All posts filed under: Issue 18

Introduction / Issue 18 / Making Sense of Visual Culture

Published by IVC Editorial Board

Alicia Inez Guzmán and Alexander Brier Marr As the first generation of PhDs trained in visual culture programs settles into tenured positions and important curatorships, our field continues to grow in ways that its founders hardly anticipated. An expanding institutional network encourages a rethinking of vision and visuality, two key terms in visual studies. In The Right to Look, Nicholas Mirzoeff reconfigures visuality.1 Typically considered as a perceptual field, Mirzoeff describes visuality as the historically variable self-envisioning of authority. Taking a global and historical view, Mirzeoff identifies a series of countervisualities. As this issue of InVisible Culture demonstrates, the role of vision is changing, too. There are a number of elements affecting these movements, including the influence of materialist thinking, ebbing critiques of “hyper-reality,” and a burgeoning interest in relations between media (as opposed to the modernist emphasis on media specificity). Twenty-five years into our interdisciplinary venture, we can reconsider an early, important idea in visual studies: that vision is the primary way people make sense of the world. For better or worse, we can no longer …

Contributors / Issue 18

Published by IVC Editorial Board

Guest Editors Alicia Inez Guzmán is a Doctoral Candidate in the program in Visual and Cultural Studies Program at the University of Rochester. Her research focuses on the visual culture from and about the Southwest, particularly New Mexico. Alexander Brier Marr is a Doctoral Candidate in the program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. His research focuses on American and Native American art, with a dissertation that addresses the display and representation of indigenous architecture in North American visual culture. Authors Lidia Klein is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Art History, University of Warsaw and is the recipient of the Foundation of Polish Science Scholarship (2012).  She is also a Fulbright Alumna (Duke University, 2010/11). Her research focuses on architecture and design. (http://uw.academia.edu/LidiaKlein) Jonathan Schroeder is the William A. Kern Professor in the College of Liberal Arts at Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the author of Visual Consumption, co-author of From Chinese Brand Culture to Global Brands: Insights from Aesthetics, Fashion and History, editor of Conversations on Consumption and co-editor of …

Tasting Space

Published by IVC Author

Lidia Klein Among the senses engaged in experiencing architecture, taste remains the least active. Edible architectural structures seem only to exist in fiction, in stories such as The Gingerbread House, a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in 1812. The protagonists, Hansel and Gretel, are a young brother and sister cast away from home. Wandering alone through the forest, the two children discover a house made of cake and confectionery. Tempted by the luscious structure, the hungry siblings start to bite into its sugar windowpanes and gingerbread roof, not yet knowing this architectural treat is a trap set by a witch. In Grimms’ story, architecture appears as an object of immediate, bodily experience. Doors, roof, walls and other structural elements function as sources of sensual pleasure, as they are “nibbled,” “tasted,” and “enjoyed with.”1 The tale of Hansel and Gretel is still one of the most powerful stories on the sensual perception of architecture, yet it remains different from our experience of buildings. First, the gingerbread house lacks the constraints of “real” …

Snapshot Aesthetics and the Strategic Imagination

Published by IVC Author

Jonathan Schroeder This paper is concerned with photography as strategic imagery. Strategic imagery consists of images intended to persuade, promote, or otherwise perform strategic intentions. Encompassing advertising, billboards, packaging, promotional brochures, point of purchase displays, viral media, and website design, strategic imagery comprises a large portion of contemporary visual culture. Pictures of people–models, celebrity endorsers, spokespersons, “average” consumers, managers and employees—make up a large part of this imagery.1 In turn, visual images constitute much strategic imagery for products and services, about economic performance, or designed to promote organizational identity. Within this purview, advertising has long since moved beyond its traditional role of “showing products” or “informing” consumers. Much strategic imagery, of course, does not show products at all; instead, it encourages a range of aesthetic, cognitive and emotional effects to promote a vision of a brand’s essential role in a good life. Much of this promotion depends upon visual style, how images appear, and how they fit into broader trajectories of visual culture. If we take a close look at how strategic imagery deploys the …

Seeing the Sounds: Exceeding the Frame through the Acoustical Sublime in the Revelation at Sinai

