[Reader-list] Journal of Visual Culture - Call for Papers

[Eric Kluitenberg]

hi all,

At 10:19 +1000 28-05-2001, geert wrote:
>thanks. please note how how the so-called visual culture
>discourse is strategically positioning itself in difference
>with new media, the digital etc. I find that unacceptable.

Hear, hear!!

>> It will promote research,
>> scholarship, and critical engagement with visual cultures.
>
>it will not reach its goal if it leaves out such an important
>part of the contemporary world. the visual today cannot
>be understood if it is not brought into a relationship with
>the technological changes. otherwise it is just an
>institutional continuation of old disciplines like film,
>television, art history etc.
>

I totally agree!

I get really sick, tired and bored with this visual culture crap, and
someone has to do the odd job of putting an almost dead horse out of its
misery. The whole concept is just complete crap, and nothing less.

I say this being employed by an institution (De Balie) that recently
organised a crap conference around this %$#%$#% concept called  - oh what
horror - %#$#^%%&*  Visual Culture @%@$%^&*   >:-0
http://www.visualculture.nl
Luckily I managed to convince my colleagues not to continue on this
hopeless track...

There is no sense in flogging a dead horse, but this horse, most
unfortunately, is not dead yet.

The problem is very obvious, actually.

1 - Almost all culture is somehow visual - to say visual culture is to
almost say "culture" - Imagine: "What is your discipline? Oh, I am involved
in culture!" - #%^$#% that does not make sense..

2 - One of the premises of VC is that contemporary culture is becoming more
and more visual, that visual codes proliferate throughout society, and
break the boundaries between *high* and *low* cultures.
Well, yes of course they do! But society and culture have always been
permeated by visual codes that travel in all kinds of manners. Secondly the
difference between *high* and *low* culture is one that was created by a
bourgeoisie that was looking for a device for class distinction in an age
of mass-production, as much as the concept of the self-contained artist is
a product of the industrial age (despite Vasari).
So, there is no point being made at all - it just sounds nice.

3 - Culture, with the emergence of the internet has not become more visual
at all. NO it has become LESS visual!!
Culture in the age of digital network technology has not become more
visual, it has become more TEXTUAL. If anything take a look at all the
recent discussions and confusion on nettime about textual culture and
textual practices.

4 - Geert is absolutely right when he says that visual culture as a new
academic discipline cannot work if it is not brought into interplay with a
critical analysis of technological developments and their economic and
power structures. It will become another form of *organised innocence* -
completely unacceptable in view of the magnitude of problems caused by the
current constellations of power and economic disparity that dominant media
and ICT discourses and practices serve to uphold.

5 - If anything, I have an academic background in art history. For me
*visual culture* is merely an extension of iconography - the study of
morphological evolution of visual systems in the arts, and iconology - the
study of the evolution of meaning properties and semantic networks within
visual systems in the arts (such as symbolism in various epochs of art
history). Here these analytic tools, which to be clear are most useful and
important for the study of visual systems both within the arts as beyond,
are extended in their reach to encompass objects of study not pertaining to
the realm of the arts. This seems hardly a profound move, and indeed the
only context in which this extension might be seen as a radical move is in
the academic context, where *visual culture* moves out of the confines of
traditional art history. However, even here many respected art historians
have moved *beyond the brillo-box* so to speak and started to apply
traditional analytic tools and practices to new study objects, and very
succesfully so.
In short, even in the not so revolutionary academic context, the whole
thing is merely stating the already obvious, so why turn it into a *new
discipline*, if only for the most lowly of motives, which I will not
ascribe to anyone here.

6 - The VC concept finally completely fails to do justice to all the
communicative practices and sound-based practices that are such an
essential ingredient of our current media-ecology - I will just mention a
few terms here: telephony, mobile phones, SMS, radio, streaming audio /
net.radio, MP3, chat boxes, e-mail, non-visual html, web archives and
hypertexts, ascii culture, text-based MOOs....

Get the picture?? Nothing much *visual* here - so do you want to study
contemporary media culture without all these phenomena??

Let's please burry this concept.

best wishes,

Eric