Between Image and Identity

Reviewed by: Empires of Vision: A Reader ed. by Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy Carla Manfredi Empires of Vision: A Reader. Edited by martin jay and sumathi ramaswamy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. 688 pp. $119.95 (cloth); $32.95 (paper). Empires of Vision contributes to our understanding of the visual cultures of European imperialism and to their afterlives in postcolonial milieus. Thoughtfully edited by cultural historians Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy, the volume includes twenty-one reprinted essays and is divided into two sections: “The Imperial Optic” and “Postcolonial Looking.” The first section introduces five visual media within a trans-historical and global context that spans roughly five hundred years of imperialism. The second section focuses on the decades following decolonization and explores the different ways in which subaltern artists have responded to or “look[ed] back” (p. 3) at Europe. The selections offer a multitude of historical, regional, cultural, and theoretical perspectives, which will be of interest to an interdisciplinary readership. Although many of the volume’s selections will undoubtedly be familiar to seasoned scholars, they will provide graduate students with a solid grounding for future historical and theoretical research across the fields of imperialism, postcolonialism, visual and cultural studies, and art history. It is impossible to do justice to any book in a brief review let alone to extracts from twenty-one impressive pieces of scholarship. Thus, this review focuses on the editors’ contributions to Empires of Vision, which are bold reminders of what cross-disciplinary study can achieve: a recasting of conventional, written histories and a questioning of entrenched theoretical paradigms. In “The Work of Vision in the Age of European Empires,” Ramaswamy offers a sophisticated and lucid introduction to current critical approaches to colonialism and visual culture. The stakes of Empires of Vision are clearly defined: “The image is a site where new accounts of empire, the (post)colony, and Europe itself emerge and depart from—even challenge—the more familiar narrative line(s) of nonvisual histories” (p. 3). The volume, explains Ramaswamy, responds to and encourages a gradual academic reorientation. Despite the appearance of several recent visual culture anthologies, the study of art remains largely limited to art history; indeed, histories of colonialism and postcolonialism marginalize the integral role of visual culture in the production of colonial violence. Ramaswamy supports her claim with an anecdote about Edward Said, who confessed that “‘just to think about the visual arts generally sends me into a panic’” (p. 5). Panic becomes a productive metaphor for theorizing how images are often “disorderly” and “unpredictable” and sometimes “incoherent”; thus, Empires of [End Page 927] Vision offers alternative histories to those presented in official textual archives (pp. 5–6). If colonial and postcolonial studies have given short shrift to the visual arts, then visual culture studies also need to catch up. In conventional visual culture accounts, the presence of empire is still obscured, resulting in a European framework of visuality (p. 10). To illustrate this argument, Ramaswamy refers to a compelling 1996 “Visual Culture Questionnaire” published in the journal October: No one who responded to this questionnaire was a specialist in visual arts from regions other than Europe or the United States (pp. 10–11). Needless to say, the questionnaire highlights the importance of this collection, which will militate against parochialism (whether disciplinary or otherwise) and encourage interdisciplinary and interregional approaches to visuality and empire. In their introduction to part 1, “The Imperial Optic,” Ramaswamy and Jay trouble Eurocentric approaches to visual culture by underscoring the dynamic interactions between metropolitan technologies and indigenous traditions and practices. Thus, the “mutually constitutive relationship between empire and image-work” engendered new practices of seeing in and outside Europe (p. 25). Part 1 is divided into four sections, which deal with easel painting, mass-printed illustrations, cartography, and photography/film respectively. Anthropologist Deborah Poole’s influential notion of “visual economy” (1997) serves as an underlying concept for this part. The term “visual economy,” rather than “visual culture” is better suited to consider how images circulate within wide social, cultural, geographical, and imperial networks. In other words, individuals do not have to share a common (visual) culture in order to belong to the...

This article experiments with collage to explore the visual representation of black people in Brazilian media, popular culture and politics, examining how these representations constitute statements regarding dynamics of racial domination. The work proposes that the introduction of disruptive elements into the very images that objectify the black body could create the necessary conditions for a valuable criticism of how blackness is disposed within the nation’s formation. The articulation with black studies in visual culture and performance, black feminism, African diaspora and post-colonial theories intends to develop analytical frames to examine the interconnection between the representational process of ‘stereotyping’, symbolic violence and anti-black ideologies in the context of the national formation narratives. Methodologically, the articulation of these fields of inquiry intends to provide tools able to highlight and disrupt the regimes of racial representation circulating in Brazilian popular culture.

