Visual culture and critical pedagogy: from theory to practice

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 study aims to examine the development and implementation of social network-based visual culture activities in the workshop courses that are part of the curricula in fine arts high schools. In their visual culture activities, students of fine arts high schools have used social media and social networks as examples of web 2.0 technologies. Social networks allow people from different communities to come together and communicate. Communication technologies such as social networks and internet subject people to a communicative and visual bombardment. Given that visual cultures in contemporary society are spread mostly via media products, there is a need to approach and consider visual culture in terms of its connection with media products. In this context, visual arts activities that aim to improve the critical thinking skills of students, to associate their visual literacy skills with their technological literacy skills in this technological age, and to support their visual awareness were utilized. The study focused on “The Garden of Earthly Delights” of Hieronymus Bosch, and required the students to complete a collage piece entitled “The Garden of Earthly Delights Today” in three weeks by associating the original work with the present day. The social network-based visual culture activity for the study was implemented within the Two-Dimensional Art Workshop (2DAW) course, and made use of a participatory action research design. Nine 11th grade students from a fine arts high school participated in the study, for which data was collected from the researcher notes, researcher diaries, student diaries, semi-structured interviews and documents. A content analysis was used in the analysis of the data, and the study findings showed that, thanks to the utilization of visual culture activities based in critical pedagogy, the students acquired a critical perspective and were able to criticize these activities in their environments on the basis of society, religion, race, gender and power. Based on the findings of the study, it is recommended that visual culture education in fine arts high schools incorporate activities that allow students to express themselves, to engage in critical questioning and to draw upon their own life experiences.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1. The Febuary 2011 annual meeting of the College Art Association (CAA) in New York had an entire session organized by Patricia Mainardi dedicated to “The Crisis in Art History.” The papers were later published in a special issue of Visual Resources (27, no. 4, 2011). Yet the present crisis in the discipline can be considered just the latest of many that it has faced at least since the 1970s, when a whole new range of theoretical references, such as postcolonial theories, psychoanalysis, gender studies, and semiotics, pressured art historians to reflect about their specific approaches to art. Hans Belting's Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? came out in 1983, centering its fire on the power structures of the field in Germany, and in 1982 the Art Journal also produced an issue on “The Crisis in the Discipline,” edited by Henri Zerner, with articles by such leading art historians as Rosalind Krauss, David Summers, and Donald Preziosi, among others. At that time, the main topic of discussion was the incorporation of new objects of study in the art historical field, such as advertisement, photography, and other aspects of visual culture, bringing art history closer to so-called visual studies. Concerns about developing a global art history, something that still resonates today, appeared at the turn of the century with important publications such as Hans Belting's Bild-Anthropologie (2001) and David Summers's Real Spaces (2003). Both books demonstrate a special interest in anthropology, which persists today with the incorporation of anthropological theories such as those of Alfred Gell and Bruno Latour, for example, into the field. Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1983), trans. as The End of the History of Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Zerner, ed., “The Crisis in the Discipline,” special issue, Art Journal 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982); Belting, Bild-Anthropologie (Munich: W. Fink, 2001); and Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon Press, 2003).2. This was the 33rd Congress of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art, Germanische Nationalmuseum Nuremberg, July 15–20, 2012. Its theme, “The Challenge of the Object,” appears somewhat conservative when considered from the perspective of contemporary art. Since at least the 1960s Conceptual art has done away with the idea of a necessary connection between art and the material world, which had important political consequences as well.3. The same logic that we see here organizes much of the “globalized” art world. In a review of the exhibition Africa Remix: L’art contemporain d’un continent, presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, in 2005, Roberto Conduru notes that African artists still need to pass through the established institutions of art in the United States or in Europe to enter the circuits of the international market and art world. “With one sole exception—Wim Botha … all of the remaining 87 artists already represented their country and/or the Continent in the Biennials that proliferate throughout the world, and also presented their work in prestigious institutions within the system of international art.” Conduru, “O mundo é uma tribo,” Concinnitas (UERJ, Rio de Janeiro), no. 8 (July 2005): 198–202.4. Although this in fact is a very significant way to approach Brazilian visual culture, it should not be exclusive. Important work has been done in the last few years on the process of the transfer and circulation of material culture within the Portuguese Empire and in Brazil. See Jens M. Baumgarten, “Transformation asiatischer Artefakte in brasilianischen Kontexten,” in Topologien des Reisens, ed. Alexandra Karentzos, Alma-Elisa Kittner, and Julia Reuter (Trier: Universität Trier, 2009), vol. 1, 178–94.5. A good example can be found in Rodrigo Naves's interpretation of Jean-Baptiste Debret's Brazilian period: “Definitely, the existence of slavery hindered once and for all any effort to transplant the classical form as truth into Brazil.” Naves, A forma difícil: Ensaios sobre arte brasileira (São Paulo: Ática,1996), 71.6. Moema is the tragic character of Frei Santa Rita Durão's epic poem Caramuru. She was the sister of Caramuru's wife, Paraguaçu, and drowned while swimming after the ship