Issues in Visual and Critical Studies
Survey of the course:
A. Principal themes
B. Objectives of the course
Note: this material was originally posted on www.jameselkins.com, under “Syllabi.” Send all comments to jelkins@artic.edu
A. Principal themes
1.Visual literacy
A proposition you can argue with: We are the most visually
literate culture: we can read complex images, we multitask,
we take in more images per minute or per day than any
other culture
(Associated with visual culture, Martin Jay)
A counter-proposition: We are less visually literate—we don’t
know how to read complex images
(Associated with art history, Barbara Stafford)
There are more ways of considering this—we will
encounter them later in the semester.
2. Visual studies, or visual culture
Throughout the semester we will be trying to define visual studies (= visual
culture):
A. How is it related to other disciplines, including art history, anthropology,
sociology, literary studies, film studies, women’s studies, and cultural studies?
B. What are its principal subjects? (I.e., what do visual-studies people study?)
C. Who are its principal scholars? (Contemporary and past.)
D. What is its relation to art practice, and to SAIC?
3.Visuality (together with other senses...)
A. How are vision and visuality privileged in what we do?
B. How many senses are there?
C. What are the connections between different senses?
4. The place of scholarship, theory, etc., in visual arts
practice
A. What is the relation between the things we’ll study in this class
and day-to-day studio practice?
B. What good is visual theory in the art world?
5. The place of science in (or outside) the arts
A. Is vision science important to art practice?
B. Is science in general (as opposed to technology) important to
contemporary art?
6. The ultimate aim of visual studies
A. Is it to train the eye? (As in Albers’s book?)
B. Is it to train artists to become more visually aware members of
society—more aware, for example, of consumerism?
C. What other purposes might visual studies have?
B. Objectives of the course
1. To study some of the key texts of visual theory
2. To get to know some of the key theorists
3. To learn some of the key concepts
The idea is to give a firm grounding in some principal texts, theorists, and concepts, so
that you can go on to read visual theory, and have a perspective on other classes at
SAIC.
1. The key texts of visual theory
We will read five of the most important writers in the visual arts (though that’s
debatable!).You will encounter them over and over at SAIC. The purpose is
-- to read them as primary texts (i.e. not read about them, but read them in the
original), and
-- to read them carefully and slowly, with attention to their cultural context. That way
when you encounter them later you’ll be confident about them.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by
Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999): “Paris, The
Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Exposé of 1935),” 3-13; and convolute K,
“[Dream City and Dream House, Dreams of the Future, Anthropological
Nihilism, Jung],” 388-404
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by
Alan Sheridan, second edition (New York: Vintage, 1991), chapter on
“Panopticism,” 195-228
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in
Jacques Lacan, Écrits, edited by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 1-
7
Karl Marx, Capital, section “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret
Thereof”
2. The key theorists
Arguably the most important are Barthes, Benjamin,
Lacan, Marx, and Foucault. Others crucial for the
prehistory of visual studies:
Theodor Adorno (1903-1969)
Jakob Burckhardt (1818-1897)
Gilles Deleuze
Jacques Derrida (b. 1930)
Clement Greenberg (1909-1994)
G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831)
Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908)
Paul De Man
Jules Michelet (1798-1874)
Charles Peirce (1839-1914)
Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886)
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
Aby Warburg
In addition we will encounter some of the most influential contemporary writers:
Svetlana Alpers
Mieke Bal
Michael Baxandall
Jean Baudrillard
Jay Bernstein
Homi Bhabha
Susan Buck-Morss
Judith Butler
Lisa Cartwright
Hélène Cixous
T.J. Clark
Tom Conley
Jonathan Crary
Douglas Crimp
Thomas Crow
Jonathan Culler
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
Guy Debord
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
E.H. Gombrich
Martin Jay
Stuart Hall
Rosalind Krauss
Joseph Masheck
Stephen Melville
Jacques-Alain Miller
Nicholas Mirzoeff
Tom (W.J.T.) Mitchell
Laura Mulvey
Richard Shiff
Hugh Silverman
Gayatri Spivak
Barbara Stafford
Leo Steinberg
Paul Virilio
Slavoy Zizek
3. Key concepts of visual theory
The class is organized in part around concepts. (It was originally called “Concepts of
Art.”) Each unit of the class is intended to bring in new concepts, so that by the end of
the semester you have a working vocabulary of visual theory.
