own modest, academic way, to produce subjects for the next stage of
globalized capital.
4. It has been suggested that pressure within the academy to shift
toward the interdisciplinarity of visual culture, especially in its
anthropological dimension, parallels shifts of a similar nature within
art, architectural, and film practices.
*
This questionnaire was sent to a range of art and architecture historians, film theorists, literary
critics, and artists in the winter of 1996.The responses follow.
OCTOBER 77, Summer 1996, pp. 25-70. 0 1996 Editors, OctoberMagazine, Ltd.
Anamorphic Art History
SVETLANA ALPERS EMILY APTER
When, some years back, I put it Jean Baudrillard's vision of
that I was not studying the history of America as a country of lonely screens
Dutch painting, but painting as part flickering in a holographic landscape
of Dutch visual culture, I intended projects consciousness as thoroughly
something specific. It was to fociis on abstracted from its corporal envelope:
notions about vision (the rrtechanisnt it is a dream of absolute simulation,
of the eye), on image-making devices depleted sociality, and image disem-
(the microscope, the camera obscura), bodiment set in the context of a
and on visual skills (map-making, but suburban mirage. The arrival of virtual
also experimenting) as cultural images and cyber-optics on the scene
resources related to the practice of of disciplinary debates over visual
painting. This had the additional culture seems to be the inevitable
benefit of granting painters a seri- extension of this Baudrillardian
ousness that was appropriately visual nightmare.
in nature-treating them as skillful Though cyber-culture may as
observers and representers instead of yet have no distinctly recognizable
as moral preachers. form or singular visual style, it does
The term "visual culture" I owed seem to stock its images from the
to Michael Baxandall. But rriy use of dark side of corporate, computer
the notion was different from his technoculture, and to have conferred
because of the nature of the case. The favor on spectral poststructural iden-
difference image/text was basic, in tities. Mobilizing ghostly, derealized
both historical and in critical tenns, to selves within a dirty realist, sleaze, or
the enterprise. But I was dealing with a pulp tradition (a tradition drawing
culture in which images, as distin- visually on sci-fi, cartoons, comics,
guished from texts, were central to the graffiti, porn, fanzines, slash and snuff
representation (in the sense of the for- movies, film noir, flight simulation,
mulation of knowledge) of the world. I surveillance cameras, and technical
was not only attending to those visual imaging), cyber operates through a
skills particular to Dutch culture, but combination of ontological projection
claiming that in that place and at that and ethical subjection. In this anamor-
time these skills were definitive. phic picture, boundaries between
On such an account, visual cul- spectatorial ego and image collapse:
ture is distinguished from a verbal or being and image, depending on the
textual one. It is a discriminating angle or optical investment, morph
notion, not an encompassing one. into each other. Intersubjectivity is
Disciplinary boundaries, like differ- replaced by interactivity, and virtue
ences between artistic mediums, are a (governed by the delirious ethics of
subject of investigation, not of denial. the alibi) is located in the virtual.
History of Art, UC Berkeley New media and the evolving
Visual Culture Questionnaira
aesthetics of cybervision call for CAROLARMSTRONG
alternate art-historical formations
based on different modes of visual
interpretation. Formalist approaches One of the things that seems to
to painting, thematic considerations go with the shift from old disciplinary
of typologies and topologies of art, structures like art history to new inter-
iconology, the social history of art disciplinary models such as that of
and the history of material artifacts, visual culture is a predilection for the
seem on the surface to have little disembodied image, and with it a dis-
relevance to visual futurism, whereas trust of the material dimension of
discourses in psychoanalysis, gender, cultural objects, such that to consider,
race, technology, and global econom- to value, or to pleasure in the materi-
ics seem obviously, if divergently, ality of a made object is to exercise
pertinent. the fetishism of the old art history
An obvious question thus and thereby to submit to the forces of
emerges: will the oneiric, anamorphic, the market, to the policing of the
junk-tech aesthetic of cyber-visuality canon, and to the structures of social
find a place in the discipline of art and sexual domination that go with
history (the field that has historically them. Within this model, paintings
storehoused, interpreted, and pedi- and such are to be viewed not as par-
greed visual culture), or will it remain ticularized things made for particular
in the academic clearinghouse of cul- historical uses, but as exchanges cir-
tural studies? For the moment, cultural culating in some great, boundless,
studies seems to be the site of cyber's and often curiolrsly ahistorical eron-
web. That said, issues of appraisal, oiny of images, subjects, and other
inventory, patronage, provenance, representations.
