版权声明：转载时请以超链接形式标明文章原始出处和作者信息及本声明
http://dushijue.blogbus.com/logs/3095603.html

Visual Culture: The Reader

Edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall.

London: Sage Publications in association with the Open University, 1999. ISBN, 0 7619 6248 4 (pbk); 0 7619 6247 6 (hbk). xviii + 478 pp. £17.99 (pbk); £55.00 (hbk).

To this re-viewer, "seeing" and the "look", embedded in "gender", "racial difference", "pleasure" and "resistance", are immediately conveyed by the image on the front cover of Visual Culture: The Reader. The image is Robert Mapplethorpe's photograph of Roedel Middleton, 1986. Before I open up the book and survey its contents, the "face" that gazes back from the cover engages me in an interplay of meanings and references including Frantz Fanon's writings on colonization and resistance, essays by bell hooks on the black body politic and Glenn Ligon's installation Notes on the Margin of the Black Book, 1991-93, which is (as is work by hooks) a critique of Mappelthorpe's representations. Turning the book over I see, on the back cover, that the name "Roedel Middleton" is miss-cited as "Roedel Washington"; the interplay now includes the possibilities of an unconscious process producing the (proof reading) "error" and the resultant meanings of "Washington", not least what is signified by "Washington [D.C.]" in the midst of a Mapplethorpe reference.

Inside the covers there is Fanon's "The Fact of Blackness" (Chapter Twenty-Nine), but no bell hooks, though there is Kobena Mercer's important critique of Mapplethorpe's photographs (Chapter Thirty-One). Both of these extracts are in Part Three "Looking and Subjectivity". The other two Parts are "Cultures of the Visual" and "Regulating Photographic Meanings". Within the two subdivisions for each Part there are a total of thirty-three extracts ranging from classic texts by, for example, Althusser, Barthes, (Walter) Benjamin, Debord, Fanon, Foucault, and Freud, to more recent contributions by, for example, Bhabha, Burgin, Bryson, Crimp, Dyer, Hebdige, Krauss, (Jacqueline) Rose, Sekula, Solomon-Godeau, Tagg, and Watney. The three Parts have introductions and the Reader starts with an essay "What is Visual Culture?" by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall. The latter provides a good overview of the possible ways of answering the editors' question as well as outlining the themes and structure of the Reader as a whole. Clearly, both in their discussion and the cited references, Evans and Hall are also concerned with the ways in which the conventional institutional demarcations of "cultural studies", "media studies" and "art history" might be transgressed by the turn to "visual culture". With respect to "art history", which institutionally is, arguably, least hospitable to the transforming experiences of such transgression, Evans and Hall draw positive attention to texts by Alpers, (Hal) Foster, Holland and Spence, and Tagg. Additionally, an essay that crops up both in the overview essay and in the introductions to Part One and Part Three is W.J.T. Mitchell's "The Pictorial Turn", from Picture Theory, 1994. One reason for the editors' references to Mitchell is his emphasis on the picture understood as "a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, bodies and figurality" (4-5 and 310). In part, Mitchell seeks to emphasize the complications of spectatorship and the inadequacies of the "model of textuality" in explaining "visual experience" or "visual literacy". A risk with Mitchell's arguments is that, after considering the crucial relationships and processes between the viewing subject, institutions and pictures or images, any claimed residual excess may be co-opted within claims about the "imaginative life", the inexplicable characteristics of "pictures", and the repressed modernist traditions of aesthetic autonomy. To distance themselves from such possibilities, Evans and Hall rightly draw readers' attention to their "concern with how the study of visual images is subsumed under often unsubstantiated and metaphysical claims about contemporary cultural developments" (5).

The editors make reference (6) to the journal October and its special issue (number seventy-seven), from 1996, which included the results of a "Visual Culture Questionnaire". October has a particular disciplinary place within the institutional power structures of intellectual and academic life, or what O.K.Werckmeister has called "citadel culture", since its first issue in 1976. Significantly, the journal identified not with the "historical moment" of 1917 but with Eisenstein's film, 1927, as a requirement for consideration of the "aesthetic practices" since the late 1960s. Arguably too, the texts, debates and questionnaires published in October require an awareness of the issues and processes considered in, for example, Edward Said's essay "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community" from 1982. My point here is not to make an idle digression but to query what Hal Foster regards (in October seventy-seven) as noteworthy in the displacement of art history by visual culture: what Evans and Hall characterize as "the dual shift from art to visual, and history to culture" (6). The risks, evident in October, include theories of "visual culture" being developed by way of new devices for the repression of history. It would be useful to be reminded of such risks here.

In the last paragraph of "What is Visual Culture?" Evans and Hall argue for critical analyses of both "visual and verbal communication" and the "cultural technologies designed to disseminate viewing and looking practices". What I miss is a further explicit emphasis on histories in the study of visual cultures. Such an emphasis is implied by the editors' references and examples: on the one hand, to Benjamin's work and the context of the use of mass media by German National Socialists, and, on the other hand, to more recent possible case-studies such as "the meaning of 'Hollywood', a contemporary lifestyle magazine, the advertising industry or an episode of the Jerry Springer Show" (7). Historical differences and contingencies are important implied aspects of the editors' juxtaposed examples. Do the editors mean to leave them as implied? Maybe, too, the emphasis on histories and cultures evident in, and between, extracts included in this Reader could have been more clearly signaled.

Visual Culture: The Reader forms part of an integrated sixteen-week module in an Open University MA programme. It has to stand, also, as a resource and critical intervention for a range of readers in a variety of situations, contexts and institutions. Amongst these readers are teachers and students in higher education. To those, including myself, who wish to encourage the critical crossings of conventional disciplines, this Reader will be greatly welcomed as an invaluable and well-presented publication with considerable potential to be realized in use.

A Review by Francis Frascina,

Keele University, UK.