a small superficiality on visual culture

My understanding of visual culture is rooted in my undergraduate training in literature and critical theory, and as such is dependent on a definition of objects of study and fields of interpretation. Visual objects can be defined as unique gestures of communication expressed not only through material visual media, which include painting, illustration, fashion, and the plastic arts, but also reproducible and electronic media such as photography, cinema, and videogames. As material objects, the singular existence of the visual object denotes an economic as well as ontological significance. While site-specific installations of video and photography have evolved as evocative disciplines, such media tend toward the reproducible rather than the singular. The nature of electronic media reifies Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura as the visual object is divorced from the specificity and unique aura of the material object, with which it may at times be co-present.

         In any case, visual objects are given meaning through the act of interpretation. The study of visual culture involves a synthesis of a multiplicity of viewpoints and subjective locations – this is perhaps the genius of Cubism. The visual is itself a language with a developed syntax and mode of reception that are historically determined. When interpreted within different contexts, a visual work can be evaluated in entirely different ways with a consequent ascription of a greater or lesser degree of significance to the piece. In specific material contexts, certain visual images are ritually given a specific meaning intended to be commonly understood. Thus, a painting can be a religious object worthy of veneration, fashion often signals social status or function, and in the guise of urban signage a common pictorial language allows the public control of individual behaviour. The modes of reception for visual culture are informed by socio- historic forces, and in this context can be witnessed the categorisation of cultural forms into specific interpretive frameworks, such as popular or high art. Furthermore, visual objects can themselves be placed within a larger communicative
framework. Visual objects are often used in a new context or medium. This dynamic, most prevalent in advertising, serves to render the themes and modes of interpretation of the original visual object as themselves an object within a new visual frame. For example, a sequence from the film Gone With the Wind can be used in an advertisement for erectile dysfunction medication. Its existence highlights not only the visual juxtaposition between the old and the new, signalling a playful inversion of the position of the subject viewing the ad itself (they remain the old version of themselves until they purchase the product), but also signals a targeted interpellative gesture to those viewers who have an emotional attachment to the film, the majority of whom represent an older demographic.

         Visual culture encompasses not simply the visual, but rather incorporates a network of information, including non-visual media (music, words) as well as the entire operation (from Jacques Ranciere’s work) which informs the production of meaning. For this reason, visual culture necessarily represents an interdisciplinary engagement with culture.