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Visual Culture (visual + culture)
Selected AbstractsTHE NORTH LOOKS SOUTH: GIORGIO VASARI AND EARLY MODERN VISUAL CULTURE IN THE KINGDOM OF NAPLESART HISTORY, Issue 4 2008AISLINN LOCONTE This article considers how the artist, writer and critic Giorgio Vasari (1511,1574) in his canonical text Le vite de più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori characterized the artists working in the city of Naples and the monuments they produced. Through his own experience working in Naples (1544,45) Vasari acquired significant first-hand knowledge of the city and its artistic culture. His account of his experiences and those of other artists who worked in the city portrays Naples as lacking a dominant local artistic tradition and the support of active and interested patrons. With the intention of furthering the central themes and aims of his text, Vasari created a carefully constructed image of Naples as a rhetorical foil for the alleged superior virtue and strength of northern artists and urban centres where art and architecture played a key role in civic pride. [source] Memory, Masculinity and National Identity in British Visual Culture, 1914,1930: A Study of ,Unconquerable Manhood' by Gabriel KoureasGENDER & HISTORY, Issue 1 2010JOHN BAXENDALE No abstract is available for this article. [source] Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China , By Eugene Y. WangRELIGIOUS STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 4 2007Fan Lin No abstract is available for this article. [source] Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and AnimeASIAN POLITICS AND POLICY, Issue 2 2009Alwyn Spies [source] GETTING BY THE OCCUPATION: How Violence Became Normal during the Second Palestinian IntifadaCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2008LORI ALLEN ABSTRACT The second Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation, which began in September 2000, saw Palestinian areas repeatedly invaded and shelled by Israeli forces. A long history of war and targeted cities is told along the thoroughfares of Palestinian towns; memories of past battles and defeats inscribed in street signs recall massacres in places like Tel Al-Za'atar and Deir Yasin. But recent events were more important than any official marker and formed the most relevant base by which Palestinians organized their lives. Commemorative cultural production and basic acts of physically getting around that became central to the spatial and social practices by which reorientation and adaptation to violence occurred in the occupied Palestinian territories. This article analyzes the spaciotemporal, embodied, and symbolic aspects of the experience of violence, and the political significance of cultural practices whereby violence is routinized. Such an approach provides a lens onto the power of violence in Israel's colonial project in the occupied territories that neither necessitates an assumption that violence is all determining of Palestinian experience, nor a championing of every act of Palestinian survival as heroic resistance. Memorialization that occurs in storytelling, in visual culture, in the naming of places and moving through spaces is one way in which this happens. The concept of "getting by" captures the many spatial and commemorative forms by which Palestinians manage everyday survival. The kind of agency that is entailed in practices whereby people manage, get by, adapt, and the social significance of getting used to it may be somewhat nebulous and unobtrusive as it develops in the shadow of spectacular battles and bloodshed. I demonstrate that this routinization of violence in and of itself, the fact of getting by, just existing in an everyday way, is socially and politically significant in Palestine. [source] Objects of Love and Decay: Colonial Photographs in a Postcolonial ArchiveCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2005Liam Buckley The poor condition of a collection of colonial photographs currently housed in the National Archives of The Gambia is the subject of a variety of competing discourses and practices concerning the preservation of colonial visual culture. At issue is the question of who has the right to look after the artifacts of material culture as they inevitably expire. I suggest that the discourse surrounding decaying colonial photographs is a lover's discourse. The decay causes controversy because it reminds us of our feelings for, and intimacy with, colonial culture and asks that we imagine ways of finally letting go. [source] Obsolescence and the Cityscape of the Former GDRGERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 4 2010Simon Ward ABSTRACT Paul Ricoeur claims that it is on the scale of urbanism that we best catch sight of the work of time in space. This article establishes two paradigmatic ways of seeing time in the city, the synchronic urban gaze and the urban memorial gaze, in order to explore how visualisations of the cityscape of the former GDR negotiate the significance of obsolescence, both ideological and physical. These paradigmatic forms can be associated with the ,official vision' of the cityscape, and ,alternative' visions respectively. While the state vision is evident in its urban planning, and the visual discourses at its disposal, the alternative visions are expressed in forms of visual culture (film and photography) that also explicitly engage with the visual discourses of urbanism. The article thus begins with an analysis of the official vision, through a consideration of the demolition of the Berlin Stadtschloss in 1950 as an act that may have been underpinned by both the ideological and physical obsolescence of the Schloss, but was