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to semiotics and psychoanalysis. At the same time, they began to integrate the interests of Cultural Studies-just as Cultural Studies had drawn on Anthropology.

For while questions of class and gender and race had already been integral to the development of the New Art History, Cultural Studies offered a means to address analogous concerns focusing more on the ordinary, the everyday, and the popular and on the politics of representation, difference, and power in ways that reminded us how cultural practices themselves do make a difference. Thus emerged what we might call a visual‘take’on Cultural Studies. Here Visual Culture Studies, like Cultural Studies before it, begins to function as an inter-discipline, drawing from existing disciplines and ways of thought, and because of it inding techniques to articulate the objects of visual culture differently.

6. Conferences and programmes: Still another lashpoint in the development of

Visual Culture Studies is the period 1988-1989 in which two events took place. The irst was a conference on vision and visuality held in 1988 at the Dia Art

Foundation in New York. Participants included Norman Bryson, Jonathan Crary,

Hal Foster, Martin Jay, Rosalind Krauss, and Jacqueline Rose. The proceeds of this event went on to appear as the inluential collection Vision and Visuality,

edited by Foster. Of this collection, historian Martin Jay has recently remarked that its publication‘may be seen as the moment when the visual turn… really showed signs of turning into the academic juggernaut it was to become in the 1990s [because] a critical mass beg[a]n to come together around the question of the cultural determinants of visual experience in the broadest sense.’16 The second event is the establishment in 1989 of the irst US-based graduate programme in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, which gave a certain academic and institutional legitimation to Visual Culture (founding staff in the programme included Mieke Bal, Bryson, and Michael Ann Holly).17

Offering this account of the genealogies of Visual Culture Studies is part of the process of legitimising it as an academic ield of inquiry, a discipline in its own

16.Martin Jay,‘Cultural Relativism and the Visual Turn,’journal of visual culture, 1:3, December 2002, 267-78, 267, 268

17.This programme, which had graduated many students that have gone on to transform scholarship in the arts and humanities in the last two decades, celebrated its 20th anniversary with a conference at the end of September 2009; just last month.

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right, or at least as a discursive formation, a site of interdisciplinary activity, a‘tactic’ or a‘movement.’18 This is necessary because the question of the disciplinary status of Visual Culture Studies matters, and it matters for two reasons in particular.

Firstly, because introducing such accounts of the emergence of Visual Culture Studies as a potentially legitimate discipline makes us aware of the fact that it does have its own distinct, albeit interwoven, histories that need to be acknowledged and articulated. For a ield of inquiry that is so often accused of ahistoricism, it is imperative to recognise that Visual Culture Studies did not simply appear from nowhere, as if by magic, at some point in, say, the late 1980s but does in fact have a series of much longer divergent and interconnecting genealogies. The status of Visual Culture Studies continues to be hotly contested, and everyone has a different story to tell about the origins of Visual Culture Studies. Secondly, this question of the disciplinary status of Visual Culture Studies matters because, as I will argue in the inal section of this article through my case study on‘place’, it offers new ways of thinking, and of thinking about objects, such that it is a distinct ield of inquiry.

As Martin Jay points out, Visual Culture Studies did become an academic,

intellectual, and publishing juggernaut in the 1990s-the number and range of books I listed above testiies to this. With the exception of the rightly critical

‘Visual Culture Questionnaire’published by the prominent journal October in 1996, on the whole the 1990s and the early years of the irst decade of the

twenty-irst century have seen a multitude of triumphant books and journals, conferences, departments, centres, programmes, courses, minors, and modules bearing the name‘Visual Culture’or‘Visual Studies.’19 If Visual Culture Studies was inaugurated out of frustration in relation to the stiling effects of disciplinary

18.In The Visual Culture Reader, Nicholas Mirzoeff (1998) refers to Visual Culture as a‘tactic’, 5. Recently Mieke Bal (2003) has referred to it as a‘movement’, 6.

19.October’s‘Visual Culture Questionnaire’(1996) continues to be the most engaging critique of Visual Culture Studies. In particular, the questions posed by the Editors of the‘Questionnaire’rather than the answers to it accuse Visual Culture Studies of ahistoricism (an over-attention to analyses of the contemporary) and of de-materialising the image. On this question of ahistoricism, it’s well worth mentioning that Art History, along with many other disciplines in the Humanities, including Visual Culture Studies, is no stranger to questions of historiography. From their inception, such questions necessarily plague, challenge, and offer ways forward for disciplines themselves. October is well aware of this. While the‘Questionnaire’has been a huge bone of contention in subsequent discussions of Visual Culture Studies, a clear, extended elaboration of its underlying assertions written by one of its originators can be found in Foster (2002).

