Session One: Visual Literacy
What
is Visual Literacy? And Who Has It?
James
Elkins (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA)
What
should count as visual literacy – the equivalent to the ‘ordinary’
literacy that is universally taught in colleges – for every college
student, whether their subject is arts, science, or medicine? What
images should be known to everyone who claims to be an educated
participant in contemporary society? What methodologies, what strategies
of interpretation should comprise the lingua franca of a visually
articulate culture? This lecture frames the problem historically
and pedagogically and provides some tentative answers.
Magic! Writing and Transformation in Photography
Jean Baird (Artist,UK)
This
presentation is an attempt to develop an idiomatic account of the
development of technologies of illusion, and cultural forms of magic
that culminate in the invention of photography, by way of Muybridge,
Marey & their equestrian adventures as they chart movement in the
spasm between the moment and the long slow gaze. The topic evolves
in correspondence with a theme in my own artwork that has surfaced
at various points over a period of about twelve years; the hieroglyphic
trace of the object/image in the photograph, its transformation
as it approaches the condition of writing. The paper is the site
of conflicts of critical intention as they interpenetrate with photographic
practice, as I foolishly try to recuperate the notion of ‘magic’
in a more positive way, as an unmasking of representation in the
very temporary suspension of reality that sometimes occurs in the
encounter between the spectator and the photograph when language
has momentarily left the scene.
Wundtian
Scissors and Kantian Glue
Derek Bunyard (King Alfred’s College, Winchester, UK)
This
paper proposes two alternative figurations for critique’s relationship
to its objects, other than that of gender, reflecting two different
conceptions of the objects themselves and the nature of agency within
critical reflection. In reaching towards these, the phenomenon of
ekphrasis – the description of visual experience by means of words
– is used to introduce issues relevant not only to this paper but
to the general aims of this conference. Principal amongst these
are questions of epistemology and the nature of critique itself.
Even if critical thinking does not necessarily involve language,
it is hard to understand how a linguistically-bound culture such
as our own can sustain response to critical interventions outside
of this verbal matrix. However, while this may be true of reception
in general as currently understood, the production of critical interventions
themselves – irrespective of medium – involves agents transacting
the transfer of objects from the private to the public domain and
vice versa. The two figurations developed in the paper suggest how
this process might be articulated, and its epistemological consequences.
Session Two: Placing the Visual
Placing
and Encounter: Visual Culture’s Geographies
Gillian
Rose (The Open University, UK)
The
literature on visual culture most often locates its claim to be
critical in its exploration of the effects of an image. This paper
takes that starting point seriously and argues that most discussions
of visual culture do not follow through its implications. The paper
argues that the effects of images are located in the people who
see them, and that discussions of ‘our’ visual culture need to explore
much more carefully the effects of particular images on particular
people. Critical work also needs to explore more carefully the importance
of where images are sited and seen, since spaces of display are
also fundamental to the effects of visualisations. Specific spaces
have their potentialities variously mobilised by the subjects who
move through or inhabit them, and their geometries, and their power,
are complex and overdetermined. The paper also argues that these
demands apply to the work of those of us who write about visual
culture as its critics. We need to think more carefully about how
we write and to what effect, and part of that should entail a reflection
on where we do various kinds of critical work.
Image,
Text, Context and Controversy
Alan
Schechner (Artist, USA).
Against the backdrop of what Norman G Finklestein has called a “Holocaust
Industry” I have attempted to demythologize the Holocaust, thus
making it again a living demon with which to struggle. My artwork,
which deals largely with issues of Holocaust representation became
the source of much controversy when it was exhibited at the exhibition
Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art (2002), organized by The
Jewish Museum in New York. In this paper I wish to address a number
of issues brought up by these works in the context of that exhibition.
In doing so I wish both to interrogate these artworks as a way of
analysing how images work, as well as to justify my use or manipulation
of Holocaust imagery as legitimate, specifically in relation to
some of the attacks made about the work. Other issues I will address
include: Issues of cultural ownership (who owns and may use Holocaust
images and to what ends?); how images are ‘read’ specifically in
relation to work that exists at the intersection of art, history
and politics?; and the relationship between art, criticism, theory
and practice in the context of my work.
Two
Ways of Seeing - A Confrontation of ‘Word and Image’ in My Name
is Red
Feride Çiçekoglu (Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey)
*
Full paper available in the Journal
of Aesthetic Education, Vol 37, No 3, 2003, p.1-20.*
This
paper focuses on two ways of seeing, taking as its frame of reference
the novel My Name is Red, by Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, winner
of the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. This book
is important for visual culture since it highlights issues of representation
in a comparative context. Pamuk’s anachronistically created characters
confront each other on ways of seeing in sixteenth-century Istanbul,
when it was the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The visual narratives
of Ottoman miniature painting are elaborated in comparison with
the contemporary Renaissance art, unfolding the differences in the
depiction of faces in particular. My Name is Red, which appears
to be a detective and love story, is interesting not only for the
identity of the murderer but for the reason of murder, which is
none other than what has come to be known as the confrontation of
‘word and image’. In this sense, the story is also a contemporary
tale, dealing with the concepts of representation and resemblance,
iconoclasm and fundamentalism in the context of ‘East and West’.
