CRITICAL PRACTICE 1
The primary learning objective of the course is to understand how images work, successfully or not, to convey the intended meaning of the artist/designer to a desired audience. Rather than ask what images mean, the emphasis is on how they work in a variety of contexts. Focusing on the technological and artistic developments during the last 25 or so years, the course will engage the students in a broader discussion of the shift of visual imagery from the 20th century to the digital present. This discussion will take place through the students’ participation in the lectures, writing assignments and exams.
The seminar will provide an overview of a range of theories about how we engage in looking in everyday ways, how we understand a wide array of visual media, and how we use images to express ourselves, to communicate, to experience pleasure etc. Using the term “visual culture” (which encompasses examining many media forms ranging from fine art to popular film and television to advertising to visual data in fields such as sciences, law and medicine,) we will explore questions like: What does it mean to study these diverse forms together? How do shared understandings of these various forms of visual culture emerge? How does meaning circulate through diverse visual forms, and how has the visual impacted our society?
Week 1 Visual culture, visual rhetoric: An introduction to the course. Discussion of syllabus.
Week 2 Meaning does not reside within images but is produced at the moment they are consumed by and circulate among viewers. We will look at the concept of representation, the role of photography, the relationship of images to ideology, the basic tenets of semiotics, and the ways in which we make meaning from and award value to images.
Week 3 We will focus on the ways that viewers produce meaning from images; we’ll discuss the concept of ideology in more depth, and explore the complex dynamics of appropriation, incorporation and cultural production in contemporary image culture.
Week 4 We will look back at the fundamental aspects of modernity and theories of power and spectatorship. We will explore the concept of the modern subject, as well as the concept of the gaze in both psychoanalytic theory and theories of power. We’ll examine the ways that images can be used as elements of discourse, institutional power, and categorization.
Week 5 Art historical perspective. From Renaissance painting to digital media, we will explore the history of realism in representation and map out the history of technologies of seeing, such as perspective, from the Renaissance to contemporary image practice and game culture.
Week 6 We will explore visual technologies, image reproduction and the copy by taking an historical approach to the history of visual technologies, such as the development of photography and cinema, and concepts of reproduction that have dominated visual analysis. We will discuss Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. We will also examine the political and legal issues raised by image reproduction from the nineteenth century to digital image culture. And we will include a discussion of images and intellectual property, an issue of increasing importance in the 21st center era of digital reproducibility.
Week 7 This seminar will examine the history of concepts of mass media, tracing critiques of the media in the 20th century and concepts of propaganda and the public sphere. We will address how the Web and digital media have dramatically changed the forms of institutions of the media to the extent that the term mass media has lost its currency. We will examine the concepts of the democratic potential of media, media flows and national and global media events.
Week 8 We will focus on advertising, consumer cultures and desire; the role of the visual in the development of and social impact of consumer culture. We will continue to discuss theories of ideology and semiotics as tools for understanding the strategies used in advertising images and examine the marketing of coolness and the reconfiguring of consumer culture it has entailed.
Week 9/10 During these two weeks we will explore Postmodernism, Indie media and popular culture. We will look at the central concepts of postmodern theory and at a range of styles in contemporary art, popular culture, and advertising that can be seen as postmodern. We will discuss postmodern strategies of reflexivity, pastiche, parody, and the politics of postmodernism as a philosophical concept; addressing the postmodern consumer and the digital body.
Week 11 Scientific Looking will be the focus of this week’s seminar. We will return to many of the concepts of photographic truth discussed earlier to look at the relationship of images to evidence and the role of images in science. We will see how science has been depicted as a form of theater and analyze the politics of imaging the body’s interior, the meanings created by new medical imaging technologies, and the marketing of science in pharmaceutical ads.
Week 12 We will discuss the global flow of visual culture and look at the ways in which images travel in the contemporary context of globalization. We will examine the role that images have played in the concept of the global, how popular culture has become increasingly global in its circulation and content, and the impact of globalization on art production and exhibition. We will look at the conditions within and across societies in a globalizing economy in which the distribution of visual technologies is remarkably wide-ranging but radically uneven. The space of the visual in the new millennium.
TEXTS: The primary texts are:
“The Visual Culture Reader” edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff (2nd Edition)
“Ways of Seeing” by John Berger.
“The Rhetoric of the Image” (in Image, Music, Text), by Roland Barthes
“Simulacra and Simulation” by Jean Baudrillard
Additionally, a number of texts will be handed out throughout the term. You will be expected to read them and be ready to discuss their contents in class. There is also a website (http://www.lostforwords-artwords.blogspot.com) where you can access additional readings and visual material.
EXAMS: The midterm and final exams will cover information from readings and lectures that test your understanding of the concepts and history covered.
BLOG PROJECT: This will take the form of a blog, set up at the beginning of term that you will post short assignments on. You will send me the addresses on the second day of term. In the event of technical problems, you may turn in a hardcopy.
The purpose of this project is to help you solidify the concepts discussed in class and to “practice” for the ten-page term paper. This is a chance for you to synthesize and analyze in depth the images discussed. Each journal entry will address a theme as listed under CLASS ASSIGNMENTS handed out the week before the blog posts are due.
MID TERM ASSIGNMENT: This 5 page paper will be handed in on the 6th week of term. You will be given your assignment in the 3rd week.
RESEARCH PAPER: Ten pages in length. You will select one topic from three that I will provide. As with all writing assignments, the paper will be graded on clarity and structure of thesis, syntax, grammar and incorporation of class information. The paper is to be a critical discussion of a major idea within visual culture.
GRADING CRITERIA: 100 points possible
Journal Project 20 (5 assignments at 4 points each.)
Midterm 30
Research Paper 50