Published by IVC Author

Raysh Weiss As the defining moment in the Biblical narrative of the Exodus from Egypt, the revelation at Sinai stands unparalleled in its political and theological importance in Israelite history. Curiously, the Pentateuch (or Torah) offers conflicting accounts of the revelation in two of its books, Exodus and Deuteronomy. Both accounts cryptically describe the physical qualities of the awe-filled moment. The difference between these descriptions raises important questions regarding the sequence of events at the revelation, its mode of address, and the nature of the sounds.  Furthermore, each of the Biblical accounts describes the Sinaitic revelation from a different perspective, making a singular, cohesive representation of this event impossible. Illuminated Haggadot, dating as far back as the middle ages, prominently feature depictions of this defining event.1 A compilation of Biblical and Rabbinic texts, ritual prescriptions, and various blessings that serves as the manual for the Passover Seder conducted in Jewish homes, the actual text of the Haggadah dates from before the middle ages. Here, I examine pictorial representations of the revelation at Sinai in six Haggadot: …

Mediating Visual Experience: Zbigniew Libera’s Photographic Works and Google Street View Imagery

Published by IVC Author

łukasz zaremba The word “view” is used in a variety of ways: in specialist jargons, as well as common language. It functions as a synonym for landscape painting or photography, as well as for landscape perceived without the mediation of the picture (looking through a window, we take in the view). It’s a genre and a type of composition, but above all to view constitutes a visual experience and an element of perception. On the most basic level–that of popular art historical lexicons–the term usually operates as a neutral explenans. The fact that the genre of landscape is defined either as a view or a representation of a view calls our attention to the unclear positioning of this term. Is it a part of the world as it is seen or a result of the human act of creation? The view is certainly connected to images, representations, and pictures but also to imagination, appearance, apparition, and looks. And with the look, it is connected to vision, the gaze, eyes, and the notion of visibility. But …

Corn Palaces and Butter Queens: A History of Crop Art and Dairy Sculpture

Published by IVC Author

Reviewed by Jennifer Rachel Dutch, York College, York, NE Pamela H. Simpson. Corn Palaces and Butter Queens: A History of Crop Art and Dairy Sculpture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 248 Pages. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, local State Fairs and the great World’s Exhibitions tantalized eager visitors with stunning displays of American agricultural and technological advancement. Tucked amid the architectural wonders, unusual entertainments, and awe-inspiring mechanical gadgets, two forms of ephemeral food art may have piqued viewers’ interest: cereal architecture and butter sculptures. Constructed on a grand scale and decorated with a colorful array of vegetation, cereal architecture, like corn palaces, transformed ordinary crops into breathtaking architectural wonders as artists painstakingly grafted fruits, vegetables, grains and other plant materials to a wide variety of arches, columns, walls, and even entire buildings in eye-catching geometrical designs and beautifully detailed murals. At the same time, intricately designed and amazingly preserved for long periods of time, butter sculptures, ranging in style and subject from detailed carvings of Greek literary figures to scenes of daily …

Peoples on Parade

Published by IVC Author

Reviewed by Radhika Natrajan, University of California, Berkeley Sadiah Qureshi. Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 392 pages.   Sadiah Qureshi’s Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain presents an empirical challenge to more theoretically-oriented studies of Victorian exhibitionary practices. Surveying a century of metropolitan encounters with ‘other’ cultures, Peoples on Parade troubles accounts of hegemonic Victorian ideologies of ‘race’ and argues for the ways contingent historic circumstances shaped nineteenth-century demand for ethnographic performances, and consequently, ideas of human variety. Rather than a simplistic fetish of the primitive other, Qureshi argues there was a widespread, articulated engagement with displayed people. Importantly, it was ethnicity based in culture not biological racial dichotomy that framed nineteenth-century British understandings of human variety. Qureshi urges her readers not to simply dismiss ethnographic exhibitions as exemplars of Victorian racism, but to understand both the contexts from which these shows emerged and the social worlds in which they circulated. She situates the emergence of human exhibitions in the cosmopolitan milieu …

Alien Phenomenology

Published by IVC Author

Reviewed by Sandy Alexandre, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ian Bogost. Alien Phenomenology: Or What it’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 168 pages. What does it mean to ruminate on and indeed end up insisting upon the limitations of human understanding, particularly with respect to what turns out to be the human impossibility of ever knowing what it must be like to be a thing? The approximation suggested by the word ‘like’ and that word’s simultaneous evocation of the figure of speech known as simile, in the book’s very title, offer something toward an accurate description of this human inability to apprehend in Ian Bogost’s pointedly circuitous Alien Phenomenology. According to Bogost, humans (who are also things, which are renamed “units” in the book) get closer to understanding these nonhuman units and their internal systems of operation through human manipulation of language. Metaphors, in particular, are used to facilitate and finagle the kinds of inter-unit relations that Bogost imagines can at least help remind humans that the world does not revolve around us. …