The words, together with the names of writers, are what will be on the quizzes.
The following list of concepts will be revised during the semester. I will keep an
updated list on the website, exported as a pdf.
My lecture notes will also be posted on the website as pdfs.
Unit 1
Introduction
visual literacy
pictorial turn
high art and low art
materiality
medium
disembodied image
word-image opposition
scopic regimes
optical regime
anti-optical regime
photography vs. painting
the journal October
high modernism
critique of intentionality
social construction
Unit 2
Foucault
panopticon
panopticism
discipline mechanism
disicpline blockade
society of the spectacle (Foucault’s)
society of the spectacle (Debord’s)
Unit 3
Science
cones
rods
visual cortex
LGB = lateral geniculate body
New world monkeys (their vision)
“color Mondrian”
color constancy
CIE diagram
color vision, ancient subsystem
tetrachromacy
polymorphic color vision
two cultures
elegance
beauty (in Steinberg’s essay)
“rude questions” (C.P. Snow’s)
Second Law of Thermodynamics
Unit 4
Lacan
camera obscura Gorgons spectator
chiasmatic diagram hydranencephaly stain
image/screen hypnotic staring Steinberg
geometral point Lacan strabismus
sardine can story looking theatrical staring
cyclophobism masks traps for the gaze
deflected seeing not-seeing uterine diagram
Derrida object vacant staring
distance objectification viewer
Ganzwelt observer object petit a
gazing painter-beholder Other
geometral point picture L-schema
glancing point of light imago
staring psychological portrait Innenwelt and Umwelt
glimpse scopic pulsion Gestalt
screen
Unit 5
The body
anthropomorphic landscape grotesque, terrible and sportive
articulated body naked vs. nude
body pain vs. metamorphosis
contrapposto physiognomy
distortion plumb line
divided body (compare articulated body) proportion
empathy = Einfühlung psychomachia
sympathy second seeing
figure and ground serpentine figure, figura serpentinata
first seeing skin
free leg standing leg
Gothic tip–toe visual desperation
gridded body
Unit 6
Photography
structuralism
semiotic square uncoded image
semiotics ontological desire
sign photographic “shock”
signifier = signifiant heuristic ontology
signified = saignifié jouissance
syntax, syntactics simulacrum
semantics indexical sign
pragmatics symbolic sign
studium iconic sign
punctum
Unit 7
Space and form
linear perspective
vanishing points
infinite Euclidean space
non-perspective
anti-perspective
a-perspective
anaglyphs
curvilinear perspective
anamorphosis
aerial perspective
Ogham script
Tabula Peutingeriana
retro-azimuthal map of the world
Easter Island script
Chinese landscape painting
engineering perspective
parallel perspective
isometric perspective
Unit 8
Time and narrative
visual narrative orders: of telling
narrative vs. iconic orders: of occurrence
punctm temporis orders: of reading
deductive seeing vs. associative narrative theory
Poggendorf illusion episode
vanitas paintings reference line
gisant, figure en transis narrative cue
the epitome fabula
the anatomy boustrophedon
the encyclopedia cat’s cradle
continuous narrative narratves, truncated
narratives, emblematized
narratives, hidden
“feeling of meaning”
Unit 9
Religion
intermundia
pantheism
Stoicism
spirituality vs. religion
liturgy
numinous
apophatic theology
cloud of unknowing
verbal vs. nonverbal
anti-religious
non-religious
irony
master trope
Unit 10
Marx
historical materialism
capital
capitalism
political economy
commodity
commodity fetishism
value
richness
use value
exchange value
the noble lie
bourgeoisie
proletariat
ideology
unhappy consciousness
Unit 11
Benjamin
dialectical reversal
“flash of awakened consciousness”
dreams, dream-city
arcades
flâneur
panoramas
world exhibitions
Gesamtkunstwerk
(“total work of art”)
l’art pour l’art
(“art for art’s sake”)