reproduction, authentication, appro- That within the increasingly
priation, copyright, insurance, and cyberspace model of visual studies,
censorship-crucial to the practice of "text" is the mother-model for utter-
art history as it relates to the global art ances, performances, fashionings, and
market sincc time immemorial-may sign collocations of all kinds is not
give art history a central role and a unrelated to this disembodiment of
different life in cyberspace. the cultural object. I sometimes
French and Comparative Literature, wonder if this is not simply a new face
C'CLA put on the old contempt for material
crafting, the surface and the superfi-
cial, as well as tire old privileging of
the verbal register that went with tradi-
tional humanist notions of idea or ut
pictura poesis, or with the iconographics
of the old art history. Certainly it
speaks to an indifference to questions
of difference-an indifference, even a
28 OCTOBER
hostility, to thinking that there might stand the particular intelligence
be any foundational differences involved in material facture. And last,
between media, kinds of production, I would propose that the differences
or modes of sign, or that those differ- between kinds of production, be they
ences might matter to either the literary or pictorial, painterly, sculp-
producer or the consumer of a given tural, photographic, filmic, or what
object. A prime example of that have you, matter absolutely, that they
would be the notion that the differ- are the source of whatever particular
ence between a literary text and a interest a given object holds and the
painting is a non-problem: that both locus of whatever philosophical work
are equally representations; that the it does, and that to ignore those dif-
distinction between verbal signs on a ferences is to submit utterly to the
page, produced and taken in a partic- system of exchange and circulation in
ular temporal fashion, and marks on which any cultural object undeniably
a thickened material surface, pro- participates.
duced and taken in a different Art History,
fashion, is not worth making, and has Graduate Center, CUNY
no implications of any significance.
While there is much that I take
to be advantageous about the model
of visual culture, especially if what
one wants to give an account of is cul-
ture at large rather than particular
cultural objects, I find the above
propositions to be unfortunate on a
number of counts. Indeed, in all
instances, I think the contrary of
what is proposed is true. First, the
material dimension of the object is, in
my view, at least potentially a site of
resistance and recalcitrance, of the
irreducibly particular, and of the sub-
versively strange and pleasurable. It
is, again at least potentially, a pocket
of occlusion within the smooth func-
tioning of systems of domination,
including the market, hierarchical
thought-structures, and subject-posi-
tionalities: a glitch in the great
worldwide web of images and repre-
sentations. Second, to subsume
material objects within the model of
"text" is to discredit and misunder-
Visual Culture Questionnaire
SUSAN BUCKMORSS within a new interdisciplinary field of
visual studies? What would be the
episteme, or theoretical frame, of such a
The production of a discourse of field? Twice at Cornell over the past
visual culture entails the liquidation decade we have had meetings to discuss
of art as we have known it. There is no the creation of a visual studies pro-
way within such a discourse for art to gram. Both times, it was painfully clear
sustain a separate existence, not as a that institutionalization cannot by
practice, not as a phenomenon, not as itself produce such a frame, and the
an experience, not as a discipline. discussions-among a disparate group
Museums would then need to become of art historians, anthropologists,
double encasings, preserving art computer designers, social historians,
objects, and preserving the art-idea. and scholars of cinema, literature,
Art history departments would be and architecture-did not coalesce
moved in with archaeology. And what into a program. Still, visual culture
of "artists"? In the recently expired has become a presence on campus. It
socialist societies, they printed up call- has worked its way into many of the
ing cards with their profession listed traditional disciplines and lives there
confidently after their name and in suspended isolation, encapsulated
phone number. In recently restruc- within theoretical bubbles. The psycho-
tured capitalist societies, they became analytic bubble is the biggest, but
caught in a dialectical cul-de-sac, there are others. One could list a
attempting to rescue the autonomy common set of readings, a canon of
of art as a reflective, critical practice texts by Barthes, Benjamin, Foucault,
by attacking the museum, the very Lacan, as well as a precanon of texts by
institution that sustains the illusion a long list of contemporary writers.
