Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture. - book review

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 2002 by Ellen Fernandez-Sacco

Malcolm Barnard

New York: Palgrave, 2001

What is visual culture? Over the last three years, several introductory texts on visual culture have been published that address the production of visual imagery and its interpretations. These texts offer an answer to the burning questions, what is visual culture and what do we do with it? Approaches to understanding the myriad forms of visual production became a concern across several fields beyond the art historical. Methodologies from sociology, anthropology, feminist and cultural studies, among other fields, augment the analytical tools for understanding images. However, the terrain covered by Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture has been explored in a plethora of other titles.

Approaches is divided into nine sections on particular methodologies of cultural analysis. Visual culture can be taken in either a 'weak' or 'strong' sense. In its 'strong' sense it references "values and identities constructed and communicated by visual culture." In its all-inclusive, 'weak' sense it "stresses the visual side...the enormous variety of visible two and three dimensional things that human beings produce and consume as part of their cultural and social lives." Barnard locates his work squarely within visual culture's weak sense, because the wide variety of images and art have "different ways visual culture may be understood." Approaching the act of understanding as a problem, evaluation employs "the truest or most rewarding means" of interpretation. Focused on understanding as the connection between "individual and structure," Barnard's analytical tools are based on two traditions of knowledge formation, the structural and the hermeneutic, offered as the preferred means of solving how to underst and an image. As a philosopher, Barnard's strength lies in explaining the historical development of these concepts. His lucid comparison of Ferdinand Saussure and Charles A. Pierce's methodologies for reading signs demonstrates his knowledge of the European tradition, implicitly assumed to be more important.

Disappointing however, is his lack of engagement with the scholarship of the last decade, or the burgeoning literature on image, race, identity and globalization, and its paucity of images and explanatory diagrams. Absent from discussion are the installations and performances of artists who engage the problematic aspects of consumption, or those whose works foreground questions around visibility, culture and social critique. His address of Feminism conflates the feminine with female consumption, and steers clear of masculinity and race. There are no sustained links made between marginalization, whiteness or the history of colonization, factors that profoundly shape the content and form of the visual. Visual culture, to borrow Nicholas Mirzoeff's definition, is perhaps best understood as a tactic for studying the genealogy, definitions and functions of a world addressed in a pictorial, rather than textual mode.

Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture is tellingly classified as "Visual Sociology," a temporal marker for the bulk of its approaches, most culled from the last 40 years. Pitched to undergraduates or others interested in learning about visual culture, its scope is ambitious, but remains a synthesis of art historical approaches. Its toolbox of methodologies remains entrenched in the domains of art history and philosophy, rather than the polycentric field of visual culture.

The Map is Not the Territory by Alan Woods and Ralph Rumney. Manchester University Press (distributed by Palgrave)/204 pp./$45.00 (hb).

The Money Shot: Cinema, Sin and Censorship by Jane Mills. Pluto Press/282 pp./price unavailable (sb).

The Sounds of Early Cinema edited by Richard Abel and Rick Altman. Indiana University Press/343 pp./$22.95 (sb).

The Vermont Notebook by John Ashbury and Joe Brainard. Granary/108 pp./$15.95 (sb).

The Video Activist Handbook by Thomas Harding. Pluto/255 pp./price unavailable (sb).

The Western Genre: From Lordsburg to Big Whiskey by John Saunders. Columbia University Press/144 pp./$16.95 (sb).