The subject of this thesis is a perception that the visual arts is declining in value in Australian culture. The rationale for this perception is drawn in the immediate sense from repeated debate in favour of abolition of the Australia Council (the premier source of grant funding to artistic producers). The method selected to investigate this perception is a comparison of rational and social epistemologies for curriculum, based respectively on the work of Arthur Efland and Theodor Adorno. By making this comparison, the thesis argues that the perceived shrinkage in the value and status of visual art is based on a fundamental conflict between the meanings of “art” and “culture”. The context of the debate is in fact perceptions of curriculum and their function vis-à-vis “cultural production” and is taken here to signal a change in the way Australia regards and values artistic activity. <br> <br> The thesis argues that culture needs to be defined appropriate to the Australian experience of “cultural production”. A lack of appropriate definition has resulted in terms like “creativity” becoming so broad in meaning that they are losing theoretical impact. I am inquiring as to what this loss of meaningfulness indicates about art education: some of the questions I ask in order to conduct the inquiry address whether the switch from visual art to visual culture signals a decline in the value of artistic culture; or does it owe itself to changing conditions between art education and artistic employment or commerce? <br> <br> The study examines visual art in particular as it might fall within the realm of Australian cultural production, providing one instance of artistic employment (i.e., in the visual arts). The focus of the study will be on addressing the stand-off between visual arts and visual culture in the field of curriculum studies: my method entails the application of Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory so as to place visual art and visual culture within a framework by which both rational and social epistemologies of art education can be used to define change in the realm of cultural production. <br> <br> Such change will include a re-evaluation of the role of visual art within higher education. At Monash University in Melbourne, the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture has progressively eroded the value of different studio practices by shutting down programs in disciplines that cannot attract sufficient enrolments. The institution appears to displace artistic practice, and to favour visual culture as a more reliable, rational form of investment, leading to more secure forms of employment, and offering less risk in terms of the returns to public education and the economy more generally. <br> <br> Visual culture, or visual culture studies, purports to be a postmodern approach to the study of art and replaces fine art and visual art studies, which represent a more rational epistemology within the field of art education. Visual culture studies aims to work with the current corporate and technocratic reality rather than deny its existence. It permits interdisciplinarity and the removal of a metanarrative about the artist as hero, offering in its place a semblance of plurality, multiplicity, indeterminacy and fragmentation. <br> <br> Visual culture embraces forms of symbolic analysis to construct meaning or rather, to analyse artworks (Lankshear, 1997); addresses digital and social media more readily, and turns to visual literacy to justify the artfulness of artworks (de Duve, 1994; Brown, 2003). This process may suggest a value-free art is being practised: it erodes the significance of traditional aesthetic skills, making aesthetic judgment less essential to the creation of an artwork. <br> <br> One implication of this change is to free fine art in general from its supposedly elitist origins, and to enable the art world to encompass both “high” and “low” art forms with equal value. This new value, which is implicitly more value-free than the high art it seeks to overturn, destabilizes art to the point that it has so few boundaries its continued existence (in its traditional form) becomes questionable.

The overwhelming focus on textual or dharma studies in Buddhism, to the relative neglect of artistic production, has led to a bias in understanding the close and intricate relationships between Buddhist art (usually comprising sculptures, mural paintings, architectural facades and ornamental elements, illuminated paintings, cloth banners, and drawings in manuscripts), rituals, and the written word. The constant dialogue between material, visual, and ritual cultures should be approached in tandem. Visual culture is a significant part of Buddhism and must be treated as part of the same social, historical, and geographical contexts as texts and practices. Buddhist visual culture, including art media, graphic aids, and physical objects or monuments associated with Buddhist practices, does not merely serve to illustrate sacred texts, legends, and doctrines. In addition, the textual tradition does not always have to explain or justify the presence—or absence—of a material object such as a Buddha icon or a Buddhist painting. While visual culture studies have become increasingly important in various academic fields over the years, a critical and complete overview of the precise relationship between art, ritual, and text in the study of south and southeast Asian Buddhism has yet to be written.

