Visual Cultures

James Elkins

Description

Visual Cultures is the first study of the place of visuality and literacy in specific nations around the world, and includes authoritative, insightful essays on the value accorded to the visual and the verbal in Japan, Poland, China, Russia, Ireland and Slovenia. The content is not only analytic, but also historical, tracing changes in the significance of visual and verbal literacy in each nation. Visual Cultures also raises and explores issues of national identity, and provides a wealth of information for future research. Visual Cultures will appeal to those with an interest in visual studies, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, area studies, subaltern studies, political theory, art history and art criticism.

Introduction 

Slovenia: Visuality and Literarity In Slovene Culture – Andrej Smrekar

Japan: Lost In Translation, or Nothing To See but Everything – Sunil Manghani

Ireland: Words Upon the Windowpane: Image, Text, and Irish Culture – Luke Gibbons

Poland: A Visually-Oriented Literary Culture? – Kris Van Heuckelom

China: Verbal Above Visual: A Chinese Perspective – Ding Ning

Russia: To Read, To Look: Teaching Visual Studies In Moscow – Viktoria Musvik

Critical Response – Esther Sánchez-Pardo

Sujets

• Media Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Película fotográfica
• General officer
• Television
• Anthropology
• General
• Social
• Film
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 27 avril 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841503844
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Visual Cultures
Visual Cultures
Edited by James Elkins
First published in the UK in 2010 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2010 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2010 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover design: Holly Rose Copy-editor: Lesley Williams Typesetting: John Teehan
ISBN 978-1-84150-307-3 / EISBN 978-1-84150-384-4
Printed and bound by 4edge Ltd, UK.
Contents

