Читать книгу A Concise Companion to Visual Culture - Группа авторов - Страница 18

If one looks to the horizon, then one discerns a key element in the emergence of visual culture in the Anglo‐American context during the mid‐twentieth century. In helping to set the scene, I would like to offer some reflections on the importance and implications of the figure of horizontality and of thinking horizontally in a few critical texts foundational to visual cultural studies. In these texts, horizontality is championed and idealized as the level playing field or democratic ground for the constitution of visual cultural meaning, and often in direct opposition to what it is condemned as art history’s insistence on hierarchies and its elitist positioning. In some cases, we find that horizontality offers to viewers new perspectives for perceiving and apprehending the work and its significance. Moreover, horizontality becomes a way of marking visual culture’s proclivity toward interdisciplinary approaches and its affinity with the logic of the network. In light of this fascinating range of roles, I am interested in reviewing the political, ethical, and aesthetic force of horizontal thinking as a key rhetorical trope in the formation of visual culture as an emerging mode of criticism and as a new discursive field. It is my contention that, rather than appearing out of nowhere, horizontal thinking was articulated as a rupture within art historical thinking and directly against its valorization of fine art as a privileged object of study. This path‐breaking emphasis on horizontality is found in the texts of a few mavericks who moved away from art history either partially or completely. In Great Britain, horizontal thinking was framed in the mid‐1950s, in terms of “the long front of culture,” in the writings of the art critic and curator Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990) and in the context of the Independent Group, of which he was a founding member. About two decades later, it was the neo‐Marxist critic John Berger (1926–2017), with his passion for a radically democratic art practice, who would espouse and circulate many ideas that reflected horizontal thinking (even though he did not use the term per se) in the initial program of his epoch‐shifting TV series and book Ways of Seeing (Berger 1972).

On the American side of the ledger, it was the art critic and historian Leo Steinberg (1920–2011) who broke away from the formalist mode of art criticism to engage the importance of horizontality in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the topsy‐turvy figure of the flatbed picture plane and in stark contrast to his arch‐enemy Clement Greenberg’s conception of flatness as a marker of medium specificity. This bold move also enabled the positing of a postmodernist paradigm shift, as Steinberg located this horizontal demand specifically in Robert Rauschenberg’s combine paintings and intermedia work of the 1950s. It appears to be no accident that Steinberg’s and Alloway’s horizontal readings engage with the emergence (and proto‐history) of pop in Great Britain and the United States, as the works of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton, and Eduardo Paolozzi among others provided early food for visual cultural thought and served as direct counterparts to the vertically informed positions of high or fine art defenders. Thus the emergence of a visual culture articulated on horizontal thinking was allied to the rise and embrace of Anglo‐American pop as a mass‐mediating and levelling phenomenon, before its legitimization (and institutionalization) as fine art.