Art history in the expanding field of visual inquiry
The advent of cultural studies in the 1970s
has had transformative effects on art and architectural history, asit has on most humanistic disciplines. Art history has expanded the
medial range of its objects of study, diversified its researchquestions and protocols in theoretical and social directions, and
begun to adjust the balance of its interests toward the modern, thecontemporary, and the global. As before, art history continues to
be centrally concerned with the distinctive materiality, visualappearance, and spatial experience of works of art and
architecture, but its texts have become more self-conscious aboutthese defining characteristics of the discipline.
Art history's internal diversifications and
theoretical articulations have not exhausted or satisfied expandedscholarly interest in ways and forms of seeing, however. Over the
past three decades, scholars from a wide variety of humanities andsocial sciences have pursued stimulating new questions about the
visual constitution and experience of the world, in itsphysiological, phenomenological, and social aspects. Much of this
interdisciplinary inquiry has been institutionalized as visualculture or visual studies in new academic programs, curricula,
centers, and departments in North American and Europeanuniversities. Some visual culture programs are symbiotically allied
with traditional art history departments, others are subordinatedto art history, and yet others are integrated with film and media
studies, studio art programs, cultural studies, and visualanthropology and sociology in entirely different departments or
schools.
For attempts at articulating the expansive
scope of visual culture studies, see W. J. T. Mitchell, "What Is Visual Culture," in Irving Lavin, ed.,
Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside. A Centennial Commemoration of Erwin Panofsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 207-217, and W. J. T. Mitchell, "Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture," in Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, eds.,
Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies (Williamstown and New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2002), 231-50; for a wide-ranging debate about that scope and its intellectual content, mostly from the art historical side, see Svetlana Alpers et al., "Visual Culture Questionnaire,"
October , 77 (Summer, 1996), 25-70; for institutional and disciplinary histories of visual culture, see James Elkins,
Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 1-62, and Margaret Dikovitskaya,
Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2005).
While the objects and methodological purview
of visual culture studies remain matters of exciting possibilityand vigorous debate, it is already clear that many visual culture
scholars and publications address questions and images that mightbe, but have not quite been, central to art history as well.
"Popular" arts, decorative arts, design, phenomenology, and,especially, modern conditions of visuality and contemporary media
are topics of great interest to visual culture studies, yet theyare also the kinds of concerns that have not sat easily within an
art history foundationally dedicated to the pre-modern, primarilyWestern arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture. The many
visual culture publications dedicated to cultural theories ofseeing and to modern and contemporary art and design appear to fill
some of art history's gaps from outside the discipline, and theyhave in turn shaped new directions within art history.
The intersections among visual culture,
critical theory, and art history (particularly of the modern andthe contemporary) are evident in the anthologies that constitute a
central scholarly medium for visual culture studies; see NormanBryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds.,
Visual Theory:
Painting and Interpretation (New York: Harper Collins, 1991);
Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds.,
Visual
Culture: Images and Interpretations (Hanover, NH: University Press
of New England, 1994); Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, eds.,
Visual
Culture: The Reader (London: Sage, 1999); and Nicholas Mirzoeff,
ed.,
The Visual Culture Reader (London and New York: Routledge,
2002).
Rather differently from art history, however, visual
culture texts tend to focus on the circulation of images ratherthan the making and exchange of art objects.
The expansion of the visual investigation of
culture has had several consequences for scholarly publication inart history. There are welcome new journals, edited volumes, and
press lists in which to publish—and they are open to art
historians, particularly in the subfields mentioned.
For example,
Journal of Visual Culture (a
scholarly journal published by Sage Publications);
Invisible
Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture (sponsored by the
University of Rochester);
Visual Studies (published on behalf of
the International Visual Sociology Association);
Early Popular
Visual Culture (published by Routledge; its scope is defined as
"interdisciplinary studies in relation to all forms of popularvisual culture before 1930").
With its scholarly interest in
new media, visual culture has shown itself receptive to thepotentialities of digital communication and publication.
In 1998,
Invisible Culture launched itself
as an electronic journal dedicated to problematizing "theunquestioned alliance between culture and visibility, specifically
visual culture and vision." Thus far, it has taken the form ofscholarly articles c. 2500-6000 words in length, in a traditional
print layout without illustrations.
Academic publishers in
the humanities have recognized the academic interest and appeal ofvisual culture studies, and on balance some of the publication list
space traditionally dedicated to art history has shifted in thedirection of more broadly conceived and more interdisciplinary
inquiries into visual culture.
Growing university press interest in
scholarship that views art as a broader phenomenon of visualculture was widely acknowledged by scholars and editors alike; see
Lawrence T. McGill's report
The State of Scholarly Publishing in the History of Art and Architecture . Our survey of individual
lists of ten university presses from 2000 to 2006, supported by theresearch of Eric Ramírez-Weaver, shows modest shifts of this kind.
It is also evident that publishers not traditionally active in arthistory have entered the broader field of visual culture, with new
opportunities for certain kinds of art history scholarship. DukeUniversity Press, University of Minnesota Press, and University of
Pittsburgh Press are expanding or introducing new lists, forexample.
The lure of the potential cross-over book has
encouraged some university presses to shape art history lines thatare liberally inclusive of visual culture or to publish monographs
with an art historical component under other headings, such asclassics, cultural history, or visual studies. Inherent in this
interdisciplinary shift is the risk of neglecting core areas ofscholarship dedicated to the material, visual, and social character
of art and architecture. Our study suggests that while theopportunities for publishing art history monographs have
retrenched, new modes of disseminating scholarship are available tobe developed. The extant and prospective publication opportunities
for art historical research are not utilized fully atpresent.