ultimately justified by the need to create urban space for ideologically-motivated circulation. It then charts the changing relationship to obsolescence on the part of the regime's urban planners in the late 1960s, showing how this ostensibly dovetails with alternative ,subjective' visions of the cityscape in the 1970s in films such as,Die Legende von Paul und Paula,and,Solo Sunny, and in the photography of Ulrich Wüst. Such visions are widespread and largely permissible by the 1980s (with the notable exception of Helga Paris's study of Halle); and Peter Kahane's 1990s film,,Die Architekten, is read as offering a summary of these positions, as well as of the tensions between official and alternative ways of framing the manifestation of time in the cityscape. The article concludes by considering the afterlife of the obsolescent cityscapes of the former capital of the GDR within the new ,official' regime of representation that dominates in the ,new' Berlin. Paul Ricoeur behauptet, dass wir im Kontext des urbanen Raumes am besten betrachten können, wie sich die Zeit im Raum manifestiert. Diesem Aufsatz liegen zwei paradigmatische Sichtweisen auf die Stadt zugrunde, und zwar der synchronische Stadtblick (,synchronic urban gaze') einerseits und der zeitbezogene Stadtblick (,urban memorial gaze') andererseits, durch die Bedeutung und Rolle des physischen und moralischen Verschleißes in Darstellungen der Stadtlandschaft von Ostberlin, der Hauptstadt der DDR, untersucht werden können. Diese Sichtweisen lassen sich mit der ,offiziellen' Sichtweise, bzw. mit ,alternativen' Sichtweisen in Verbindung bringen. Die staatliche Sichtweise drückt sich in der Stadtplanung, aber auch in den visuellen Medien, die dem Staat zur Verfügung stehen, aus. Die alternativen Sichtweisen drücken sich auch in Formen der visuellen Vermittlung (Film, Fotografie) aus, die sich auch mit dem Urbanismus auseinandersetzen. Der Aufsatz beginnt daher mit der Analyse der offiziellen Sichtweise, und betrachtet den Abriss des Berliner Stadtschlosses im Jahre 1950 als einen Vorgang, der sowohl vom physischen wie auch ideologisch verschlissenen Zustand des Gebäudes ausging, aber letztendlich seine Legitimation aus dem Bedürfnis, urbanen Raum als Verfügungsmasse für ideologisch fundierte Tätigkeiten zu schaffen bezog. Diese Position des Regimes zum Verschleiß veränderte sich in den späten 1960er-Jahren, und diese neue Position hat scheinbare Ähnlichkeiten mit alternativen ,subjektiven' Vorstellungen der Stadtlandschaft in Filmen wie,Die Legende von Paul und Paula,und,Solo Sunny, und in der Fotografie von Ulrich Wüst. Solch alternative Visionen der Stadtlandschaft setzten sich mit weitgehender offizieller Duldung in den 1980er-Jahren fort (mit der berühmten Ausnahme der Halle-Arbeiten von Helga Paris); Peter Kahanes Film,,Die Architekten,(1990), bietet eine Zusammenfassung dieser Perspektiven und der Spannung zwischen der ,offiziellen' Sichtweise und dem alternativen Blick auf die verschlissene Stadt. Im Schlussteil untersucht der Aufsatz das Nach- oder Weiterleben der scheinbar obsoleten Stadtlandschaften der Hauptstadt der DDR in den offiziellen Formen der Stadtlandschaft, die im ,neuen Berlin' herrschen. [source] The culture of judgement: art and anti-Catholicism in England, c.1660,c.1760*HISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 202 2005Clare Haynes Art produced in Italy and France was highly prized in England during the long eighteenth century even though much of it was Catholic in subject matter. A number of strategies of mediation were developed to manage this problem that allowed the prestige of this culture to accrue to the English élite. At the same time, the role of visual culture in the Church of England was being contested between those who were confident that the Reformation had been effected and those who believed it to be still incomplete. Central to both these phenomena was the idea that popish pictures and art in churches could be acceptable if, and only if, the spectator could be trusted to look ,properly'. [source] Actualism and the Fascist Historic ImaginaryHISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2003Claudio Fogu This essay argues that, just like liberalism and communism, fascist ideology was based on a specific philosophy of history articulated by Giovanni Gentile in the aftermath of World War I. Gentile's actualist notion that history "belongs to the present" articulated an immanent vision of the relationship between historical agency, representation, and consciousness against all transcendental conceptions of history. I define this vision as historic (as opposed to "historical") because it translated the popular notion of historic eventfulness into the idea of the reciprocal immanence of the historical and the historiographical act. I further show that the actualist philosophy of history was historically resonant with the Italian experience of the Great War and was culturally modernist. I insist, however, that the actualist catastrophe of the histori(ographi)cal act was also genealogically connected to the Latin-Catholic rhetorical signification of "presence" that had sustained the development of Italian visual culture for centuries. Accordingly, I argue that the fascist translation of actualism into a historic imaginary was at the root of Italian fascism's appeal to both masses and intellectuals. Fascism presented itself as a historic agent that not only "made history," but also made it present to mass consciousness. In fact, I conclude by suggesting that the fascist success in institutionalizing a proper mode of historic representation in the 1920s, and a full-blown historic culture in the 1930s, may have also constituted a fundamental laboratory for the