Visual culture
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Visual culture is a term coined in the 1990s for an academic discipline that focuses on visual communication. While it is often taught that visual culture started with the rise of television, its origins can be traced further back. The age of visual culture starts with the age of printmaking, more specifically with the advent of woodblock printing in Europe in the 9th century. Printing is often associated with text, but the first print culture was in fact a very visual culture.
As an academic discipline
Visual culture is a field of study that generally includes some combination of cultural studies, art history, and anthropology, by focusing on aspects of culture that rely on visual images. Among cultural studies theorists working with contemporary culture, this often overlaps with film studies and the study of television, although it can also include video game studies, comics, traditional artistic media, advertising, the Internet, and any other medium that has a crucial visual component.
Early work on visual culture has been done by John Berger (Ways of Seeing, 1972) and Laura Mulvey (Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1975).
Major work on visual culture has been done by W. J. T. Mitchell, particularly in his books Iconology and Picture Theory. Other writers important to visual culture include Stuart Hall and Slavoj Zizek.
Notes towards a critique of visual culture as an academic curriculum
Several curricula of visual culture have been taught at English and American universities since the 1990s. While it is true that in the era after World War II, television has known a phenomenal rise in popularity, it would seem to me that in the early days of the so-called informational revolution, we were again moving to a textual Gutenbergian text-based cultures (email, messenger and search engines were the killer applications of the internet until the arrival of Youtube.
Mirzoeff argues that Modernism was a text-based culture, marked by the rise of novels and newspapers, But the rise of photography and the illustrated newspaper make it very much a visual culture. The illustrated newspaper was the television of its age and influenced impressionism to a large extent.
To the defense of visual culture as an academic curriculum, it must be noted that the discipline stresses the importance of the visual in cultural consumption, an approach which I appreciate in music too; an example of which is Ocean of Sound by David Toop, which celebrates music as an expression of aural culture. Incidentally, music is the only culture I know that is not visual culture, music is the only art form which is invisible.
Further reading