The handbook embraces the extraordinary range of disciplines which now engage in the study of the visual - film and photography, television, fashion, visual arts, digital media, geography, philosophy, architecture, material culture, sociology, cultural studies and art history. Throughout, the Handbook is responsive to the cross-disciplinary nature of many of the key questions raised in visual culture around digitization, globalization, cyberculture, surveillance, spectacle, and the role of art. It guides readers new to the area, as well as experienced researchers, into the topics, issues and questions that have emerged in the study of visual culture since the start of the new millennium, conveying the boldness, excitement and vitality of the subject.

This chapter argues that just as images and texts are treated expansively in the context of the visual culture of late medieval religious devotion, and are understood to have multivalent meanings and significances, so should musical notation. Sound and music have lately been integrated into the study of visual culture, as part of an approach to reception that seeks to analyse the multisensory nature of the experience of medieval devotional objects and images. Despite this greater sensitivity to sound, and to the important links between the visual and the aural in medieval religious experience, music is sometimes assumed by scholars trained in the analysis of visual and material culture to enjoy a concrete reality only when the music is sung. Thus, musical notation within visual images is either considered as mere ‘decoration’, and as an evocation of the general idea of ‘music’, or as a record of or a prescription for performance. This chapter will suggest that notation can do similar devotional work to that performed by images and texts, and should be considered more readily as part of the study of the visual culture of late medieval devotion.

Seeing Black Sarah Blackwood (bio) Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery. By Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. 248 pages. $35.00 (cloth). Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum. By Bridget R. Cooks. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. 205 pages. $29.95 (paper). Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. By Leigh Raiford. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 293 pages. $47.50 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. By Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 400 pages. $99.95 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). In 1969 the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted an exhibition titled “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968.” The exhibition, composed mainly of documentary photographs, stirred controversy. Bringing what the New York Times called “sociology” into an art museum, the exhibition neglected to include any works of art by Harlem artists, and was organized and curated without any input from residents of the neighborhood just a handful of blocks north of the museum. This exhibition raised the ire of the black communities it excluded, who in turn argued that the museum seemed to mistake mere visual representation for social advocacy.1 I open this review of recent work on African Americans and visual culture with this particular exhibition, which the art historian Bridget R. Cooks examines in Exhibiting Blackness, because it distills a number of themes central to the flourishing field of African American visual culture studies. This field links questions about the relationships between photography, art, and racial identity, the place of black artists within and without the canon and white [End Page 927] artistic institutions, and the long history of visual representations of black individuals in the United States. The question of representation has long been vexed for people of African descent in the Americas. Indeed, representation by others and the capacity for self-representation have been at the heart of racial politics. White supremacy founded itself on a belief in the inability of people of color to give form to experience in a manner approaching art. In 1781, for example, Thomas Jefferson declared that “never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.”2 Shorn, by this logic, of this basic human faculty, African Americans were everywhere represented by others in images and narratives that tended to confirm their inhumanity. Not surprisingly, in the nineteenth century, the new and purportedly objective medium of photography reinforced the racial hierarchy—as, for example, in the infamous Louis Agassiz slave daguerreotypes. Jefferson was, of course, wrong about African capacities for representation beyond the utilitarian, as centuries of African American literature, music, and material culture attest. Scholarship over the past century has largely succeeded in bringing these achievements of people of color into full view, if not into the canon. Scholarship on African American participation in the plastic and visual arts, however, has only recently begun to have the same impact.3 The reasons for the delay in scholarly attention to black visual culture are multiple and intersecting. Traditional art historical methods, with their emphasis on artistic training, money, influence, the aesthetic as “common” (and unraced) sense, and mediating systems and institutions such as patronage and museums often exclude a priori the visual art forms most commonly produced (and consumed) by African Americans: craft, vernacular, and popular forms. The rise of what is called “visual culture studies” has been a boon to the study of African American visuality, given the flexibility of this approach.4 The methods of “visual culture” have enabled scholarly work like that under consideration here by attempting to do away with “high” and “low” forms of art, considering vernacular and popular media forms in addition to painting, drawing, and sculpture, and perhaps most importantly, moving the production of meaning away from the solitary artist toward an understanding of the meaning-making collaboration between producer, viewer, and object. Yet traditional art institutions and analytic practices remain...