formation of posthistoric(al) imaginaries. [source] Prehistory, Identity, and Archaeological Representation in Nordic MuseumsAMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 1 2006JANET E. LEVY In this article, I examine the variable representation of Saami (Lapp) prehistory in several Nordic museums. The analysis is situated at the intersection of (1) the examination of the ideology of archaeological practice, (2) the discourse about creation of indigenous identity, and (3) the visual culture of museum exhibitions. I describe and analyze displays about archaeology and prehistory from seven museums in Sweden, Finland, and Norway. The presentation of Saami prehistory differs significantly between majority community museums and those run by Saami communities. These presentations reflect ideologies implicated in building indigenous, nationalist, and pannational identities as well as in establishing legitimacy of Saami claims to land and heritage. Representations of the past are inevitably political because they are about linking people, place, and legitimacy. Ambiguities in these uses of prehistory are discussed, as is the globalizing role of the European Union. [source] Donatello's decapitations and the rhetoric of beheading in Medicean Florence*RENAISSANCE STUDIES, Issue 5 2009Allie Terry Abstract While Donatello's bronze sculptures of Judith and David are stylistically discrete, and may have been originally created in and for different contexts, they are firmly connected to one another through their content: both figures clearly are characterized as active agents of decapitation. As this article argues, the Medici fostered a familial association with the iconographic, symbolic and practical language of decapitation in Florence since the Albizzi coup of 1433,4, when the family came to be associated with the feast of St John the Baptist's martyrdom, through the placement of the Donatello sculptures in the family palace in the 1460s. Although rarely mentioned in the vast art-historical literature on the Medici, visual allusions to beheadings in paint, performance and sculpture served a rhetorical function in Florence to describe the shifting political status of Cosimo de'Medici and his family. By outlining a cultural map by which this visual rhetoric of decapitation may be charted in relation to the Medici family, this article contributes yet a further layer of meaning to the Donatello sculptures within the larger context of early Medici patronage and politics and offers a new methodological approach for the investigation of early modern Florentine visual culture. [source] Creating sacred space: the religious visual culture of the Renaissance Venetian casa*RENAISSANCE STUDIES, Issue 2 2007Margaret A. Morse Religion and its visible manifestations were fundamental and consistent aspects of the Renaissance household, yet the subject remains largely overlooked in the scholarship on the domestic environment. Based on a variety of contemporary sources for evidence, this article introduces readers to the religious visual culture of the Venetian casa through an examination of its three main components: the sacred objects acquired for the domestic sphere, the ritual settings fashioned through their display and use, and the purposes that this visible piety served for the familial audience. Holy domestic articles , which consisted of a wide variety of goods, including painting, sculpture, and decorative arts , fostered devotion within the interior setting, while serving important roles as protective devices, as aids for religious development, and as outward expressions of the family's devoutness and honorable reputation. Additionally, while located within a ,private' setting, religious objects from domestic spaces connected individuals and families to Venice's wider community of Christian devotion and were intimately tied to the Republic's mercantile way of life. [source] Classicism, Enlightenment and the ,Other': thoughts on decoding eighteenth,century visual cultureART HISTORY, Issue 3 2002Maiken UmbachArticle first published online: 22 DEC 200 Cultural historians have been slow to respond to the pictorial turn. They often find images too ambiguous to use as sources in their own right. This problem is aggravated by two characteristics shared by early modern and postmodern visual culture: both transgress boundaries of genre (such as the text/image divide), and both tend to be notoriously fluid and plural in terms of their ,message'. The nineteenth,century Idealist notion of ,art', by contrast, celebrates unity of style and content, and tolerates multiple meanings only where they can be resolved in dialectical synthesis. This legacy continues to prevent us from understanding visual evidence which conforms to neither requirement. Drawing on readings of the contemporary landscape art of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Cy Twombly, this article proposes a new approach to visual culture of pre,Idealist periods, for which ambiguous allusive fields and transgressions of genre were constitutive. The eighteenth century's use of classical culture is a case in point, here exemplified by a close reading of the multi-layered trope of Arcadia. The conclusions that emerge from this reading call into question negative assumptions about the Enlightenment's dogmatic rationalism which have dominated historiography from Romanticism to postmodernism. The ,image,texts, of the eighteenth century destabilized hegemonic rationality without promoting its opposite, instead integrating the ,other' into a self,reflexive and self,critical Enlightenment ideology. [source] Paintings, Films and Fast Cars: A Case Study of Hubert von HerkomerART HISTORY, Issue 2 2002Lynda Nead In a