Italy serves the pivot of the compass defining the scope of this
presentation, joining Netherlandish painting and Ottoman miniature
tradition at a common juncture. Both ways of seeing will be traced
through the sixteenth century, from Hieronymus Bosch to Pieter Bruegel
on the one hand and from Bihzad (the master of Persian miniature)
to Nakkas Osman (the chief miniaturist of the Ottoman Palace during
the second half of the second century) on the other. My Name is
Red provides the framework for this journey, with implication
Session Three: Visual Rhetoric
The
About to Die Image and Journalistic Subjunctivity
Barbie
Zelizer (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
This
paper examines the ways in which photographic images have instantiated
themselves in Western journalism, both in its coverage of events
as they happen and in the recycled knowledge that journalism provides
in helping publics to remember events over time. Tracing the utilisation
of one particular kind of photograph - photographs of individuals
about to die - the paper shows how images of people facing their
impending death have been imported from artistic representations
of the crucifixion and other memorable deaths (among them Socrates
and General Wolfe) to depict a wide range of contested and complicated
news events in the public sphere. From the assassinations of U.S.
presidents, the Holocaust, and Vietnam to the Intifada and September
11, the about-to-die moment has surfaced repeatedly in Western journalism,
becoming one of the favored visual tropes by which journalists depict
war, assassination, atrocity, and geo-political strife. It is argued
that the intrusion of the about-to-die image in journalism illustrates
a subjunctive voice of visual representation, and offers a space
in which hypothesis, imagination, and conditionality work both against
the photograph’s referential force and its symbolic meaning. It
is an oppositional space to that of journalism, undermining news
value by laundering, softening, and rendering contingent complicated
events in the public sphere.
The
Speed of Immanent Images: The Dangers of Reading Photographs
Kevin DeLuca
(University of Georgia)
As
a field, rhetoric has yet to encounter images/photographs. Our studious
gazes at images are always askew, filtered through the terministic
screens of old habits, old practices, old concepts. Through recourse
to historical context, morality, and transcendent theory we reduce
the rhetorical force of images to meaning, domesticating them for
our studies. As habits of reception and modes of perception are
transformed, our habits of analysis are challenged. In a world moving
at the speed of images, criticism premised on the gaze, sustained
attention, focus, rationality, and depth of research is rendered
archaic. Criticism seeking the rhetorical force of photographs oscillates/vibrates
with two tasks—facing the intractable immanence of this photograph
in its absolute particularity and describing the world called into
being by this photograph as part of the public discourse of an image-centric
media matrix. These tasks call on us to invent a rhetorical criticism
of images that is imbued by images - a criticism premised on speed,
distraction, and glances.
Session
Four: Visual Theory
Cinema
All the Way Down
Jon Beller (University of California, USA)
This
paper places the social relation known as the image at the centre
of contemporary metaphysics and epistemology. It argues that the
intensification of image technologies underpins structuralism, psychoanalysis,
post-structuralism and (post)modern political-economy. These discourses
do not explain the image but rather can themselves be explained
with reference to the image as the emergent interface between the
material exigencies of late capitalist social organisation and human
bodies.
Outside
of Place and other than Optical
Jessica Dubow (University of Nottingham, UK)
*
Full paper printed in the Journal
of Visual Culture *
Schoenberg
never completed his most famous opera, ‘Moses and Aaron’. For an
important structural reason: the logic of the libretto could not
be reconciled with the musical score. But this has a deeper implication.
In the last minutes of the opera, Moses, the Hebrew patriarch, does
not sing. Against a muted orchestration, he simply declares: ‘O
word, Thou word that I lack’. If Moses is unable to find the means
to convert affective substance into language and representation,
it also hints – analogically – at the theoretical distinction between
the perceptual and the specular, between the sensual, phenomenal
body and its formal, abstractive fulfilments. This paper explores
these distinctions in context of a Judaic philosophic tradition
and its conceptual links to the notion of nomadic mobility. Looking
at the itinerant figure of Walter Benjamin the question it poses
is this: How may we see the anti-optical as an expression of the
subject freed from the imperatives of territory and territorial
identity? How does the Judaic injunction against visual presence
relate to the perceptual discontinuities of the mobile body? In
short, if we understand spatial mobility as an experience that cannot
be incorporated by a simple adaptation of thought (or cognition
and representation) how may we see a ‘Jewish eye’ as introducing
a radically critical visual regime: one located outside a culture
of specular presence as outside the site of the sedentary?
Addressing Media
W.J.T.
Mitchell (University of Chicago, USA)
Paper
available in Mitchell's book What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives
and Loves of Images (2005, University of Chicago Press)
Synopsis:
Why
do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images
and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures
were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things
from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray? According
to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as
inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires,
needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. What Do Pictures
Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and
profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives
and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature,
and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and
wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes
and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive
images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting.
Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual
culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheep - who,
as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image
- and the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which,
among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm.
What Do Pictures Want? offers an immensely rich and suggestive account
of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by
one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be
a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists,
and philosophers alike.
Summary
& Roundtable Debate
Chair:
Marquard
Smith (Kingston University, UK)
Practical
Workshop: Figuring Thinking - an exercise in alternative
pedagogy!
Session
Leader: Derek Bunyard (King Alfred’s College, UK)
The
workshop has been developed by a team from King Alfred’s College,
and is based on a range of pedagogical interventions that seek to
provide alternative media experiences from which one can manipulate
and draft responses to academic work. Participants will receive
several presentations explaining the nature and purpose of the work
so far attempted at King Alfred’s, and they will be invited to take
part in related activities and simulations. A review at the end
of the workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to
interrogate in a more formal way the purposes and methods featured
in the workshop.