<i>Iklan</i> Aesthetics in Niger: Identity and Adornment from Servility to Self-agency

Cultural Studies have been preoccupied with questions of national identity and cultural representations. At the same time, feminist studies have insisted upon the entanglement of gender with issues of nation, class, and ethnicity. Developments in the wake of German unification demand a reassessment of the nexus of gender, Germanness and nationhood. The contributors to this volume pursue these strands of the cultural debate in German history, literature, visual arts, and language over a period of three hundred years in sections devoted to History and the Canon, Visual Culture, Germany and Her "Others," and Language and Power. Contributors: L. Adelson, A. Taylor Allen, K. Bauer, R. Berman, B. Byg, M. Denman, E. Frederiksen, S. Friedrichsmeyer, E. Kaufmann, L. Koepnick, B. Kosta, S. Lefko, A. M.O'Sickey, B. Mennel, H. M. Müller, B. Peterson, L. Pusch, D. Sweet, H. Watt, S. Zantop.

This book addresses the important question of what appears as luxury in contemporary visual culture. The author introduces the reader to the concept of visual culture to clarify the transformation of the private and public spheres of luxury in contemporary advanced cultures. • Luxury in contemporary visual culture is contextualized by linking its precise sphere – abundance – to those of fashion and art, photography, cinema, television, and social media that configure the structures of contemporary visual culture. • The visual representations of contemporary culture are considered as luxury-branded visual representations and the idea of visual culture as the portrayal of luxurious photographic, cinematic, and televisual selves. • Examinations of the roles of contemporary fashion and art in visual culture are employed as conduits to later analyses of visual consumers, luxury-branded and other visual representations produced by twentieth-century and contemporary fashion photographers and filmmakers, television, and social media producers in everyday life. • The ways in which luxury is utilized and operates in twentieth-century and contemporary cinema and television are investigated through the luxury lifestyles, lavish choices, luxurious values, and occasionally wayward inclinations sustaining the new voluptuousness and behaviors. • The new role of the luster of the digital luxury fashion house is addressed before the conclusion. Luxury and Visual Culture presents a thoughtful, yet user-friendly explanation of how luxury is undergoing numerous shifts in visual culture. It is vital reading for all scholars and students in critical luxury studies and visual culture, fashion theory, contemporary art, photography, cinema, television, and social media studies.

