All posts filed under: Issue 5

Introduction: Visual Culture and National Identity

Lucy Curzon Increasingly, within the domains of film studies, art history, and cultural and communication studies, the role of national identity as a component of visual analysis has become paramount. The work of Timothy Barringer, Robert Burgoyne, David Peters Corbett, Darrell William Davis, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Sarah Street, and Janet Wolff, amongst others, has demonstrated the importance of including, for example, ideas of “Americanness” or “Englishness” in the discussion of painting, photography, and cinema.1 The purpose of this issue of Invisible Culture, therefore, is to investigate how visual culture can be analyzed as an expression of national identity, including how questions of national identity are negotiated through different forms of visual culture. Visual culture, in this context, is understood not as a mirror that reflects national identity, but rather a complex venue for its interpretation – a site through which populations come into consciousness as members of a particular community. J.T.H. Connor and Michael G. Rhode explore the complicated relationship between medical photography and national identity, in both “high art” culture and the broader realm of visual studies. …

Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Images, Memory, and Identity in America

J.T.H. Connor and Michael G. Rhode There is on the wall, in the northwest corner of the room, a small gallery of watercolor paintings…. Among these is one, the picture of a young man, a mere boy of eighteen or nineteen, resting on a couch… It is a beautiful face, almost perfect in its contour, with hazel eyes and long, wavy, brown hair; but there is such an expression in the eyes and features as tells –oh, what a tale! — of suffering, long and patiently borne. The left arm is placed under the head, while the fingers of the right clasp the palm-leaf fan with which [he] has been seeking to impart coolness to his fevered cheeks. That pale, youthful face, with the large brown eyes, sank deep into my memory; only one other face have I seen, a painting, also, that possessed for me the same fascination—that of Guido’s “Beatrice Cenci.”1[Fig. 1] The unlikely location of Louis Bagger’s moving experience, recounted in 1873 in Appleton’s Journal, was Washington, DC’s Ford’s Theatre, the scene of …

Saving the Other/Rescuing the Self: Promethean Aspirations in Mikhail Kalatozov’s Sol Svanetii

Daniel Humphrey They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above.1 — Karl Marx Anthropology, in its traversing of cultural realities, is always on the verge of the surreal… The lesson of surrealism, however, is that the experience of paradox is in itself significant and must be grasped to generate new perceptions. Thus, if these films have special value, anthropologically or more broadly, it is that they enable us somehow to confront the intersecting of the worlds they describe.2 Recently rediscovered and released on home video in the United States3, the Soviet film Sol Svanetii [Salt for Svanetia] (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1930) offers important insights into contemporary debates around the cinematic representation of “the other” in colonialist and ultimately post-colonialist discourse. Beyond the unavoidable concerns the film raises about primitivism and Orientalism in ethnography, this film obliges us also to consider the unexplored …

A Case Study in the Construction of Place: Boundary Management as Theme and Strategy in Canadian Art and Life

Gaile McGregor The search for a theoretical peg on which to hang this paper led me, inevitably, to Homi Bhabha. Yet when I pulled out Nation and Narration in quest of an apt quote to use as an epigraph, the best I could come up with was actually a passage from Benedict Anderson, whom Bhabha himself quotes in his introduction. Anderson, through Bhabha, states: “What I am proposing is that Nationalism has to be understood, by aligning it not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which – as well as against which – it came into being.”1 Bhabha jumps from this quotation directly, and without explanation, to writing. I was surprised. I didn’t recall this book as being so narrowly focused. True, it’s supposed to be about narration. But surely the conflation of “cultural representation” (as he calls it on the next page) into one particular mode of representation requires some explanation. Especially if one is purporting to talk about a phenomenon that “precedes” self-consciously held ideas. Why not …

Incarnate Politics: The Rhetorics of German Reunification in the Architecture of Berlin

Daniela Sandler To describe Berlin as a construction site has become a cliché. A report from March 2000 in The Architectural Review reads: “Cranes have dominated Berlin’s skyline [for] the past ten years.”1 Five years prior, an article in Art in America declared: “Six years after the fall of the Wall, Berlin is coming more and more to resemble a vast construction site.”2 Cranes and scaffolding can be seen all over the city. But the image of Berlin as a conurbation under construction owes much to Potsdamer Platz. There, evidence of renovation is at its most evident, and because of this Potsdamer Platz has become the incarnation of a city-turned-building-site. Even though other urban locations are undergoing similar transformation, this area is by far the most visible – not only because of its central location where traffic and people converge on the way to Berlin’s most popular sights3, but also because of its often dramatic history, which I will outline below. Yet perhaps more decisively, Potsdamar Platz has become a visual signifier for post-reunification Berlin because representations of its reconstruction have …

Inventing Wifredo Lam: The Parisian Avant-Garde’s Primitivist Fixation

Michele Greet “It is — or it should be — a well-known fact that a man hardly owes anything but his physical constitution to the race or races from which he has sprung.”1 This statement made by art critic Michel Leiris could not have been further from the truth when describing the social realities that Wifredo Lam experienced in France in the late 1930s. From the moment he arrived in Paris on May 1, 1938, with a letter of introduction to Pablo Picasso given to him by Manuel Hugué, prominent members of the Parisian avant-garde developed a fascination with Lam, not only with his work, but more specifically with how they perceived race to have shaped his art.2 Two people in particular took an avid interest in Lam—Picasso and André Breton—each mythologizing him order to validate their own perceptions of non-western cultures. This study will examine interpretations of Lam and his work by Picasso, Breton and other members of the avant-garde, as well as Lam’s response to the identity imposed upon him. * In 1931, the Colonial …