Visual Culture: A New Paradigm

Author(s): William Innes Homer

Source: American Art , Spring, 1998, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 6-9
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American
Art Museum

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/3109288

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 Commentary

Visual Culture
A New Paradigm

William Innes Homer Within the past three or four years, the phenomenon known as visual culture (often
capitalized) has come into its own as a fresh approach to objects and images-a kind of
"new, new art history," to borrow from art historian Marsha Meskimmon. The rise of this
novel approach suggests that there is something wrong with art history as it has been
practiced, a field traditionally concerned with "transhistorical truths, timeless works of art,
and unchanging critical criteria." Visual culture has already replaced the typical chrono-
logical art history survey at places like Harvard, Swarthmore, and the University of
California, Santa Barbara. At Harvard, for example, the new course (dating from 1994)
treats the material thematically and "introduces students to the history of methods and
debates in the field, rather than asking them to memorize names, dates, and works of art."
Books on visual culture, such as Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (1994), edited
by Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey; Good Looking: Essays on the
Virtue of Images (1996) by Barbara Stafford; and Languages of Visuality (1996), edited by
Beate Albert, are beginning to roll from the presses. And this new approach is starting to
make inroads in the sessions held at the annual meeting of the College Art Association.
Significantly, W. J. T. Mitchell's book Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Repre-
sentation (1994) won the Charles Rufus Morey Prize offered by its namesake organization
in 1995. Yet, in spite of this recognition, visual culture pursued to its logical conclusion
"is not a tweaking of art history," as Anne Higonnet has pointed out. It is, rather, "a
fundamental disruption."' But unlike traditional art history, it has as yet no theories and
no master narrative. It is a youthful, amorphous medium that is still trying to find its own
identity.
In his book and in two recent articles, Mitchell has characterized visual culture better
than anyone to date. He points out that the new field-"the study of the social construc-
tion of visual experience"-represents a "pictorial turn" that permeates a whole variety of
fields and disciplines. It requires, he says, "conversations among art historians, film
scholars, optical technologists and theorists, phenomenologists, psychoanalysts, and
anthropologists." The construction of visual culture is thus interdisciplinary, but he warns
us that its practitioners should avoid a fashionable, glib interdisciplinarity for its own sake.
Mitchell prefers the idea of "indiscipline," his code word for remaining faithful to one
discipline while probing new areas of inquiry like visual culture. Mitchell, however,
consistently tips his hat to a variety of disciplines to which visual culture should be
responsive-"art history, literary and media studies, and cultural studies."2

6 Spring 1998

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Thomas Eakins, Perspective
Drawingfor "The Pair-Oared
Shell, "1872. Pencil, ink, and
watercolor on paper, 80.97 x 120.8
cm (31 7/8 x 47 5/8 in.). Philadelphia
Museum of Art, Thomas Skelton
Harrison Fund
Like the rationalized visual field in
Eakins's drawing, the multidi-
mensional nature of visual culture
has challenged many art historians
to take a more penetrating look
at art.
Visual culture, unlike traditional art history, may concern itself with mass culture and
the popular arts (it shares this interest with cultural studies, but Mitchell cautions us not
to regard visual culture as the "visual front" of cultural studies). For this reason, visual
culture finds a natural home in film studies programs and departments. Yet visual culture,
unlike the orientation of film programs to contemporary or recent materials, can easily
address itself to the remote past.
Image versus text has become the central issue among advocates of what I call the new
visuality. Because we live in a world filled with images, we should, Mitchell contends,
address pictures in our studies with the kind of reverence we traditionally hold for texts.
The new discipline offers an antidote to the preoccupation with textuality associated with
the structuralism and poststructuralism of the 1970s and 1980s, when everything became
a text and much critical theory was dominated by the internal dialogue between one text
and another. Visual culture, by contrast, relies in large part on sensory experience-
particularly the visual-and this reliance provides a welcome relief to the self-referential
world of linguistic relations. Barbara Stafford aptly articulated this tension when she wrote
in her 1996 book: "I am arguing that we need to disestablish the view of cognition as
dominantly and aggressively linguistic. It is narcissistic tribal compulsion to overempha-
size the agency of logos [the word] and annihilate rival imaginaries."3
Stafford is perhaps the most vehement and vocal advocate for the visual. She feels that
far too much attention has been given to word-text-oriented thinking and that the visual
7 American Art
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 has been disparaged or ignored. The seen world, she says, is a vibrant source of informa-
tion, ranking with and often surpassing the semiotic as a source of knowledge about a
given time and place. Unlike Mitchell, who hesitates to endorse a fully interdisciplinary
approach to art history, Stafford embraces every imaginable field-from optics to natural
history-as lQng as it sheds light on the object of her inquiry. And while Mitchell advo-
cates a balanced interchange between image and text, Stafford opts for the primacy of the
visual. She thus seems more emphatically avant-garde than Mitchell in her views. Or
perhaps she is more retardataire: she
looks backward to late-nineteenth- and