that art exists. Artists as a social class Certain themes are standard: the
demand sponsors: the state, private reproduction of the image, the society
patrons, corporations. Their products of the spectacle, envisioning the Other,
enter the market through a dealer- scopic regimes, the simulacrum, the
critic system that manipulates value fetish, the (male) gaze, the machine
and is mediated by galleries, museums, eye. Today the phrase "visual studies"
and private collections. Tomorrow's calls up 202 entries in a keyword
artists may opt to go underground, search at the Cornell University
much like freemasons of the eigh- Libraries. There is a media library, a
teenth century. They may choose to cinema program, an art museum, a
do their work esoterically, while theater arts center, two slide libraries,
employed as producers of visual and a half dozen possessively guarded,
culture. department-owned videocassette play-
Their work is to sustain the criti- ers. If the theoretical bubbles burst,
cal moment of aesthetic experience. there remains this infrastructure of
Our work as critics is to recognize it. technological reproduction. Visual cul-
Can this be done best, or done at all, ture, once a foreigner to the academy,
OCTOBER
has gotten its green card and is here not understand the description of
to stay. "anthropological" models and "socio-
Silent movies at the beginning historical" models as antithetical
of the century initiated the utopian poles of this theoretical project. Any
idea of a universal language of interpretation worth its salt demands
images, one that could glide over both. It needs to provide a socio-
political and ethnic borders, and set historical and biographical story of
to right the Tower of Babel. Action origins that estranges the object from
films and MTV at the end of the cen- us and shows us that its truth is not
tury have realized this idea in immediately accessible (the object's
secularized, instrumentalized form, prehistory), and a story of deferred
producing subjects for the next stage action (its afterhistory) that comes to
of global capitalism. In this way, visual terms with the potency of the object
culture becomes the concern of the within our own horizon of concerns.
social sciences. "Images in the mind While the Internet is the topic
motivate the will," wrote Benjamin, and the medium for new courses in
alluding to the political power of digital culture, it is striking to anyone
images claimed by Surrealism. But his who has visited the Internet how visu-
words could provide the motto as well ally impoverished a home-page can
for the advertising industry, product be. Cyberdigits reproduce the moving
sponsoring, and political campaign- image haltingly, and the static image
ing, whereas today the freedom of unimpressively. The possibility of
expression of artists is defended on computer screens replacing television
formal grounds that stress the virtual- screens may mean a great deal to
ity of the representation. The images stockholders of telephone companies,
of art, it is argued, have no effect in but it will not shake the world of the
the realm of deeds. visual image. Aesthetic experience
A critical analysis of the image (sensory experience) is not reducible
as a social object is needed more to information. Is it old-fashioned to
urgently than a program that legiti- say so? Perhaps the era of images
mates its "culture." We need to be that are more than information is
able to read images emblematically already behind us. Perhaps discus-
and symptomatically, in terms of the sions about visual culture as a field
most fundamental questions of social have come too late. It is with nostalgia
life. This means that critical theories that we boycott the videostore and
are needed, theories that are them- insist upon seeing movies on the big
selves visual, that show rather than screen.
argue. Such conceptual constella- The producers of the visual
tions convince by their power to culture of tomorrow are the camera-
illuminate the world, bringing to women, video/film editors, city
consciousness what was before only planners, set designers for rock stars,
dimly perceived, so that it becomes tourism packagers, marketing consul-
available for critical reflection. I do tants, political consultants, television
Visual Culture Questionnaire
producers, commodity designers, lay- TOM CONLEY
out persons, and cosmetic surgeons.
They are the students who sit in our
classes today. What is it they need to What you have assembled is
know? What will be gained, and by cause for both laughter and alarm. I
whom, in offering them a program in shall try to explain why by moving
visual studies? from point three to points two, one,
Government, and four, respectively.
Cornell University Alarm. The riotion that visual
ctilttlre is based on disembodied
images is fraudulent. Images are by
definition riddled and stippled with
language. Images cannot be disem-
bodied, even if they deny the
presence of the languages inhering in
them. Without those languages they
would fail to be images. Everything
we know about dialogue and dialogzsm,
concepts vital to communication,
psychogenesis, subjectivity, literature,
poetry, and the apprehension of
expression in general, depends on
the immiscible qualities of image and
language. The two arc different and
exclusive but constitutive of one
another. To say, then, that visual
studies is producing "subjects for the
next stage of globalized capital" is
Itldicrous. Ry adhering to the miscibil-
ity of image and language we tend
to fracture the unity of meaning-a
result of the valorization of the one
to the detriment the other-that
ideology purveys. When we see that
language is the welcome other in
visual culture, we have at our behest
a modest but effective, tactical means
of challenging strategies aimed at the
globalization of capital.