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policing and border controls, as a call to look self-reflexively both inwardly towards the limitations of one’s own discipline (such as Art History) and outwardly to the opportunities made available by others, it can safely be said that it continues to do this, and to productive ends. In working with and against other disciplines and between ields of inquiry, following its counteror anti-disciplinary impetus it has led to disciplines questioning their own foundations and imperatives, even as it has also displayed outward hostility towards the prospect of its own conditions of possibility. Perhaps even more importantly, it has found its own methodologies and its own objects of study. It is a true example of what Barthes, paraphrased by the cultural theorist Mieke Bal, says of interdisciplinary study, that it‘consists of creating a new object that belongs to no one.’20

Finally, in bringing this section to a close, I would like to offer a word of caution: in its ongoing and ever-more successful search for legitimation, Visual

Culture Studies has the potential to become too self-assured, and its devotees too conident. In so doing, it can all too easily lose sight of its drive to worry or

problematise other disciplines. It must remember to continue plotting a fractious course between disciplines, learning from them and teaching them lessons in return; and to continue engendering new objects or mobilising more established things in new ways, by carrying on doing the work that it does. Visual Culture Studies should be careful not to lose, as Mitchell puts it, its‘turbulence,’its

‘incoherence,’its‘chaos,’or its‘wonder’as an indiscipline: the‘anarchist’moment of‘breakage or rupture’when‘a way of doing things… compulsively performs a revelation of its own inadequacy.’21

In fact, it is at this point that one comes to realise it is not its disciplinary status that is of interest so much as the prospect that Visual Culture Studies might be a whole new strategy for doing research, of seeing and knowing, of outlining our

20.Bal (2003).

21.Mitchell (1996), 541; it is here that Mitchell first uses the wonderfully damning phrase‘safe default interdisiciplinarity’(541) to characterise a particularly prevalent but ineffectual form of interdisciplinary study. It’ s a phrase that parallels Stephen Melville’s comment in the October Questionnaire (52-54). Carlo Ginsburg has also reasonably reminded us that‘there is nothing intrinsically innovative or subversive 22) See Donald Preziosi,‘Introduction,’The Art of Art History (1999) where he offers an astute account of Art History’s efforts to expand its object domain, its willingness and ability to extend its purview.

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encounters with visual culture, and mining them for meaning, constituting its own objects and subjects and media and environments of study that belong to no one, as Barthes would have it, and that can only come into existence, be made, and made sense of as‘a way of doing things’that is particular to Visual Culture Studies.

It is in this way that the‘object’of visual culture, and the question of the‘object’ in Visual Culture Studies, comes into view.

Section III: What is the ‘object’ of Visual Culture Studies?

This conception of Visual Culture Studies as an indiscipline is very appealing. Here, the chance to consider attending to the ield of inquiry as‘a way of doing things’ is fascinating, as is gesturing towards the extent to which studies of visual culture have the potential to make evident their own limitations as a necessary part of their capacity and willingness to comprehend and perform these new‘way[s] of doing things.’So given the work that Visual Culture Studies does, with what objects does it engage, and how are they constituted?

Some academics are happy simply for Visual Culture Studies to include an expanded ield of vision, an expanded purview, an expanded object domain, to include all things‘visual.’(Of course some would say that in certain quarters the discipline of Art History has already been doing this for years.22) Other scholars are more attentive to its particular character. In writing of and on Visual Culture Studies they have returned, explicitly and implicitly, to mull over meticulously the full implications of Roland Barthes’s remarks on interdisciplinarity mentioned earlier. Rogoff for instance, has drawn on Barthes’ideas in thinking of Visual Culture Studies, and its interdisciplinarity, as‘the constitution of a new object of knowledge.’23 Bal has recently made similar comments, pointing out that‘[i]f the tasks of visual culture studies must be derived from its object, then, in a similar way, the methods most suitable for performing these tasks must be derived from those same tasks, and the derivation made explicit’.Likewise in suggesting that this ield of inquiry has the potential to be an example of interdisciplinarity in an

22.See Donald Preziosi, ‘Introduction,’ The Art of Art History (1999) where he offers an astute account of Art History’s efforts to expand its object domain, its willingness and ability to extend its purview.

