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A Histories

A. Joan Saab

One of the standard critiques of visual culture is that it abandons the historical. Indeed, the very first question in the now notorious October “Visual Culture Questionnaire” of 1996 passively asserts:

It has been suggested that the interdisciplinary project of “visual culture” is no longer organized on the model of history (as were the disciplines of art history, architectural history, film history, etc.) but on the model of anthropology. Hence, it is argued by some that visual culture is in an eccentric (even, at times, antagonistic) position with regard to the “new art history” with its social–historical and semiotic imperatives and models of “context” and “text.” (The Editors 1996, 25)

In her response to the survey, Michael Ann Holly called this “an unforgivable exaggeration of the state of affairs.” Art history, she writes, “has traditionally constrained us to think in terms of linear time, because time, like the arches of heaven, appears to offer us the reassurance of a regularized and harmonic aesthetic. Representing times past instead through the chaos of overlapping and contested spaces provides the opportunity for undermining that confidence” (Holly 1996, 40). Similarly, in his reply, Martin Jay addresses the misconception that “an anthropological culture concept … brings with it an indifference to historical change, preferring to discern the same cluster of signifying mechanisms no matter the context, in the way that structuralism during its heyday sought universal patterns across many different divides” (Jay 1996, 43). And David Rodowick pointedly asks: “Are the old disciplines dissolving because of a failure to conceptualize new phenomena,” or “is disciplinarity under suspicion because of an internal critical and philosophical pressure?” (Rodowick 1996, 59–60). These questions, we believe, still hold. Rather than equate history with a fixed and canonical past buttressed by the arches of heaven, as it were, we see it as a mode of thinking—across time and artifacts, archives, and ephemera.

The chapters in this section examine the role of history, broadly conceived, across the domain of visual culture studies. In his entry on temporality, for example, Joel Burges investigates the idea of televisual time through the ordered grid of the weekly TV guide schedule and the narrative frame of the sitcom. Marquard Smith weaves personal memories—his familial history of the Shoah—alongside his own experience of contemporary moments of silence in his mediation on questions of what we see and what we hide when we “observe.” Jane Blocker in her chapter on the archive asks us to push against the limits of the idea of the museum or archive, by crossing media boundaries in order to understand the archive’s strange ontology. Finally, Kate Palmer Albers interrogates the ways in which modes of intentional ephemerality and live photography offer viewers the possibility of control that may counter what she calls “the oppressive voraciousness of the online and emerging automated systems of images” (p. 139).

For all these authors, just like for us, history provides more than just a temporal frame. It also presents opportunities for contemporary intervention. Like Holly, we see richness in chaos and we understand the past as always changing—in ways that are indeed eccentric, at times antagonistic, yet always engaging and full of possibility.

References

1 The Editors. 1996. “Visual Culture Questionnaire.” October 77: 25–70.

2 Holly, Michael Ann. 1996. “Saints and Sinners,” pp. 39–41 in “Visual Culture Questionnaire.” October 77: 25–70.

3 Jay, Martin. 1996. “Visual Culture and Its Vicissitudes,” pp. 42–4 in “Visual Culture Questionnaire.” October 77: 25–70.

4 Rodowick, David. 1996. “Paradoxes of the Visual,” pp. 59–62 in “Visual Culture Questionnaire.” October 77: 25–70.