Introduction
Slovenia: Visuality and Literarity In Slovene Culture
Andrej Smrekar
Japan: Lost In Translation, or Nothing To See but Everything
Sunil Manghani
Ireland: Words Upon the Windowpane: Image, Text, and Irish Culture
Luke Gibbons
Poland: A Visually-Oriented Literary Culture?
Kris Van Heuckelom
China: Verbal Above Visual: A Chinese Perspective
Ding Ning
Russia: To Read, To Look: Teaching Visual Studies In Moscow
Viktoria Musvik
Critical Response
Esther S nchez-Pardo
Contributors
I NTRODUCTION
W hy gather a set of essays about concepts of the visual in different nations? Because the nation, as a site for the study of visuality, has been eclipsed by two complementary kinds of studies: those that focus on transnational, international, and global culture; and those that concentrate on local or regional culture.
Scholarship on visuality in global culture is moving rapidly, with new and forthcoming studies by many scholars-David Summers, Whitney Davis, Hans Belting, Iftikhar Dadi, Partha Mitter, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, and others (Elkins, et al., 2009; see also van Damme, et al., 2008). On the other hand, there is also a rapidly growing literature on visuality and literacy in particular places. There are studies, for example, of the visual cultures of individual cities such as Los Angeles and of particular cultures and cultural practices such as contemporary Aboriginal art (Is 1998; Walsh 2000). In comparison there are relatively few studies of visuality or visual culture in nations. The existing scholarship tends to focus on particular periods in the history of nations, employing the vocabulary of visual studies to articulate practices that are particular to moments in the nations histories. 1
This bifurcated literature is, in part, a result of the pressure of political theory, which drives outward, toward issues of empire and transnationalism, or inward, toward issues of the everyday, the local, and the regional. Theorists such as Saskia Sassen, Immanuel Wallerstein, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Anthony King, Pascale Casanova, and Arjun Appadurai have transformed the discourse on the global and the local culture, and in the process the nation has become more a locus of theoretical discussion than of substantive study. In addition, the nation has long been the focus, and even the defining purpose, of traditional art history. As Hans Belting and others have shown, early- and midtwentieth-century Kunstgeschichte was both openly and inadvertently nationalist, and the amalgamated and increasingly global discipline of art history retains many elements of those earlier discourses (Belting 1998). In the past few decades, the many developments that have led away from traditional art history-including varieties of visual studies and Bildwissenschaft as well as postcolonial studies, area studies, and decolonial studies-have also led away from studies that concentrate on national themes.
The six histories of ideas about visuality and literacy in this book are examples of what can be said about visuality and valuations of the visual in relation to national histories. These essays are primarily historical and not theoretical: they are replete with exact examples set in precise historical contexts, responding to specific politics and expressed in local languages. It is my hope that these histories can suggest forms of the dialectic relation between values accorded to language and to visuality that are not immediately present in current theorizations. The extensive discussions in the book Art and Globalization (Elkins, et al., 2009) work to problematize the local and the global culture, but they do not contribute directly to a rethinking of what can be said about the visual on a national scale. That book is as large as this one is small- Art and Globalization (Elkins, et al., 2009) includes fifty or sixty scholars from about forty countries-and this book was begun and largely completed before Art and Globalization (Elkins, et al., 2009). Yet this book can be read as a response to Art and Globalization (Elkins, et al., 2009) because it addresses a hiatus in conceptualization, where thinking about the national situation has moved into critical theory, whereas thinking about both global art and local practices of art have remained fruitful areas for historically specific work. (On the other hand, the historical inquiries in this book are not substitutes for the critical theory that informs current discourse: the brevity of this book does not condense or even address the crucial ongoing efforts to conceptualize the local, the regional, the transnational, the global, and the national culture.)
There is also the question of the generalization of western critical theory. For the most part, theorizations of collective identity, nationality, colonialism and postcolonialism, hybridity, and marginality have drawn on historiographic concepts and interpretive strategies formulated within western Europe and North America, even when they have taken as their subjects nations and cultures outside the West (Elkins 2003, pp. 110-120). 2 The same is true of studies of scopic regimes, ocularcentrism, and the gaze. It can sometimes feel as if theorizations of the ocularcentric ideology, perspectival naturalism, panoptical social surveillance, and other such concepts have reached a limit defined by their geographic and historical specificity. 3 Word and image studies, too, have reached a point where an enormous amount of literature on individual objects-much of it produced in and around the International Association of Word and Image Studies-relies on a relatively small number of theorizations, most of them developed in response to themes that are taken to be general throughout the postclassical West. These limits have not been invisible; in Art and Globalization (Elkins, et al., 2009), for example, Garc a Canclini and others suggest that hybridization should be complemented by terms that are better suited for other parts of the world, such as South America. But hybridization remains to develop some of them in national contexts- Art and Globalization (Elkins, et al., 2009) issues several calls for rethinking hybridization but that work is not done in the book itself.
Readers should find a wealth of new ideas to contemplate in these essays. Andrej Smrekar s lucid summary of Slovene attitudes to the visual includes the fundamental point that Slovene national identity was forged by men of letters and oriented predominantly toward literarity -and yet, unexpectedly, the emergence of Slovenia was articulated best by visual objects. The occult reappearance of the visual through the literary is a recurrent theme in these essays. Kris Van Heuckelom s study of Polish literary and visual culture picks out several moments when literary culture seemed compelled to defend its purity, such as Julian Klaczko s claim that As Slavs, we are and can be only masters of the Word! and the poet Witold Gombrowicz s call for Poles to stop prostrating themselves before French painting. Those protests articulate a defensive fear, the inevitable companion of an unexpressed desire. The play of an articulate, publicly acceptable iconophobia and a private, pervasive iconophilia is another theme shared by several of these essays. Ding Ning s essay on China is a succinct survey of two thousand years of determinedly literary educational traditions, and it ends with only a faint hint-a hope-that university education in China might become more centered on images. Ning s pessimism-if that is what it is-is a tonic to the exuberant celebrations of visual culture that mark western publications on visual culture. We have to remember that we-that is, we in North America and Anglophone Europe, where this book is likely to be read-are a tiny minority, despite the apparent preeminence of visual media in global capitalist culture. No less important, we need to keep in mind that the current infatuation with visuality is arguably a trait of western Modernism and therefore a new and probably ephemeral interest in the history of culture. Viktoria Musvik s very honest essay-she is courageous in the claims she allows herself to make about Russian literacy and senses of the visual-is a tonic in this regard.
The pervasiveness of western European and North American theories of visuality s history has made it difficult to discern some workings of the visual and the literary outside the western compass. That problem is itself the subject of Sunil Manghani s meditation on Japan in Chapter 2 . Manghani is an outsider to Japan, and his essay often turns on other people s meditations on their outsideness. (The movie Lost in Translation [Coppola 2003] plays as big a role in his essay as Roland Barthes s Empire of Signs [1983].) It is possible that for some Japanese readers, Manghani s essay may seem a bit forced, or even naff. But that lack of fluency is not a trait to be expunged: As Manghani knows, it is the condition of observation itself, in its perpetual partial exile. (Manghani is as sensitive and an eloquent observer of this form of alienation as any I know.) Irremediable partial alien