that carried Caramuru back to Europe.7. Regarding the position that Baroque occupies in Brazilian art history, it is interesting that in the first Pan-American Congress of Architects, organized in Uruguay in 1920, Alexandre de Albuquerque proposed the Baroque manner of Minas Gerais as the source for a Brazilian national style, since, according to him, Brazil did not possess a strong indigenous culture, as did other countries in South America.8. Sergio Miceli, Nacional estrangeiro (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003).9. The study of art history is relatively recent in Brazil, and by examining other contributions to the history of culture in the country, one can find elements that could help to impel art history in new directions. The writer Mario de Andrade, one of the main protagonists of Brazilian modernism, for instance, developed a genuine interest in African and Native culture and in 1936 wrote a project for the creation of an Institute for National Patrimony in which he included material and immaterial culture of the different populations in Brazil. In the same period, the sociologist Gilberto Freyre, who had studied with Franz Boas, wrote his classic book Casa-grande e senzala, in which he examines the diversity of contributions to Brazilian culture. In the 1940s and 1950s, Lina Bo Bardi organized exhibitions in Bahia and at the São Paulo Art Museum (MASP) based on her research on popular art in Brazil. See, among others, Antonio Gilberto Nogueira, Por um inventário dos sentidos: Mário de Andrade e a concepçã de patrimônio e inventário (São Paulo: Hucitec/Fapesp., 2005); Marina Grinover and Silvana Rubino, eds., Lina por escrito: Textos escolhidos de Lina Bo Bardi (São Paulo: Cosac e Naify, 2009); and Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande e senzala (São Paulo: Global, 2003).10. “From this we conclude that … art, in its simple forms, is not necessarily expressive of purposive action, but rather based upon our reactions to forms that develop through mastery of technique.” Franz Boas, Primitive Art (New York: Dover, 1955), 62. I also think that Boas's question about what could be considered an aesthetic object in these cultures is a very important one because it definitely secures these objects as of interest for the field of art history, at the same time that it forces us to listen to the point of view of their creators.11. On Assuriní visual culture, see Regina Polo Müller, Os Assuriní do Xingu: História e arte (Campinas: Unicamp, 1993). When dealing with contemporary indigenous culture we must also acknowledge the impact of the market on how aesthetic value is assigned. This, of course, implies recognizing that indigenous culture is in fact alive and interacting with other sectors of society today, resisting the tendency of both anthropologists and art historians to imagine these cultures as if “frozen in the past.”12. Tapirage is the name given to a technique used by some indigenous groups to alter the feather colors of live birds. See Amy Buono, “Crafts of Color: Tupi Tapirage in Early Colonial Brazil,” in The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments 1400–1800, ed. Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Press, 2012), 8–40.13. Amy Buono, “Indigeneity as Corporeality: The ‘Tupinambization’ of the Early Modern Atlantic,” in Art and Its Histories in Brazil, by Claudia Mattos and Roberto Conduru, Issues and Debates (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, forthcoming).14. On this issue, see Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Americas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 1–26.15. As I have argued above, there cannot be one unitary Brazilian art; given the constant dynamic exchange between local and transferred material and immaterial culture, we must substitute this concept for a more dynamic view of the arts in Brazil.16. Terreiro is the name for buildings and spaces that contain Afro-Brazilian religious activities. Quilombos are historic settlements of fugitive and freed slaves that were created in remote places within the interior of Brazil.17. We must learn to see the circulation of people, ideas, and objects between different localities in Africa and Brazil as a two-way process. As Roberto Conduru notes, although slavery implied the forced migration of a much larger population from Africa to the Americas, there was also some significant immigration in the other direction. This is well documented, for example, in the development of agudá architecture in the region of the Gulf of Guinea (Togo, Benin, and Nigeria). Conduru, “Sobrevivência e invenção—conexões artísticas entre Brasil e África,” in Mattos and Conduru, Art and Its Histories in Brazil.18. The direct relation between art and art history has been pointed out numerous times. Wolfgang Kemp (“Benjamin and Aby Warburg,” Kritische Berichte, no. 3 [1975]: 5–6) has argued that Dadaist collage played an important role in the development of Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, for instance. See Kurt W. Forster, “Die Hamburg-Amerika-Linie, oder: Warburgs Kunstwissenschaft zwischen den Kontinenten,” in Aby Warburg: Akten des internationalen Symposions, Hamburg, ed. Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass (Weinheim: Wiley-VCH Verlag), 11–37. Performance art has helped us understand the theatricality of Baroque art, and it also can be very productive in interpreting much of what we call Native art, for instance.19. Thierry Dufrêne, “Pour en finir avec le corset de la chronologie: Vers une histoire de l’art élargie qui rapproche les temps et les oeuvres,” in Théâtre du Monde, exh. cat. (Paris: FAGE, 2013), 30–37. The exhibition at La Maison Rouge, which showed the collection of eccentric Tasmanian collector David Walsh, was curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, who also used Surrealist-inspired anachronistic models to display the objects.20. Belting, Bild-Anthropologie; and Summers, Real Spaces. For a critique of David Summers's book in relation to the question of a new world art history, see James Elkins, “On David Summers's Real Spaces,” in Is Art History Global? (New York: Routledge, 2007), 41–72.Additional informationNotes on contributorsClaudia MattosClaudia Mattos, professor of art history at the University of Campinas, earned a PhD from the Freie Universität, Berlin, in 1996. She publishes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and is preparing one book on art and ecology in Brazil and editing another on Brazilian art history for Getty Publications [Instituto de Artes, Departamento de Artes Plásticas, Rua Elis Regina 50, Cidade Universitária Zeferino Vaz, 13083-854, Campinas, SP, Brazil, cvmattos@iar.unicamp.br].