recent conversation with Bruno Latour, the French philosopher Michel Serres visualized his concept of modernity through the image of the automobile. The car, Serres argued, could not be defined as uniquely of one period or as belonging exclusively to the modern, being ,a disparate aggregate of scientific and technical solutions dating from different periods , The ensemble is only contemporary by assemblage.' This metaphor offers a highly productive way of looking at the history and forms of visual culture in Britain in the early twentieth century, when the technological and commercial possibilities of nineteenth-century optical developments were filtering into all aspects of cultural production and consumption. The article examines this moment via a case study of the artist Hubert von Herkomer; offering a reassessment through an examination of his paintings, films and fast cars and thereby proposing a reframing of the history of British visual culture through the integration of still and moving images. [source] Wissenschaftliche Photographie als visuelle Kultur.BERICHTE ZUR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE, Issue 3 2005Die Erforschung und Dokumentation von Spektren Abstract This paper discusses facets of 19th-century scientific photography as a visual culture. The example of spectral research and documentation is particularly well suited, because prismatically diffracted light from the sun or from luminous gases was one of the most frequently examined phenomena of that century. The results were significant not only for physics but also for analytical chemistry and astrophysics. The spectrum also served as an ideal test object for checking the effectiveness of a wide array of photochemically sensitizable surfaces to the various color regions. Scientific photography became the most important experimental technique in the infrared and ultraviolet. H. A. Rowland's spectrum charts are discussed as an example of the transition from comprehensiveness in documentation to fetishism. The discussion of the Lippmann process, one of the first methods of color photography, addresses the associated training of the eye. Issues of authenticity and the much averred ,mechanical objectivity" are raised with regard to retouching. The overriding theme of visual science cultures leads furthermore to unanticipated interdependencies with other scientific fields, such as geography, and draws the importance of practitioners into the foreground. [source] ,A Natural and Voluntary Dependence': The Royal Academy of San Carlos and the Cultural Politics of Art Education in Mexico City, 1786,1797BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 3 2010SUSAN DEANS-SMITH In this article, I explore the controversies that characterised the foundational years of the Royal Academy of San Carlos of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in Mexico City (1786,1797). They provide provocative insights into questions of competing agendas and ambitions among the artists and bureaucrats of the royal academy. They also illuminate contemporary understandings about the hierarchical relationships between a metropolitan power, Spain, and its American colonies and their visual culture and artistic production, which mirror broader political hierarchies and relationships of power and subordination. [source] Die Fotografie , ein neues Bildmedium im Wissenschaftspanorama des 19.BERICHTE ZUR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE, Issue 2 2005Jahrhunderts. Abstract Photography , a novel medium of scientific representation in the XIXth century array of arts and sciences. To delve into various nineteenth century academic disciplines under the heading ,photography in the arts and sciences' as did last year's annual conference of the History of Science Society , the interest in such a topic only partly stems from the ,iconic turn' that has generally enlarged the scope of the social sciences in recent years. A more poignant feature in any such present day study will probably be a basic scepticism facing the fact that in public use photographs have been manipulated in many respects. Yet, while shying away from any simple success story, a historically minded approach to changing ,visual paradigms' (Historische Bildwissenschaft) has begun to emerge. In this context, it has proved of considerable heuristic value to reconsider the role of early photography in an array of science, arts and technology: Since the reliance on the traditional ways of sketching reality persisted, in many an instance where photography was introduced, the thoughts the pioneer photographers had about their new, seemingly automated business, call for close attention. Thus scholarship sets up a parallel ,discussion room'; the lively debate on the benefit of academic drawings as opposed to photographic portraits is a case in point. Some fairly specialised reports on photographically based analyses, such as electron microscopy, point to a borderline where the very idea of representation as a correspondence of reality and imagination gets blurred. Even though any ,visual culture' will have to shoulder the ,burden of representation', it is equally likely that it will offer a deeper sensibility for the intricacies entailed in the variegated ways of illustrating or mapping chosen subjects of scientific interest. Scholarship may thus somewhat control the disillusionment that by now has become the epitome of writing on photographic history. Provided with a renewed methodological awareness for the perception process and its photographic transition, historians may strike a better balance between the ever present tendencies of a realistic and an aesthetic way of picturing the world we live in. [source] | ||||||||||