Visual Culture: Definitions, Issues

Readings

Elkins, James. Six Stories From the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics, 1980-2000. Stanford University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780804741484.

Krauss, Rosalind. "Welcome to the Cultural Revolution." October 77 (Summer 1996): 83-96.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. "Introduction: What is Visual Culture?" An Introduction to Visual Culture. Routledge, 2000, pp. 1-33. ISBN: 9780415158763.

Mitchell, W. J. T. "Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture." In Holly, Michael Ann, and Keith Moxey. Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies. Clark Art Institute, 2002, pp. 231-250. ISBN: 9780300097894.

Questions

1. Based on your reading of the pieces by Krauss, Mirzoeff, and Mitchell, how would you define "Visual Culture?" How does it differ from Art History? What analytical possibilities does it hold for historians?

2. What does Elkins mean when he uses the phrase "the end of representation?" How does this periodization scheme compare to some of the others developed by historians that we have discussed this term?

3. Elkins steadfastly refuses to draw any "general conclusions" from his six case studies in visual culture. Are you bothered by his refusal to do so?

Partial Bibliography

A. General

Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. MIT Press, 1992. ISBN: 9780262531078.

Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. University of California Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780520088856.

Bryson, Norman, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey. Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations. Wesleyan, 1994. ISBN: 9780819562678.

Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. MIT Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780262531993.

Bal, Mieke. Looking In: The Art of Viewing. Routledge, 2001. ISBN: 9789057011122.

Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780195314403.

Holly, Michael Ann, and Keith Moxey. Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies. Clark Art Institute, 2003. ISBN: 9780300097894.

Manghani, Sunil, Arthur Piper, and Jon Simons. Images: A Reader. Sage, 2006. ISBN: 9781412900454.

Jones, Caroline A. Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art. MIT Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780262101172.

Stafford, Barbara Maria. Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images. University of Chicago Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780226770529.

Elkins, James. Visual Literacy. Routledge, 2007. ISBN: 9780415958110.

B. Case Studies (some emphasis on 18th and 19th-century France)

Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. University of California Press, 1988. ISBN: 9780226262130.

Bryson, Norman. Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime. Cambridge University Press, 1983. ISBN: 9780521276542.

Schorske, Karl A. "Gustav Klimt: Painting and the Crisis of the Liberal Ego." Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. Vintage, 1981. ISBN: 9780394744780.

Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. University of Chicago Press, 1984. ISBN: 9780226015132.

Clark, T. J. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. Princeton University Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780691009032.

Crow, Thomas E. Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Yale University Press, 1987. ISBN: 9780300037647.

Baxandall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. Oxford University Press, 1988. ISBN: 9780192821447.

Silverman, Deborah L. Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style. University of California Press, 1992. ISBN: 9780520080881.

Stafford, Barbara Maria. Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine. MIT Press, 1993. ISBN: 9780262691659.

Kemp, Martin. Behind the Picture: Art and Evidence in the Italian Renaissance. Yale University Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780300071955.

Jones, Caroline A. Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses. University of Chicago Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780226409535.

C. Web sites

Journal of Visual Culture

Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester

"Media and Visual Studies Graduate Programs." Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota.