Visual Culture & Visual Studies
The term "Visualism" was
developed by the German anthropologist Johannes
Fabian to criticise the dominating role of vision in
scientific discourse, through such terms as observation. He points to an
under theorised approach to the use of visual representation which leads to a
corpuscular theory of knowledge and information which leads to their
atomisation.
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and
recognises before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing
comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding
world; we explain that world within words, but words can never undo the fact
that we are surrounded by it.
The relation between what we see and what we
know is never settlet. As the ’early’ Wittgenstein stated: ’A picture is a
fact’. And ’a logical pictures of facts is a thought.’
The content and form of things is to be
approached in terms of how they look.
At the very beginning of human history men
discovered in their ability to make pictures a method for symobolization of
their visual awareness which differs in important respects from any other
symbolic method that is known.[1]
Visual Culture Studies is the discipline or
sub-discipline or field of inquiry that studies visual culture. But ’Visual
Culture’ and ’Visual Studies’ are not the same thing. ‚’’ ’Visual Culture’ is
the field of study and the object or target of study, when the ’Visual Studies’
is the study of visual culture.’’ (Mitchell, 2002)[2]
The Visual Studies are an interdisciplinary rubric, a newly
conception of the visual as disembodied image, re-created in the virtual spaces
of sign-exchange. Visual culture embraces the same breadth of practice powered
the thinking of an early generation of art historians and that to return the
various medium-based historical disciplines, such as art, architecture and
cinema histories.
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, but on the
model of anthropology.
It is argued by some that visual culture is in an eccentric, even
antagonistic at times, position with regard to the ‘new art history’ with its
social-historical and semiotic imperatives and models of ‘context’ and ‘text’.[3]
Visual Culture studies recognizes the
predominance of visual forms of media, communication, and information in the
postmodern world. "Visual Studies" intersects with the notion of
"mediasphere" in mediology, the study of media systems and media as a
system.
The "visual
culture" approach acknowledges the reality of living in a world of cross-mediation--our
experience of culturally meaningful visual content appears in multiple forms,
and visual content and codes migrate from one form to another:
- print images and graphic design
- TV
and cable TV
- film and video in all interfaces and playback/display technologies
- computer
interfaces and software design
- Internet/Web as a visual platform
- digital
multimedia
- advertising in all media (a true cross-media institution)
- fine
art and photography
- fashion
- architecture,
design, and urban design
We learn the codes for each
form and code switch among the media and the "high" and
"low" culture forms.
Visual culture is the aspect of culture expressed in visual images. Many academic fields study this
subject, including cultural studies, art history, critical theory, philosophy, andanthropology. This field of study often overlaps with film
studies, psychoanalytic
theory, queer
theory, and the study
of television.
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