A Concise Companion to Visual Culture. Группа авторов
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the “now” of postmodern formations as it was to capture this mix in all its messy yet productive contradictions and future possibilities, which required accounting for the potentiality and failures of theory in modernity.
In retrospect, this description of our approaches can perhaps make our initial foray sound more systematic than it was. In fact our aim was largely shaped by the work we had done as practitioners and early career scholars, and were currently doing—in part through writing and curating and, importantly, through what we were teaching and wanted to teach in our classes: the kinds of images and practices that we wanted to interpret with our students, and the kinds of connections across social arenas and domains of practice that we wanted our students to make. Our particular institutional placements demanded a kind of bridging work and explanatory labor that was somewhat unusual in its scope, for that time. Focus on everyday image cultures or on biomedical imaging practice was not common in film and media studies or in art history of the era. Teaching across history/theory and practice was relatively new. American cultural studies was largely organized around the popular. In conceptualizing Practices of Looking, we hoped to account for an emergent field that crossed art history, film studies, media studies, cultural studies, and critical, research‐based, and activist practice‐based art and media and to provide a resource, on the cusp of the digital turn, that would offer a flexible set of tactics for approaching the visual—without mandating particular interpretations or a de rigueur set of methods. We were aiming for flexible means of theorization that would work across forms. Whereas the visual culture methods emerging around the new art history emphasized semiotics, film studies was forwarding psychoanalytic and narrative interpretive methods in parallel conversations. Yet few options were in place if one wanted to make sense of the differences or to work across these discourses in cultures of convergence—an activity that includes the traditional academic disciplines and not just media formats.
While we were writing the first edition of our book, the historical images under discussion in art and photography history classes were not yet digitized, and not yet available on the Internet or in searchable databases. Easy access to digital reproduction through licensing—at a cost, from private image brokers, and in some cases for free, from public institutional collections—was still just over the horizon. Imaging and image reproduction were themselves becoming more pervasive and more flexible sets of modalities. This was the case not only in art, where slide library digitization would soon transform both practice and pedagogy, but also in film and video. In the pre‐YouTube era before 2005, audiovisual media were viewable either through film prints or on VHS, but never online. Practically, then, the convergence of slides, films, and video circulation and display through computing after 2000 made teaching across the arts and in various media seem fluid and natural. This was a transformation that demanded convergence among an array of histories and theories as well, in order to account for both the phenomenology of experience and the economic and sociopolitical realities of image access, ownership, taste, and markets on a global scale. Importantly, social media were not yet introduced and the mobile phone camera was not yet an entity when our first edition was released. Meanwhile, fields such as medicine and law, disciplines previously dominated by text and the word, were engaging with images as routine parts of everyday research, treatment, service, and teaching. This shift required theorization among those of us with expertise in image and media history and theory. We were keen to adapt the theories at hand to these underconsidered areas of visual culture.
A bit of background on our academic training may help to explain what we brought to the table in this work when we set out to write this book in the mid‐1990s. We both came from backgrounds in art practice—Marita in photography and video, Lisa in sculpture and film. At the time when we began our collaboration, Lisa was teaching in a new PhD program that straddled art history and an English‐ and comparative literature‐based film studies program at the University of Rochester. Originally called Comparative Studies, the program had been renamed Visual and Cultural Studies in 1991, to reflect allegiance to the British cultural studies tradition (the Birmingham‐trained sociologist of art Janet Wolff had been hired to direct the program) while maintaining the visual studies concept that circulated at the time in “the new art history” (Harris 2001, Jõekalda 2013). This orientation was reflected in the work of comparative literature scholar Mieke Bal and art historian Michael Ann Holly, who remained on the Rochester faculty after Norman Bryson’s departure for Harvard and the untimely death of art critic and queer theorist Craig Owens in 1990—the year in which Lisa joined the faculty to teach in the film studies and global health majors. Douglas Crimp had been hired to teach in the program not only as an art historian but also as a cultural theorist of activism and sexuality, on the basis of his groundbreaking contributions to activism and theory around HIV/AIDS. Thus theory and cultural studies of sexuality and health were foundational to visual culture as it was taught at Rochester from the 1990s through the end of the 2010s, a conjuncture that ended with Crimp’s death in 2019. Film (and later media) studies, a program in which Sharon Willis, Constance Penley, Kaja Silverman, and David Rodowick taught, was also a part of the comparative studies configuration, making Rochester one of the few places in the early 1990s where one could pursue doctoral studies that spanned art history and film studies while maintaining a sustained commitment to bridging art practice and critical theory.
At the same time, our ideas about the book involved contributions from communication studies, a field that was foundational to cultural studies both in the United Kingdom (through sociology at Birmingham) and in the United States (through the University of Illinois Champaign‐Urbana campus, where Treichler and Larry Grossberg taught). Marita was teaching at the University of California, San Diego, in a communication department (which Lisa would later join) that was acquiring faculty members in humanities‐based cultural studies and critical theory, and that offered feminist political theory. Marita later moved to the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, to a program that was largely social science‐based and had strengths in mass communication and communication management; she was one of the first faculty members at this leading communication school with a profile in visual and cultural studies. Later, colleagues at Annenberg such as Sarah Banet‐Weiser, Larry Gross, Josh Kun, and Henry Jenkins would take part in expanding the more traditional communication curriculum into visual culture, popular culture, and feminist media studies.
Our combined work on Practices of Looking was thus informed in great part by a practical desire for the book to support combined approaches that encompassed our mix of commitments, as well as our aim to speak to students across a range of disciplinary contexts. Our goal was to offer a kind of flexible toolbox of theories and examples to the core curricula of visual culture studies as the latter was introduced to fields such as art practice, art history, film, comparative literature, and literary studies. We briefly considered an anthology, but felt the need was more urgent for a book that, like Berger’s Ways of Seeing, synthesized and explained how this conjuncture of concerns and approaches came together and how it could work into the future.
Our prior experience in arts‐based media practice informed our conception of the book as well, and merits explanation. This orientation may explain why the book has been widely adopted in art schools. In the second and third editions we were more explicit in our redesign of the book so as to match changes in art school and art training contexts. In 1960, British art schools were subject to a compulsory art history and design curricular components (Gee 2017, 61), with the interesting side effect that art students, in Britain at least, were likely to encounter the Marxist, feminist, semiotic, and psychoanalytic theories that would come to inform the new art history of the 1970s and 1980s. In the United States, the Marxist and psychoanalytic turn in film studies generated attention to research‐based structural and experimental film practice and political art film. Theory was done not only in writing but also in the forms of film and video. Experimental and political art film and the new medium of video art followed photography into the art school curriculum during this decade. At the same time, the shift in focus, in the 1970s, from popular literature to cinema and television at the Birmingham School’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies under Stuart Hall brought the discipline of cultural studies squarely into the realm of visual theory, and its focus on means of production in turn informed both art film practice and humanities‐based film studies pedagogy, in a range of national settings where Frankfurt School