In spite of the recent efforts to define visual culture, it remains early-twentieth-century art history,
a slippery concept. when visual and aesthetic experience
and broad cultural contexts were
cherished, separately or together, by the art historical community. If Staffor
toward the past, perhaps she is caught up in postmodern nostalgia. But unlike
linguistic postmodernists, she does not deconstruct earlier times, but rather m
for their affirmative, positive value.
In recent conversations with friends, I have often said that encountering vi
is something like rediscovering the wheel-the wheel being the discipline of ar
it was practiced before it was politicized as the new art history some fifteen or
ago. The new art history opened up the field to a panoply of approaches-M
feminism, gay and lesbian theory, postcolonialism, deconstructionism, semiot
psychoanalysis. In different ways, these varied modes helped break down the
canon of great masterpieces fabricated by white Western European males, as w
privileging of the fine over the popular arts. In the new art history, art was
extreme as a text, without an "author," or at the other, as a political instrum
gender, or class justice. At both poles and anywhere in between, the visual pla
part or none at all. Indeed, "scopic regimes" (as described by Martin Jay) or th
the "gaze" (as articulated by Norman Bryson) were to be avoided. The adve
culture, however, changed all that. Looking and feeling-experiencing thro
and other senses-are on their way back. It is no longer a crime to speak of th
the maker of a work of art or of the spectator as a sentient being, capable of
full range of sensations.
In spite of the recent efforts to define visual culture, it remains a slippery
Perhaps it is too new to have clear-cut boundaries, or possibly it defines itself
by what it is not. Mitchell seized upon visual culture's elusive nature:

It names a problematic rather than a well-defined theoretical object. Unlike fem

studies, or studies in race and ethnicity, it is not a political movement, not eve
movement like cultural studies. Visuality, unlike race or gender or class, has no
Like language, it is a medium in which politics (and identification, desire, and
conducted.4

From one point of view, visual culture may be a postmodern tool that deconstructs what
is outdated and useless. But it also offers new opportunities to those seeking to reform art
history. Through visual culture, we may once again revel in visual sensations and experi-
ences, welcome the interdisciplinary, rejoice in the profundity of high art as well as the
vitality of mass or popular culture, and view culture nonpolitically, almost from an
anthropological perspective. The multidimensional Erwin Panofsky, in recent years seen

8 Spring 1998

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as a dinosaur of art history, now enjoys renewed popularity, especially for his studies of
Renaissance perspective. Mitchell calls him "an inevitable model and starting point for
any general account of what is now called 'visual culture."'5
Visual culture may only be a passing fad. But given the inevitability of change in the
fashions of art historical theory, I would estimate that visual culture's time has come and
that both semiotic poststructuralism and socially based approaches may begin to lose
ground. As with any movement-artistic or theoretical-this change will take time, but at
the moment visual culture has a great deal of momentum and offers fresh new fields for
discovery and insight.

Notes

1 Marsha Meskimmon, "Visuality: The New, New Art History?" Art History 20 (June 1997): 331; for
quotation on traditional history, see Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds., Visual
Culture: Images and Interpretations (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994), p. xv; for
quotation on Harvard course, see Scott Heller, "What Are They Doing to Art History?" Art News 96
(January 1997): 102; and Higonnet, quoted in Heller, p. 104.

2 W. J. T. Mitchell, "Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture," Art Bulletin 77 (December 1995): 540-41.

3 Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1996), p. 7.

4 Mitchell, "Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture," p. 542.

5 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), p. 16.

9 American Art

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