23.Rogoff (1998), 15.

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‘interesting’sense, art historian James Elkins has suggested that it‘does not know its subjects but inds them through its preoccupations’.24 All of this is to say that, whether we are discussing objects or subjects or media or environments or ways of seeing and practices of looking, the visual, or visuality, Visual Culture Studies as

an interdisciplinary ield of inquiry has the potential to create new objects of study, and it does so speciically by not determining them in advance.

What does this actually mean? It means that Visual Culture Studies is not simply‘theory’or even‘visual theory’in any conventional sense, and it does not simply‘apply’theory or visual theory to objects of study. Rather, it is the case that

between (1) inding ways of attending to the historical, conceptual, and material speciicity of things (2) taking account of‘viewing apparatuses’and (3) our critical

encounters with them, the‘object’of Visual Culture Studies is born, emerges, is discernible, shows itself, becomes visible. In these moments of friction, the‘object’ of Visual Culture Studies comes into view, engendering its own way of being, of being meaningful, of being understood, and even of not being understood.

It is not a matter of which‘objects’are‘appropriate’or‘inappropriate’for Visual Culture Studies, but of how beginning from the speciics of our visual culture, our

preoccupations and encounters with it, and the acts that take place in and by way of visual culture, none of which are determined in advance, make it possible for us to focus, as performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz has said,‘on what acts and objects do… rather that [sic] what they might possibly mean’.25

With this in mind, and to bring my article to a Conclusion, I would like to turn to a project, a case study, a visual culture study, an instance of how Visual Culture Studies can make such a thing possible.

A Case Study: ‘The Poetics of Place: Histories, Theories,

Practices’

Let me offer an example of how a new object of study, a study of visual culture,

24.Bal (2003), 23; Elkins (2002), 30

25.Muñoz (1996), 12.

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might be constituted by such encounters-where what acts and objects do is more important than what they might possibly mean. The example I offer is of a crossdisciplinary and inter-disciplinary research project-one that was imagined, but sadly never realized - on the historical, conceptual, and aesthetic question of

‘place’in our visual culture.26 The project itself, was entitled‘The Poetics of Place:

Histories, Theories, Practices’and circled around and linked together ontological states, states of being and becoming, embodied in the themes of exile, migration, nation, and belonging. In order to confront these challenges, this project cut across and between ields of inquiry such as art and architectural history, ine art practice, cultural geography, postcolonial studies, critical theory, anthropology, and philosophy.

To be based at my then host institution, Kingston University, in Kingston- upon-Thames in South West London, the site of the coronation of seven kings of England in the tenth century, the project’s objective was to show how the question

of‘place’in all of its historical, geographical, and aesthetic complexity also needs to be understood in its speciicity. That is, when it comes to research projects and

in this instance to the question of‘place,’we have to consider both the general and the particular, the global and the local, the overall story and the details, the wood and the trees.

Because of this dual focus, in putting the project together, it soon became apparent that no one person was capable of doing this on her or his own, and that conversation or discourse between individuals-whether they agree with one another or not-was the most productive way to proceed. To this end, I decided to assemble a group of individuals who, together, could realise such a project: the Italian academic Giuliana Bruno from the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, whose writings cut across the ields of geography, art, architecture, design, cartography, and ilm, and whose thought is both materialist in its attention to history and rhythmic in its rhetoric; the

26. By‘place’I refer-following almost verbatim Vivian Rehberg’s proposal for the exhibition entitled‘The Poetics of Place’-to the social, cultural, political, and material dimensions and uses of a particular point or position that can be natural, built, deserted, inhabited, over-crowded, marginal and central, and foreign and familiar at the same time.

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American curator Vivian Rehberg then at ARC, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris who has curated international exhibitions and co-ordinated catalogues on place and globality; and the French artist Jean-Baptiste Decavèle, who works with video/photography responsive to the grain of location, travel, and memory.

Each of these individuals was asked to participate in this research project because the character of her or his practice-as writers, curators, and makers - emerges out of a sensitivity to the complex nature of our visual culture. Their starting point is not an abstract idea, or disembodied theory, but, rather each attentive in her or his own way to the particular and peculiar features, contours, disposition of‘place’and its way of articulating itself. As such, each of them offered a chance to inscribe the possibility of a nuanced encounter with visual culture itself, and with each other, which is not determined in advance.

In order to carry out its task of thinking the general and the particular at the

same time, the project had to do two things simultaneously. On the one hand, it should be self-relexive; on the other hand, it needs to be attentive to detail.

