Visual culture

Visual culture is a field of study that generally includes some combination of cultural studies, art history, critical theory, philosophy, and anthropology, by focusing on aspects of culture that rely on visual images. Among theorists working within contemporary culture, this often overlaps with film studies, psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, queer theory, and the study of television; it can also include video game studies, comics, traditional artistic media, advertising, the Internet, and any other medium that has a crucial visual component. Because of the changing technological aspects of visual culture as well as a scientific method-derived desire to create taxonomies or articulate what the "visual" is, many aspects of Visual Culture overlap with the study of science and technology, including hybrid electronic media, cognitive science, neurology, and image and brain theory. It also may overlap with another emerging field, that of "Performance Studies." "Visual Culture" goes by a variety of names at different institutions, including Visual and Critical Studies, Visual and Cultural Studies, and Visual Studies.

Early work on visual culture has been done by John Berger ("Ways of Seeing", 1972) and Laura Mulvey ("Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", 1975) that follows on from Jacques Lacan's theorization of the unconscious gaze. Late nineteenth-century practitioners of visual knowledge, such as Georgy Kepes and William Ivins, as well as iconic phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty also played a role creating a foundation for the discipline.

Major work on visual culture has been done by W. J. T. Mitchell, particularly in his books "Iconology" and "Picture Theory" and by the art historian and cultural theorist Griselda Pollock. Other writers important to visual culture include Stuart Hall, Jean-François Lyotard, Rosalind Krauss and Slavoj Zizek. Continuing work has been done by Lisa Cartwright, Margarita Dikovitskaya, Chris Jencks, Nicholas Mirzoeff and Gail Finney. Visual Culture studies have been increasingly important in religious studies through the work of David Morgan, Sally Promey, Jeffrey Hamburger, and S. Brent Plate.

Several major universities now either house or are developing graduate programs in Visual Studies. They include: Coventry University, Duke University, University of Wisconsin, Madison, University of Rochester, University of California, Irvine, University of California, San Diego, University of California, Santa Cruz, University of Southern California, State University of New York, Buffalo(MFA program), The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MA only, not PhD), California College, Goldsmiths, University of London, University of East London, Kingston University, New York University, Middlesex University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Art and Design Helsinki, Pori Department of Art and Media, University of Copenhagen, University of Pennsylvania (undergraduate only), University College, London and the University of Lisbon. Cornell University has been offering an undergraduate degree in Visual Studies, but as yet has not established a dedicated graduate program.

Northern Illinois University offers programs in studying visual culture in art education at the undergraduate, graduate, and doctorate levels. The university of limerick, Ireland offers under graduates the option to study modules in visual cultural studies. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago offers both undergraduate and graduate degrees in Visual and Critical Studies, in which academic writing coexists with artistic production as a legitimate mode of research. They are currently working on developing a PhD in Visual and Critical Studies with a similar interdisciplinary structure. Duke University's Visual Studies Initiative is highly interdisciplinary, with collaborators not only in the humanities but also in the sciences, social sciences, and engineering.

ee also

*Art education
*Art history
*Asemic writing
*Media influence
*Mediascape
*Visual anthropology
*Visual rhetoric
*Visual literacy
*Visual arts
*Visual ethics
*Gaze
*Sublime
*Visual Sociology
*Visual Studies

Further reading (Books)

* cite book
author = Dikovitskaya, Margaret
authorlink = Margaret Dikovitskaya
year = 2005 (cloth), 2006 (paperback)
title = Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn
edition = 1st ed.
publisher = The MIT Press
location = Cambridge, Ma
id = ISBN 0-262-04224-X
* cite book
author = Stuart Ewen
authorlink = Stuart Ewen
year = 1988 (cloth), 1999 (revised paperback)
title = All Consuming

edition = 1st ed.
publisher = Basic Books
location = New York, NY
id = ISBN 978-0465001019
* cite book
author = Fuery, Kelli & Patrick Fuery
authorlink = Kelli Fuery
year = 2003
title = Visual Culture and Critical Theory
edition = 1st ed.
publisher = Arnold Publisher
location = London
id = ISBN 0340807482
* Jay, Martin (ed.), 'The State of Visual Culture Studies', themed issue of "Journal of Visual Culture", vol.4, no.2, August 2005, London: Sage. ISSN 14704129. eISSN 17412994
* cite book
last = Mirzoeff
first = Nicholas
authorlink = Nicholas Mirzoeff
year = 1999
title = An Introduction to Visual Culture
publisher = Routledge
location = London
id = ISBN 0-415-15876-1
* cite book
author = Michael Ann, Holly & Moxey, Keith
authorlink = Holly Moxey
year = 2002
title = Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies
edition = 1st ed.
publisher = Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press
location = Massachusetts
id = ISBN 0-300-09789-1
* cite book
author = Mirzoeff, Nicholas (ed.)
year = 2002
title = The Visual Culture Reader
edition = 2nd ed.
publisher = Routledge
location = London
id = ISBN 0-415-25222-9
* cite book
author = Morra, Joanne & Smith, Marquard (eds.)
year = 2006
title = Visual Culture: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, 4 vols
publisher = Routledge
location = London
id = ISBN 0-41-532641-9
* Plate, S. Brent, "Religion, Art, and Visual Culture". (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) ISBN 0-312-24029-5
* Smith, Marquard, 'Visual Culture Studies: Questions of History, Theory, and Practice' in Jones, Amelia (ed.) "A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945", Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. ISBN 9781405135429
* cite book
last = Sturken
first = Marita
authorlink = Marita Sturken
coauthors = Lisa Cartwright
year = 2007
title = Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture
edition = 2nd ed.
publisher = Oxford University Press
location = Oxford
id = ISBN 0-19-531440-9
* cite book
last = Elkins
first = James
authorlink =
coauthors =
year = 2003
title = Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction
edition =
publisher = Routledge
location = New York
id = ISBN 0-41-596681-7
* cite book
last = Manghani
first = Sunil
authorlink =
coauthors = Jon Simons, Arthur Piper
year = 2006
title =

edition =
publisher = Sage
location = London
id = ISBN 978-1412900454
* cite book
last = Manghani
first = Sunil
authorlink =
coauthors =
year = 2008
title = Image Critique
edition =
publisher = Intellect Books
location = London
id = ISBN 978-1841501901

External links

* [http://www.sagepub.com/journalsProdDesc.nav?prodId=Journal201459 "Journal of Visual Culture"]
* [http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/1472586X.asp "Visual Studies" journal]
* [http://viz.cwrl.utexas.edu/ viz.: Rhetoric, Visual Culture, Pedagogy]
* [http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_2 William Blake and Visual Culture: A Special Issue of the Journal "Imagetext"]
*Material collection from " [http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/CCTP748/CCTP748-syllabus.html Introduction to Media Theory and Visual Culture] ", by Professor Martin Irvine
* [http://visualculturecollective.googlepages.com/home Visual Culture Collective]
* [http://visualstudies.duke.edu Duke University Visual Studies Initiative]
* [http://www.visualstudies.uh.edu Visual Studies @ University of Houston]
* [http://www.visualsociology.org International Visual Sociology Association]