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Visual Culture Questionnaire Svetlana Alpers; Emily Apter Visual Culture Questionnaire Svetlana Alpers; Emily Apter; Carol Armstrong; Susan Buck-Morss; Tom Conley; Jonathan Crary; Thomas Crow; Tom Gunning; Michael Ann Holly; Martin Jay; Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann; Silvia Kolbowski; Sylvia Lavin; Stephen Melville; Helen Molesworth; Keith Moxey; D. N. Rodowick; Geoff Waite; Christopher Wood October, Vol. 77. (Summer, 1996), pp. 25-70. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0162-2870%28199622%2977%3C25%3AVCQ%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G October is currently published by The MIT Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/mitpress.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Wed Nov 7 13:13:06 2007 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
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