That is to say, on the one hand, it should be speculative and curious about its own practices, its own conduct, its own mechanisms. In so doing it could better instigate and take account of the creative links between a group of researchers from distinct environments, with diverse backgrounds and knowledge of the subject at hand, and dissimilar critical tools with which to unearth the problematic disposition of the question of‘place.’Along with such discrepancies, at the same time members of the research team needed to share a cross-disciplinary commitment to establishing collaborative research, writing, informal seminars, public lectures, curating, and making, across and between their respective interdisciplinary areas of expertise into ideas around‘place’.

On the other hand, the project needed to attend to the historical, phenomenological, and material fact of‘place’in its speciicity. To this end, it drew

on and engaged critically with visual and textual archives (engravings, illustrations, paintings, and photographs, postcards, documents, and texts-images, objects, artefacts, and items that are all simultaneously both visual and textual) relating to forced migration to Kingston-upon-Thames and its environs. In so doing the project was to generate debate on the themes of nation, exile, belonging, slavery,

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cultural memory, and geographies or topographies of travel, making use of various local archives and museums, including the Kingston Museum and the Kingson Local History Centre, and interrogate these and other unique archives as well as the local census, Parish records, and cemetery records.

The research was to begin in the middle of the eighteenth century, the irst point at which tangible records are made of a black presence in Kingston and its neighbouring districts. These records show the 1761 arrival in Kingston from Senegal of the ive year old Caesar Picton, who was presented by Captain Parr to St. John Philipps of Norbiton, for whom he began working. Picton was later made a free man and set himself up as a successful coal merchant and gentleman. His former residence, Picton House, where he lived from 1788 until 1807, is a site of local interest and its former resident has been commemorated with a plaque. This biographical narrative would have formed a starting point for the research project.

In being self-relexive and attentive to detail, this collaborative research project would, then, have addressed questions relating to the visual and material culture of

‘place’that both have wider implications for the study, analysis, and understanding of‘place’in our post-colonial and trans-cultural communities but are also speciic

to the modern, colonial history of Kingston-upon-Thames and its environs.

Key research questions to ask were: How do collaborative research practices and the links that individual experts make between one another as a group offer a more complete and detailed understanding of the history of‘place’and future discussions of it? In what ways do history, cultural memory, museology, and heritage contribute to the facts and fantasies of nation, landscape, and geographies, cartographies, and visual iconographies of travel? And what can these visual and textual archives, these histories and biographies, tell us about the experience of new ways of living in exile as a member of a migrant population? (I have included in this article some images by Jean-Baptiste Decavèle produced towards the project’s conception. See Figures 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.)

As I pointed out at the beginning of this article, there are always more questions than there are answers, and learning how to ask the right questions is key to the study of visual culture, as it is to any critical study. In this instance, asking these

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Figure1-5. Jean-Baptiste Decavele, “Untitled”, 2004’

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kinds of multipart questions that mingle self-relexive thought and an attention to historical, material, and aesthetic detail would have been particularly productive.

For they would make it possible to enter into dialogue across and between history, theory, curating, and practice in order to both bridge the perceived divide between these areas of concern and show that it is only by weaving them together that

we can begin to discern a precise sense of‘place’and its sensibility in all of its complexity. Starting from the speciicity of‘place’itself, with all of its intricacies,

supports our efforts to ask new questions of and thus generate new methodologies from it that emerge out of the convergence and interweaving taking place in the enactment of the project itself.

Thinking across and between areas of inquiry and across and between visual and textual archives, images, artefacts, and practices, it was the project itself, in fact any given visual culture study, that has the potential to generate new objects of visual culture yet to suggest themselves, that belong to no one, and yet come into being or are materialised in the very‘doing’of the project itself. They are made, constituted, by way of the project, by way of the encounters between individuals

thinking through a speciic topic, and between the historical, conceptual, and material speciicity of that topic. Research itself, then, becomes determined by the

interdisciplinary nature of the material gathered for the project, in the project, that comes together as the project. It is through debate, collaboration, self-relexive

practices, and convergences between methodologies, archives, encounters, objects, subjects, media, environments, and ways of seeing and doing that a visual culture study takes shape. And it is only in this taking shape, through such contingencies, that pressing questions are asked, uncertainties, understanding, and knowledge is generated, unexpected insights come to the fore, and new objects of visual culture become known to us.

■ Key words

Visual Culture Studies, Art History, disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity

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