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Copyright2001 by the
NationalArt EducationAssociation
Within art education a shift is discernible from studying the art of the
institutionalized artworld to studying the more inclusive category of
visual culture. Increasing numbers of art educators, many of them among
the most eminent in our field, are defining their topic not as art but as
visual culture (e.g., Chalmers, in press; Freedman, 2000; Barnard, 1998).
The shift from art to visual culture appears to represent as fundamental a
change in the orientation of our field as the shift from self-expression to a
discipline base in the 1980s. Arguably, the present shift is more fundamental because the previous shift involved a different approach to at least
recognizably the same kind of artifacts. It was a shift of approach, not of
subject matter. Previously, there were proposals to study popular arts (see
Duncum, 1987 for a survey), and to be more inclusive generally (e.g.,
Chapman, 1978), but these appeals for a broader scope were always
framed in additive terms. The fine arts always remained the dominant
kind of artifact studied so that the approach to the breadth of imagery
outside the artworld never threatened to fundamentally reconceptualize
our field.
With the current shift, the artifacts have significantly changed, and,
with even the name of the topic having changed, the question raised is:
How long can we continue as a distinctive field? In this paper I have
more modest aims than to consider the long-term future of our field. I
concentrate, first, on understanding what developments in contemporary
cultural life have given rise to the shift to visual culture. Secondly,
because the shift is occurring with little debate and, arguably, even less
clarity, it is important to attempt to define visual culture. Art educators
are using the term-for example Smith-Shank and Schwiebert (2000)
use it to cover visual memories-but, as Mirzoeff (1998) says, "visual
culture is still an idea in the making" (p. 6). Furthermore, as Mitchell
(1995) says, visual culture seems like an idea whose time has come, but it
is not entirely clear how it should be studied. My third purpose, therefore, is to survey suggestions on curriculum for visual culture.
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VisualCulture:Developments,
Definitions,and Directionsfor Art Education
concentrated in only a few hands, and television news presentation is like
a vaudeville act, the seriousness, clarity and even the perceived value of
public discourse turns, as never before, on understanding visual images.
This is because observing the new visibility of culture is not the same as
understanding it. As Mirzoeff (1998) writes, "the gap between the wealth
of visual experience in contemporary culture and the ability to analyse
that observation marks both the opportunity and the need for visual
culture as a field of study" (p. 3).
The shift to visual culture represents a recognition of a vastly changed
cultural environment, which includes a new symbiosis between new technologies, new economic arrangements, and changed social formations
(Duncum, 1999). During the heyday of modernism, social class reinforced
a divide between the arts and the rest of social life, but now with the
reconfiguring of social class, the distinction between art and social life has
imploded. The once clear distinction between high and low culture no
longer holds, as each borrow freely from one another and both producers
and audiences move between them (Morley & Chen, 1996).
Consequently, culture is seen not as something that is high and refined,
but, rather, as Williams (1981) says, culture is ordinary. Culture is an
everyday experience. Mirzoeff (1998) writes, "In the present intensely
visual age, everyday life is visual culture" (p. 125). Visual culture then is
not something special, but something we all possess and practice all the
time. Even literacy educators, who have long focused on words alone, now
refer to multiliteracies where language texts are related to audio, behavioral,
and visual modes of making meaning (e.g., Cope & Kalantzis, 2000).
2The literaturereviewed
is limited to books, thus
excludingthe burgeoning
literatureof course
materialand Internet
sitesthat use the term
visualculture.
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and communities (p. 31). Rhizomes also work on the principles of multiplicity and rupture, where a connection might be made to any other thing
and, even where a connection is broken, the rhizomatic structure will
rebound time and again with new developments along old lines or the
creation of new lines.
In attempting a definition, then, we should look for something that is
useful rather than something that is neat. Much depends on the disciplinary background of the proponents. In surveying definitions of visual
culture it is immediately apparent that this emerging field is far more
inclusive than anything we would want to be involved with as art educators. What I will do here, therefore, is to search out what is useful for our
purposes. I will take the position that as art educators we are concerned
with artifacts that are, first, significantly visual and, second, constitutive of
attitudes, beliefs, and values.
In one sense, visual culture refers to a field of study. The field is emerging from different disciplines, though principally sociology, and draws
upon numerous theoretical perspectives. Nevertheless, the field is usually
thought to be composed of two closely related elements: a focus on ways
of seeing, often referred to as "visuality";and an expanded range of visual
artifacts that lie beyond the art institution. Henderson (1999), for example, defines visual culture as "what it is to see and what there is to see"
(p. 26). Enlarging the canon is a prime task (e.g., Bird et al., 1996), but
equally significant is an emphasis on ways of perceiving and reflecting
upon visual experience (e.g., Heywood & Sandywell, 1999). As a field,
visual culture is generally informed by the view that artifacts and their
perception are alike in being context bound, that is, they are historically,
socially, and politically determined and cannot be studied in isolation
from these factors (Barnard, 1998). Moreover, it is usually recognized that
visual artifacts exist in relation to other semiotic codes and appeal to sensory modes other than sight, such as language, sound, music and human
gesture, and cannot be grasped without taking those modes into account
(Mirzoeff, 1998).3
Often the term is left either undefined (e.g., Chandler et al., 1996;
Marling, 1994; Morgan, 1999) or underdefined, for example, as "images"
rather than "art" (Bryson, Holly, & Moxy, 1994, p. xvi), as "visuality"
(Jenks, 1995, p. 1), as "a materialist analysis of art" (Bird, et al., 1996,
p. 3), or as a "hermeneutics of visual experience" (Heywood & Sandywell,
1999, p. 6). One way we need to understand the term then is to see how
it is used in practice. It is commonly used, as Llewellyn (1992) does, for
example, to refer to "prints and pictures" as well as "visual artifacts"
(pp. 7, 8) associated with a particular human activity and historical
period. Llewellyn examines the visual culture of death rituals, while
among the many other studies using the term visual culture are studies of
boxing (Chandler et al., 1996), American Protestantism (Morgan, 1999)
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Studiesin ArtEducation
the artifacts have their being, including their production, distribution, and
use. Images are viewed in their contextual richness, as part of an ongoing
social discourse that involves their influence in social life.
If such a definition of visual culture is adopted as the focus of art
education, the role of the art educator, at least from a social reconstructivist position, will not significantly change. The range of artifacts we
study will be greatly enlarged, but we will continue to focus on the social
worlds of visual imagery as they are constitutive of attitudes, beliefs and
values.
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4These questionsare
expandedupon in P.
Duncum & T. Bracey
(Eds.). (in press) On
knowing:Art and visual
culture.Christchurch,
New Zealand:University
of Canterbury.
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Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age ofshow business. London:
Heinemann.
Rochlin, G. I. (1997). Trapped in the net: The unanticipated consequencesofcomputerization. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rogoff, I. (1998). Studying visual culture. In N. Mirzoeff (Ed.). The visual culture reader (pp. 14-26).
London: Routledge.
Smith-Shank, D. L., & Schwiebert, V. (2000). Old wives tales: Questioning to understand visual
memories. Studies in Art Education, 41(2), 178-190.
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