visual culture viewer: A History of Visual Culture

A History of Visual Culture
Western Civilization from the 18th to the 21st Century
Jane Kromm, Susan Benforado Bakewell

A History of Visual Culture is a history of ideas. The recent explosion of interest in visual culture suggests the phenomenon is very recent. But visual culture has a history. Knowledge began to be systematically grounded in observation and display from the Enlightenment. Since then, from the age of industrialisation and colonialism to today's globalised world, visual culture has continued to shape our ways of thinking and of interpreting the world.

Carefully structured to cover a wide history and geography, A History of Visual Culture is divided into themed sections - Revolt and Revolution; Science and Empiricism; Gaze and Spectacle; Acquisition, Display, and Desire; Conquest, Colonialism, and Globalization; Image and Reality; Media and Visual Technologies. Each section presents a carefully selected range of case studies from across the last 250 years, designed to illustrate how all kinds of visual media have shaped our technology, aesthetics, politics and culture.

About the editors

Jane Kromm is Professor of Art History at Purchase College, State University of New York and author of The Art of Frenzy: Public Madness in the Visual Culture of Europe, 1500-1850. Susan Benforado Bakewell is an independent curator and scholar, and has taught at the University of Texas, Arlington and Southern Methodist University. She is co-editor of Voices in New Mexico Art.

General Introduction
Jane Kromm

Part One: Revolt and Revolution
Introduction
Chapter 1: Helen Weston, 'The Politics of Visibility in Revolutionary France: Projecting on the Streets'
Chapter 2: Richard Taws, '19th c. Revolutions and Strategies of Visual Persuasion'
Chapter 3: Elizabeth Guffey, 'Socialist Movements and the Development of the Political Poster'
Chapter 4: Jelena Stojanoviæ, 'Avant-gardes and the Culture of Protest: The Use-Value of Iconoclasm'

Part Two: Science and Empiricism
Introduction
Chapter 5: Jane Kromm, 'To Collect is to Quantify and Describe: Visual Practices in the Development of Modern Science'
Chapter 6: Fae Brauer, 'The Transparent Body: Biocultures of Evolution, Eugenics, and Scientific Racism'
Chapter 7: Heather McPherson, 'Biology and Crime: Degeneracy and the Visual Trace'
Chapter 8: Nancy Anderson, 'Visual Models and Scientific Breakthroughs; The Virus and the Geodesic Dome: Pattern, Production, Abstraction and the Ready-Made Model'

Part Three: Gaze and Spectacle
Introduction
Chapter 9: Temma Balducci, 'Gaze, Body and Sexuality: Modern Rituals of Looking and Being Looked at'
Chapter 10: Jane Kromm, 'The Flâneur/Flâneuse Phenomenon'
Chapter 11: Elana Shapira, 'Gaze and Spectacle in the Calibration of Class and Gender: Visual Culture in Vienna 1900'
Chapter 12: Fae Brauer, 'The Stigmata of Abjection: Degenerate Limbs, Hysterical Skin and the Tattooed Body'

Part Four: Acquisition, Display, and Desire
Introduction
Chapter 13: Jane Kromm, 'To the Arcade: The World of the Shop and the Store'
Chapter 14: Amy Ogata, '”To See is to Know:” Visual Knowledge at the International Expositions'
Chapter 15: Susan Bakewell, 'Changing Museum Spaces: From the Prado to the Guggenheim Bilbao'
Chapter 16: Michael Golec, 'Design for a Display Culture: Domestic Engineering to Design Research'

Part Five: Conquest, Colonialism, and Globalization
Introduction
Chapter 17: Matthew Potter, 'Orientalism and its Visual Regimes: Lovis Corinth and Imperialism in the Art of the Kaiserreich'
Chapter 18: Marcus Wood, 'Marketing the Slave Trade: Slavery, Photography and Emancipation'
Chapter 19: Kim Masteller, 'Cultures of Confiscation: The Collection, Appropriation and Destruction of South Asian Art'
Chapter 20: Nada Shabout, 'Trading Cultures: The Boundary Issues of Globalization'

Part Six: Image and Reality
Introduction
Chapter 21: Joy Sperling, 'Multiples and Reproductions: Prints and Photographs in 19th c. England; Visual Communities, Cultures, and Class'
Chapter 22: Jane Kromm, 'Inventing the Mise-en-scène: German Expressionism and the Silent Film Set'
Chapter 23: Sarah Warren, 'The Reality of the Abstract Image: Re-thinking Spirituality in Abstraction'

Part Seven: Media and Visual Technologies
Introduction
Chapter 24: Brenda DeMartini-Squires, 'Now You See It: Disinformation and Disorientation on the Internet'
Chapter 25: Kathryn Shields, 'Carnival Mirrors: The Hermetic World of the Music Video'
Chapter 26: Matt Ferranto, 'Digital Self-fashioning in Cyberspace: The New Digital Self-Portrait'
Chapter 27A: Martin Danahay, 'Video Games: Art, Cinema and Interactivity'
Chapter 27B: Chris Kaczmarek, 'What You See is What You Get, or Reality is What you Take From It'

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Paperback
Dec 2009
480pp, Bibliog, index, 120 bw illus
9781845204921

“This is the only treatment of visual culture with a broad temporal reach across a range of Western art practices that emphasizes the historical specificity of the visual experience. The approach – to highlight the key themes in visual culture and to illustrate these themes chronologically through carefully chosen case studies - is very effective.”
Kathleen Stewart Howe, Art and Art History, Pomona College

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December 9, 2009

A History of Visual Culture

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