Cutting Edge of the Contemporary: KNUST, Accra, and the Ghanaian Contemporary Art Movement

Art History: The Key Concepts is a systematic, reliable and accessible reference guide to the disciplines of art history and visual culture. Containing entries on over 200 terms integral to the historical and theoretical study of art, design and culture in general, it is an indispensable source of knowledge for all students, scholars and teachers. Covering the development, present status and future direction of art history, entries span a wide variety of terms and concepts such as abstract expressionism, epoch, hybridity, semiology and zeitgeist. Key features include: a user-friendly A-Z format fully cross-referenced entries suggestions for further reading. Engaging and insightful, as well as easy to follow and use, Art History: The Key Concepts builds a radical intellectual synthesis for understanding and teaching art, art history and visual culture.

Dealing with the Visual: Art History, Aesthetics and Visual Culture. Edited by CAROLINE VAN ECK and EDWARD WINTERS. Ashgate. 2005. pp. xvi + 304. 84 b & w figures. £65.00 (hbk). THE IDENTIFICATION of ‘the visual’ as a field of study follows hard on the heels of ‘the political’ and ‘the ethical’. Depending on one's perspective, the grammatical awkwardness of such terms signals either a forced attempt to give substance and weight to work that lacks the necessary rigour or a welcome departure from traditional approaches. For its proponents, reference to ‘the visual’ provides a way of overcoming the deep-rooted prejudices and assumptions that are built into the older disciplinary designations. In wresting the wider field of visual culture from its subsumption under art history, they have sought to circumvent the privileging of the fine arts over popular culture and to open up new areas of enquiry. It is perhaps inevitable that the readjustment of disciplinary boundaries that were established in the nineteenth century should put pressure on language. Those who have sought to win intellectual and institutional authority for emergent disciplines such as cultural studies have insisted on the need to adopt a less prejudiced vocabulary. However, as the editors of this valuable collection of essays point out, the central paradox of the study of visual culture (as it is currently practiced) is its lack of attention to the specifically visual. Although its roots are still relatively shallow, they are tightly wrapped around twentieth-century models of analysis that are derived from general linguistics, semiotics, and structuralism. By shifting attention to the wider signifying systems within which works of art are made and received, practitioners of visual studies have tended to overlook the specific aesthetic properties of individual works of art and to treat them instead as social and historical documents that are of no greater intrinsic value or interest than other cultural products such as advertising, fashion, and soap operas.