If, then, we build visual culture
on the models of the generation of
Riegl and Warburg, we must realize
that the return is fraught with a logic
OCTOBER
of displacement: what is entailed with gain from study of the growth of visual
the return? a return to law and order? culture within the academy, then, is
a return to illusions of philological obtained when we discover that it can-
bedrock? to big daddies whose images not find a disciplinary place. For that
need to be revered and hated? a reason its production of analysis con-
recidivism of nostalgia and a love of stitutes a space, always in process, in a
discipline of yesteryear? The return condition of reinvention, that cannot
can be used to displace the past into be localized. The attempt to track a
the present. In other words, the pattern (as suggested in point 4)
Oedipal model implied by the through "art, architectural, and film
authority of these figures can be practices" betrays the mobility of
redirected along transverse itiner- visual culture insofar as it engages
aries. One feels a sense of alarm over motion, the creation of discourse
the somewhat narrow definitions of and space, to the detriment of the
culture that accompany the work of delimitation of place, the strategy that
these historians, but one takes plea- defines a discipline. Space and move-
sure in using them as needed, like ment come with invention, and visual
intellectual socket wrenches, in our culture is a practice of wit, that is, the
critical toolboxes. joy of invention.
Laughter. If visual culture is ( 0 Romance Languages
black day) abandoning art history, and Literatures,
architectural history, political history, Harvard University
film history, literary history, cultural
history, universal history, etc., we
need only remember how much his-
tory constitutes a system of mendacity.
We produce fictions of the past in
order to deal with what we "would
prefer not to" say, meaning that
something must remain camouflaged
in the present. When in doubt (a)
use the subjunctive or (b) historicize!
Recourse to anthropology is no
panacea, since it remains a discipline
built over the nightmares of history:
it redeems "man" in view of violence
enacted by man. The anthropologist
is generally the necrophile tending
over cadavers of history. If anthropol-
ogy is the domain of visual culture,
then we can proudly say that it is a
discipline.

One of the pleasures that we
JONATHAN CRARY others responding to these questions,
I have tried to show how vision is
never separable from larger histori-
Admittedly the words "vision" cal questions about the construction
or "visual" appear in the titles of cer- of subjectivity. Especially within
tain texts I have written and courses I twentieth-century modernity, vision
have taught. However, with increas- is only one layer of a body that can be
ing frequency they are terms that shaped or managed by a range of
trouble me when I hear them external institutions and techniques,
deployed within the expanding and it is also only one part of a body
visrlality industry of conferences, capable of inventing new forms,
publications, and academic offerings. intensities, and strategies of living.
One of the things I have tried to do Thus any critical enterprise or new
in my work is to insist that historical academic precinct (regardless of its
problems about vision are distinct label) that privileges the category of
from a history of representational visuality is misguided unless it is
artifacts. No matter how often the relentlessly critical of the very
two may seem to overlap, they are processes of specialization, separation,
fundamentally dissimilar projects. and abstraction that have allowed the
Therefore I don't have much interest notion of visuality to become the
in a visual studies if it is simply an intellectually available concept that it
enlarging or updating of traditional is today. So much of what seems to
categories of imagery, if it is a stak- constitute a domain of the visual is
ing out of some new cafeteria of an effect of other kinds of forces and
contemporary media products and relations of power.
mass-cultural objects as a field of If there has been a recent emer-
inquiry. I don't know if this in fact is gence of visual studies, it is, in part,
being done anywhere, but it is cer- because of the collapse of certain
tainly easv to imagine it happening. A enduring assumptions about the sta-
persistent temptation is to maintain tus of a spectator. Like so many
the fiction of a continuous historical subareas of the human sciences, a dis-
space in uhich all images are cipline built around the idea of the
assumed to have some prinlary visual gaze takes on a practical existence at
values. This in turn allo.r\.s the the moment of the disintegration and
(sonletinles covei-t) preservation of a dispersal of its purported object. This
detached and contemplative observer turn is something neither to lament
and the conducting of business as nor celebrate, but it is nonetheless
usual. crucial to understand the conditions
Perhaps more importantlv, I that have brought about such a shift.
~oulcble ~kepticalo f an\ undertak- To the disappointment of some (and
ing$ that set up \ision in such a .it7a\ to the bafflement of those bored
that it bccalne an autonomous or with typographic culture), the analy-
self-.jt~stifii1 1g problcln. I.ike some sis of those conditions would not