Reviewed by: Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art ed. by Daniel Haxall Michał Mazurkiewicz Haxall, Daniel, ed. Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art. New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019. Pp. 296. Acknowledgments, illustrations, tables, terminology and word usage, notes, bibliography, index. $99.00, hb. Numerous artists have drawn inspiration from sports competition, and the amount of scholarship dedicated to the study of sport in art has increased recently. Picturing the Beautiful Game—focusing on soccer—continues this research, covering a wide range of topics. The editor, Daniel Haxall, has gathered a cast of authors specializing in disciplines such as sport and art history, sociology, and media studies. Different perspectives enrich the volume, which thus offers a multifaced history of the world's most popular game. The book is divided into six major parts, each consisting of two chapters. First, the editor offers a useful introduction that presents soccer as "the most common avenue for uniting art and sport" (2) and defines the aim of the monograph: "this collections of essays considers the way soccer has been promoted, commemorated, and contested in visual arts" (2). Next, Haxall analyzes soccer as the subject for academic study, discusses exhibitions and art museums of soccer, and briefly describes the contributions to follow. In Part I, "Soccer and Mass Media," Alexander Leese offers insights into English late nineteenth-century soccer and draws attention to Victorian illustrated newspapers, focusing on three artists whose works demonstrate "how the game was played, watched, and officiated" (20). Luke Healey explores contemporary web-based GIF, which "provides an especially pertinent example of the visual culture of football in the early twenty-first century" (47). "Soccer and Memory," Part II, "considers soccer in the context of memory, ranging from nostalgia to commemoration" (10). Mike O'Mahony discusses the "Football and the Fine Arts" exhibition against the background of postwar British culture. He concentrates on artworks depicting crowds and the stadium atmosphere. The chapter provides—among others—an eye-opening study of painters such as Gerald Cains. Christopher Stride, Ffion E. Thomas, and Nick Catley analyze the desire to commemorate athletes, emphasizing statues of sportspeople. They present a detailed list of sculptures of this type and devote the core of the paper to three statues erected in honor of legendary manager Brian Clough. The next part, "Soccer and Modernism," examines modern and postmodern depictions of athletes. Przemysław Strożek describes early twentieth-century Italian and Russian avant-gardes, showing "how images of footballers operated as signifiers of modernity and artistic transformation from the 1910s to 1930s" (98). Chris McAuliffe looks into soccer and spectacle in contemporary art and sheds light on how the authors view society through soccer (an interesting international perspective). The fourth part, "Soccer and Gender," explores women in the world of soccer. Jennifer Doyle chronicles a history of women's exclusion in representations of soccer and critically analyzes feminist sport art. Carrie Dunn deftly explores the visual consumption of athletes in the media, offering a sociological study [End Page 175] of British female fans. She notes the high level of their media consumption but also that "they have to negotiate their identities, as fans and as women, in an institutionally sexist sport and an institutionally sexist fandom, reinforced by the media they consume" (165). In Part V, "Soccer and Global Politics," the analysis first zooms into African art. Daniel Haxall presents selected Ghanaian artists, for whom "soccer serves as a powerful metaphor, allowing [them] to engage immigration, global capitalism, fan behavior, and other issues bound within the politics of Ghana's most popular sport" (171). Also, such issues as spirituality and ritualism in sport are touched on here. Christopher Collier deals with three-sided soccer, sketching "a preliminary history of the game, tentatively exploring connections to the wider thought of its mercurial inventor—a man once labeled 'the greatest painter of the 1950s' [Asger Jorn]—and the group of which he was once a member, the Situationist International" (191). The first paper of Part VI ("Soccer and Commercialization'), by Jean Williams, analyzes World Cup posters and, to be more precise, "argues that the posters...

Visual culture attempts to expose that other facet of the world which almost hitherto remains concealed from the majority of the populace. This is because the people across the globe were fed with the visual images that largely went on a par with the interests of the white Europeans. In other words, visual culture views the world from a “subaltern” perspective and challenges the norms set by “a white European Christian male” centric outlook. To put it simply, visual culture studies and interprets the world, which is made up of visual images, from the point of view of marginalized, the suppressed or the disadvantaged. In this connection, the study of visual culture enjoys a close affiliation with feminism and critical race theory.

Since the late 1980s visibility has become a currency of social recognition, and a political issue. It also brought forth a new discipline, visual culture studies, and a hotly contested debate unfolded between art history and visual culture studies over the interpretation of visual culture, whose impact can still be felt today. In this first comparative study Susanne von Falkenhausen reveals the concepts of seeing as scholarly act that underwrite these competing approaches to visuality and society, along with the agendas of identity politics that motivate them. In close readings of key texts spanning from the early 20th century to the present the author crosses expertly between American, German, and British versions of art history, cultural studies, aesthetics, and film studies.

In this chapter, I focus on the ways in which the research that makes use of cellphilms is connected to broader discourses on visual culture including those on aesthetics and ethics. Visual culture1 can be understood broadly as having to do with visual forms from paintings to medical imagery to cellphilms. The study of visual culture is concerned with the ways in which visual experiences are constructed within social systems, practices, and structures (Tavin, 2003).

This chapter explores the phenomenon of political violence in its many forms. It focuses on distinctions among physical, structural or cultural, and symbolic violence, rather than focusing on more traditional forms of political violence, such as riots and assassinations. Thus the chapter analyzes the role of violence at the core of the modern nation-state, especially through discussing Walter Benjamin’s distinction between law-preserving and law-making violence. The chapter concludes that political violence is often at its worst, most intense, and most widespread when trust in political institutions falters and significant portions of a given polity no longer find these institutions credible or legitimate. Conversely, political violence can be minimized through the construction of strong, inclusive, and vibrant political institutions based on principles of inclusion and procedural justice, qualities Johan Galtung saw as the foundations for positive peace.