Introduction to<i>Visual Arts Research</i>Special Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

This book explores a range of experimental self-portraits made in France between 1840 and 1870, including remarkable images by Hippolyte Bayard, Nadar, Duchenne de Boulogne, and Countess de Castiglione. Adapting photography for different social purposes, each of these pioneers showcased their own body as a living artifact and iconic attraction. Jillian Lerner considers performative portraits that exhibit uncanny transformations of identity and embodiment. She highlights the tactical importance of photographic demonstrations, promotions, conversations, and the mongrel forms of montage, painted photographs, and captioned specimens. The author shows how photographic practices are mobilized in diverse cultural contexts and enmeshed with the histories of art, science, publicity, urban spectacle, and private life in nineteenth-century France. Tracing calculated and creative approaches to a new medium, this research also contributes to an archaeology of the present. It furnishes a prehistory of the “selfie” and offers historical perspectives on the forces that reshape human perception and social experience. This interdisciplinary study will appeal to readers interested in the history of photography, art, visual culture, and media studies.

This commentary on the articles in this special issue of Visual Resources suggests that they provoke a consideration of the virtues of imagining a history of visual culture that is both distinct from a history of art, on the one hand, but also distinct from a general cultural history, on the other. In order to be a useful category of historical analysis, the differences as well as the similarities between visual culture and cultural history or material cultural studies, more broadly speaking, must be constantly and consistently interrogated. Visual culture has to be more than a “big tent” designed to include everything that the history of art (as Modernism) has excluded, overlooked or relegated to a second tier. At their best, these articles get us out from under that tent and onto a vast and open interdisciplinary terrain on which the future of visual culture will be written.

Classical historical and art studies in the context of the development of modern humanities are frequently synthesised with research on visual culture and social art history, forming a broad discourse on the study of the culture of a particular era, country, or community. This optics is taken as the basis for this study, wherein such a fundamental philosophical concept as the attitude towards death is considered from the standpoint of art history iconographic and cultural studies to identify worldviews and ideology in the development of visual narratives that cover and represent them. In this dimension, illuminated manuscripts are the research subject and object where, through the synthesis of text and image, the ability to semiotically read images and decode the symbolic content of cultural categories opens up wide interpretative possibilities for the researcher. The purpose of this study is to outline the wide variability of iconographic typologies associated with the theme of death in the late medieval European culture of the Latin West and to cover the features of the connection of visual culture with the system of worldview representations based on symbolism rooted in religion, folklore, and court aristocratic culture. The proposed study uses an interdisciplinary scientific approach and an art history approach. The research is based on the methods of stylistic and formal analysis, semiotics, and hermeneutics. The typological approach allowed identifying groups of images united by identical semantics of image interpretation, joint compositional and plot solutions designed to accessibly decode their semantics. First, the ontological and metaphysical foundations of the perception of death as a phenomenon in the philosophical and anthropological dimension in culture in general, and in western European culture in particular, are defined and characterised. In the context of the analysis of the features of the symbolic and iconographic interpretation of images of death in the visual culture of illumination of the 13th-15th centuries, groups of images are identified, united by identical semantics of interpretation of these images, joint compositional and plot solutions designed to accessibly decode their semantics, namely the imagery of the death of saints and clergy, imagery of the death of monarchs, the death of soldiers, noble chivalry, the death of fallen in battle, the death of women, imagery of suicides, as well as imagery of violent death, murder. This study covers a wide range of potential recipients in modern humanitarianism and can be useful for historians, medievalists, art historians, anthropologists, and cultural scientists.

