Visual culture is an interdisciplinary concept, which refers to the cultural research method with vision as the core.This research method "is related to what individuals see in their daily life - advertisements, landscapes, buildings, photos, films, paintings, costumes - all visual means in cultureAnthropology, science and social science to study the world and its relations "[1]。
Visual culture research is the combination of visual research and cultural research.Visual research is different from text based research in humanities. It has interdisciplinary comprehensiveness and connection ability. It can absorb existing fields and methods of thought, and use newer methods and different angles to explain the research object more clearly.The study of visual culture challenges people's thinking about culture in the past.When analyzing cultural experience and artistic practice, sociology and history are both useful methods, but this method ignores a large number of concepts, experiences and meanings in the process of simplifying culture into text "reading".The study of visual culture opposes this prejudice and emphasizes the importance of visual itself.Nevertheless, visual culture research does not put textuality aside, but establishes a dialogue between textuality and visual, performative, auditory, tactile and other artistic perceptions.[2]
Historical traceability
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Visual research coincided with the emergence of the "history of new art" in the late 1960s, which was influenced by Marxism and feminism.With Clark（T.J. Clark）, Linda Nochlin and Baxandall began to pay attention to the rising contemporary image art.They start from the perspective of semiotics and psychoanalysis, integrate the latest achievements of cultural studies, and no longer avoid the problems of class, gender and race.This new research method attaches importance to the popular culture in ordinary and daily life, and focuses on reproduction, difference and rights.On the one hand, it shows the importance of vision, on the other hand, it highlights the importance of cultural practice itself.
The term visual culture first appeared in Michael Baxandall's art history textbook Painting and Experience in 15th Century Italy in 1972.However, it was not until the 1990s that visual culture emerged as a new discipline.In 1995, W. J. T. Michel opened a course on visual culture at the University of Chicago.He called a new visual research trend in art history, culturology and literary theory "image turn".
Visual culture research has developed rapidly. Most colleges in Europe and the United States have set up visual culture research majors.Many traditional majors in universities, such as film department, art history, literature and philosophy department, have also started to set up this new course.However, in different colleges and countries, the content taught by the Institute of Visual Culture is not the same.In some colleges, visual culture majors mainly study films and new media, while others focus on art history and architecture.Generally speaking, British and American scholars generally believe that visual culture has expanded the field of traditional art history, literature and film research.The visual culture research of European and Latin American scholars is usually based on the research model of semiotics, visual communication and philosophy.[2]
Key concepts
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Image steering
W. J.T. Michel
In 1992, W.J.T. Michel first proposed the "pictorial turn" in the Art Forum.Michel's "image turn" is a description and reflection of the focus of people's attention and the focus of theoretical research on images in the "image reading era".Michel believes that it is a new turn in the public sphere of humanities and culture in the 20th century after the "linguistic turn".On the one hand, it means that the academic vision of humanities has changed, and images have become the central topic of humanities. Of course, this does not mean that images completely replace language, but emphasizes that humanities begin to attach importance to image representation;On the other hand, it refers to that in the public sphere of culture, new image production technologies have created "image landscapes" and triggered human fear and resistance to images.Throughout the 20th century, many researchers have indeed focused their attention on visual production and reception research and created fruitful theoretical achievements, which are reliable signs of the "image turn" of humanities.The studies of Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Guy Debo, Foucault, Roland Barthes, Lyotard, Martin Jay, Baudrillard and others have promoted the development of image theory, while Foucault's interpretation of the relationship between words and objects and Derrida's deconstruction of the phonological central theme have also influenced Michel's thinking on the relationship between image and language.In addition, the resistance to images in the public sphere of culture in the 20th century was also seen by Michelle as a symptom of "image turning".[3]
Visual
Visuality highlights the social characteristics of vision.The study of visual culture emphasizes that vision, as a sense organ of human beings, is highly socialized, not natural.Vision itself is also a constructed cultural sense, and there is no "naive vision" or "natural vision".John Berger said, "The way we see things is deeply influenced by what we know or believe in."[4]This is the profound meaning of the so-called visual concept, which reveals that human vision is the product of social, historical and cultural construction.The "visuality" involves not only the vision itself, but also the construction of specific subjectivity and interactive subjectivity deeply related to specific historical stages.[5]
Vision Centralism and Vision Regime
The metaphysics of visual presence can be called "visual centralism".In the 20th century, with the transformation of modern science, the revolution of modern painting and art, the emergence of photography, and the rapid change of modern media from technology to creativity, especially the comprehensive penetration of image culture from film, television to commodity advertising into our daily life, the omnivision machine of visual centralism has become a nightmare existence in our daily life,The omnipresent seeing and the omnipresent being seen are intertwined with each other, and the subject has become a puppet of the alien under the visibility of nowhere to hide.
The tradition of "visual centralism" in philosophy has established a set of cognitive system and even value order based on vision, and a set of operating rules to construct a series of cultural regulations from subject cognition to social control, forming a visual practice and production system.This is Martin Jay's so-called "scopic regime".He refers to a cognitive mechanism and value order built around the relationship between subject and object of "seeing" and "being seen" in the process of western modernity.That is to say, under the thinking of visual centralism, the only reliable reference is the presence and clear presentation of objects or the visibility of objects, and the level dichotomy of visual center is extended to other fields beyond cognitive activities by analogy, so as to establish a strict dialectic of subject and object, self and othersActive and passive dichotomy, and apply this dichotomy to social and cultural practice by analogy to institutionalize it.[6]
