Visual Studies at the Workshop

Afterimage, July-August, 2003 by Chris Burnett

This special issue of Afterimage on visual studies is both an inauguration and result of institutional change at the Visual Studies Workshop. With the retirement of our founder, Nathan Lyons, in the summer of 2001, I found myself as new director, in company with board members (including Nathan), staff, alumni, and students, in possession of an organization with a remarkable history, holdings, and potential, but with an equally prodigious set of challenges. The economic downturn, global catastrophes, and subsequent retreat of cultural funding have not spared us, nor many organizations of our kind.

Even so, this time of tight money and sparse funding has only highlighted the environmental shifts, debates, and questions of our cultural moment in relation to our institutional identity. Founded in 1969, we are one of the few remaining alternative artists' spaces to survive with its mission and values largely intact from that earlier period of cultural unrest and experimentation. We remain committed to the confrontation, exploration, and innovation that an autonomous, artist-driven space can uniquely foster today.

Ironically, the endurance of open conditions of possibility pose challenges to change, and of course, any institution has to decisively transform itself to remain socially relevant. Fittingly, we have no codified or precise operating manual for the Visual Studies Workshop: no exacting handbook, other than its articles of incorporation and bylaws, to govern the dynamics of continuity and change on an operational level. Rather than well-established bureaucratic procedures, we have routines, traditions, and "rules of thumb," as Nathan or Joan Lyons would say. Rather than amend documents, the way we provoke change is to focus on the discursive goals and the work. They are the linking basis of action between our programs, which include Afterimage, the Research Center, Media Initiatives, Exhibitions, and Education. Even without an "operating manual," our common purpose is accessible through actions that are hardly buried or difficult to find, even for a new director. Knowing our purpose is somewhat like the configuration of hiding and revealing in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter," the seminal detective mystery that Jacques Lacan made so much of for the tricky way signs work in relation to the unconscious. Often, the best way to locate motivating signs is to look shrewdly at what is in plain view. Our concern with visual studies is in plain sight with its play of signs, both seen and unseen.

For me, this openness-to-view frees the meaning of one apparent sign that has perhaps become rounded with the full-exposure of a proper name (the spotlight has been on the term "Visual Studies Workshop," in use for so long). "Rounding" works here in the sense that it is used in the animation industry to refer to the progressive simplification that a cartoon character assumes when it is sketched again and again by several generations of animators on the assembly line. It is telling to see the sequence of Woody Woodpecker morphing from the ragged upstart of the 1930s to the smooth product of the 1950s. The purpose of this issue is to recover some of those sharp edges of the field that have been lost or taken for granted: "rounded" as an operating assumption in continuous use.

So, in focusing on the obvious sign, "visual studies," we seek to reinvent ourselves according to the essential ideas and pragmatics of our mission. But the term is hardly an empty sign or institutional herald. Visual studies refers to a field of discourse and practice that is itself being transformed by shifting academic configurations and embracing information technology. Rather than finding some soul within, it is the extended field that we seek to align ourselves with and perhaps guide. In whatever way we use concepts of visual studies as a focus of institutional rethinking and change, I hope that this issue will demonstrate the currency of the field--its power to introduce and reveal perspectives on the historical present. I believe the feature articles are exemplary of a lively probing of visual culture with the comparison and combination of scholarship and practice. Jane Tormey exemplifies an approach I associate with visual studies through her use of an archive to discover marginal materials that unsettle the understanding and motives of Walker Evans as a canonical photographer. According to Janez Strehovec, the changing visuality of animated, online text has altering consequences for reading, writing, and visual poetry. Finally, Johanna Drucker scans the field in penetrating terms for its consequences for knowledge and thinking about knowledge.

Drucker's essay in particular caused me to rethink my prior assumptions and conclusions about visual studies. Some years ago, my understanding had moved beyond defining the field as the reform of art education and art history, employing interdisciplinary approaches from philosophy, literary studies, psychology, semiology, and so on. More interestingly, I saw visual studies as a profoundly contextual approach to apprehending the social meaning of representation and visual culture. Visual culture, as the object of visual studies, might be more aptly termed the "image world." Here images have the same constructive function as bricks for the ambient structures that house us as social beings. I summed up my views using J. J. Gibson's quip on the ecological study of perception, "I'm less interested in what's inside your head than what your head is inside of." With the results of this special issue, I am convinced that it is just as necessary to reveal the interior processes in order to gain another level of access to the shaping realities of our sign-laden world.