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...

‘Mind the gap’

Scenography and Art History reimagines scenography as a critical concept for art history, and is the first book to demonstrate the importance and usefulness of this concept for art historians and scholars in related fields. It provides a vital evaluation of the contemporary importance of scenography as a critical tool for art historians and scholars from related branches of study addressing phenomena such as witchy designs, Early Modern festival books, live rock performances, digital fashion photography, and outdoor dance interventions. With its nuanced and detailed case studies, this book is an innovative contribution to ongoing debates within art history and visual studies concerning multisensory events. It extends the existing literature by demonstrating the importance of a reimagined scenography concept for comprehending historical and contemporary art histories and visual cultures more broadly. The book contends that scenography is no longer restricted to the traditional space of the theatre, but has become an important concept for approaching art historical and contemporary objects and events. It explores scenography not solely as a critical approach and theoretical concept, but also as an important practice linked with unrecognized labour and broader political, social and gendered issues in a great variety of contexts, such as festive culture, sacred settings, fashion, film, or performing arts. Designed as a key resource for students, teachers and researchers in art history, visual studies, and related subjects, the book, through its cross-disciplinary frame, does consider, implicitly and explicitly, the roles of both scenography and art in society.

This thesis has as twofold purpose. First, it will show that Lowbrow Art fits into the framework of art history and is worthy of art history’s attention. Second, it will argue for a revalidation of “traditional” art historical methods by proving that the methods are applicable to a marginalized contemporary art movement. Lowbrow Art is one of the most distinctive and vibrant art movements in the world, but there has yet to be a thorough examination of this style. Despite the undeniable worldwide success of the Lowbrow Art movement, it remains relatively obscure in academic discourse. Perhaps one reason why art historians have yet to investigate the Lowbrow Art style is that, for decades, the field of art history has steadily been shifting attention away from matters of style. There is a lack of discourse about Lowbrow Art and other contemporary art movements. Therefore, “traditional” methods of art history were considered in order to develop a formal definition of Lowbrow Art. The methods concluded that Lowbrow Art is figurative art executed in traditional media that exploits the aesthetic conventions of popular visual culture in order to engage the viewer with a narrative or implied narrative. The proper definition of Lowbrow Art formed the framework for a historical analysis of the movement.

The history of the art movement in the city of Erbil during the years 198-1983 The history of Arts (music, fine art, and theatre) in Erbil goes back to long time ago but academically introduced during 1920s of the last century. In terms of music and songs, Kawais Agha was the first local singer who recorded his songs (Lawk) on cylinder phonograph. By mid 1950s, a group of academic musicians founded Darseem Music Band. Darseem Music Band had a significant contribution in the development of music and songs at that time. They also contributed to the development of other fields of Art such as theatre. In early 1980s, the band also had a significant contribution with Erbil Arts Band in the field of theatre. For the first time they did a show about Salahaddin Ayoubi in 1926. Since then theatre and show activities were endured. In 1980s, the theatre movement were developed due to the fact that some Fine Arts Graduates were trained academically and contributed to the development of theatre movement in Erbil. Similarly, fine arts started in early 1930s. Then, in 1950s, it become more developed as a group of students were returning to Erbil after graduating from Fine Arts in Baghdad. In 1970s another group of Fine Arts Graduates similar to their previous generation colleagues, they also contributed in the development of fine arts in the city through school activities and opening fine arts exhibitions at that time. Thus, fine arts in Erbil started to take an academic path and this highly welcomed and appreciated by local residents of Erbil in 1980-1983. In particular, most of the activities were conveying nations messages and this was highly welcomed by people. People were eager and looking forward to see new activities by those artists and actors groups. Nevertheless, the political circumstances in Iraq were not supportive to keep the Arts movement going forward. During the Iraq-Iran war, the situation has changed negatively. Actors and artists were under political pressure by Iraqi government. Especially those artists who were working in the fields of singing, music and theatre. The political pressure by Iraqi regime resulted in decline of the arts movement in the city. Actors and artists were mostly observed by the Iraqi regime agents. This resulted some of actors and artists to leave the field and the home land towards diaspora. Others, were called for military services and sent to the battlefield by Iraqi regime.