visual culture

When I left Copenhagen for London back in 2001, it was after studying Modern Culture at University of Copenhagen – a degree focused on Western culture circa 1850- 2000. In London, I did a creative MA in Image & Communication at Goldsmiths Media & Communications department, experimenting with media such as video, photography, internet and animation.

Now, after a 7 year break, I’m back at University of Copenhagen, studying ‘Visual Culture‘ – albeit I’m only following one course at the moment – Theory of Visuality (Visualitetsteori). For the first time I am reading some theory which is more up to date with contemporary culture and the changes which have taken place over the last 15 years. ‘Visual Culture‘ as a subject is not like a more trendy version of Art History, rather it’s trying to grasp some of the essential changes occurring in our culture since the birth of the computer, the internet, the digital camera, the mobile, etc etc.

In this post I would like to share some links as well as our reading list, put together by course leader Isabel Fróes. (Please excuse that it’s a bit messy.. )

First of all, I recommend this inspiring talk by Sir Ken Robinson…

Visuel Kultur, Isabel Fróes

Bibliography:

Visual Studies, a skeptical introduction, James Elkins.

Blindness, movie directed by Fernando Meirelles, based on book of same title by José Saramago, 2008. 121 minutes

John Berger, Ways of seeing, Penguin Books.

Jean Baudrillard, The consumer society, Myths and Structures. SAGE publications, 1998.

Zygmunt Bauman, Tourists and vagabonds from Globalisation. European Perspectives.1998

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The intertwining -The Chiasm from The Invisible and the Invisible. Followed by Working Notes (Ed. Claude Lefort). Evanston: Princeton University Press 1968.

Umberto Eco, A theory of Semiotics, Bloomington, 1979.

Fred Ritchin, Foreword to the new edition, Into the information age, the pixellated press, Photographing the Invisible, In our own image from In our own image – The coming revolution in Photography, 1999 Aperture Foundation, NY.

Tony Schwartz, How commercials work, the incredible expanding telephone, Communication on the year 2000 from Media – the second God, Doubleday, 1983.

Jacques Rancière, The future of the Image, the surface of Design, are some things unrepresentable? from The future of the Image, Verso, 2007

Lev Manovich, Spatial Computerisation and Film Language from New Screen Media, Cinema, Art, Narrative, British Film Institute, 2002.

Luc CourChesne, The contruction of Experience: Turning Spectators into Visitors from New Screen Media, Cinema, Art, Narrative, British Film Institute, 2002.

Marshal Mcluhan, Movies – the reel world, Radio – the tribal drum, Television – the timid giant, from Understanding Media, New extensions of man, MIT press, 1964 (1998 7th printing)

Matthias Bruhn and Vera Dunkel, the image as cultural technology from James Elkins (ed) Visual Literacy, Routledge 2008.

Richard K. Sherwin, Visual literacy in action, from James Elkins (ed) Visual Literacy, Routledge 2008.

WJT Mitchell, Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago & London. University of Chicago Press 1994.

Stuart Ewen, All Consuming images. The politics of Style in Contemporary Culture. BasicBooks, 1988.

Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative cinema, in Brian Wallis(ed) Art After Modernism. Rethinking Representation. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984.

Arif Dirlik, The global in the local, in Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (eds) Global and Local. Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Duke University Press, 1996

Paul Ricoeur, Imagination and Discourse in Action, in Gillian Robinson and John Rundell (eds) Rethinking imagination. Culture and Creativity. Routledge, 1994

Cornelius Castoriadis, The world in fragments and Radical Imaginatio and the Social Instituting Imaginary.

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press.

Course plan:

Class 1: Course Overall

Movie: Blindness, where visual theory starts…

Class 2: Why visual culture.

John Berger, Chapter 1, Ways of seeing, Penguin Books.

Lev Manovich, Spatial Computerisation and Film Language from New Screen Media, Cinema, Art, Narrative, British Film Institute, 2002.

Group work: Analyse Blindness via Film narrative, screen/ways of seeing. Max of 5 keywords and find text that matches (agrees, disagrees).

Class 3: Eyes tell stories, our stories

Group texts:

Felix Stalder: The stuff of culture

Mikkel Bolt: Avantgardens selvmord.

Marita Sturken & Lisa Cartwright: Practices of Looking. An Introduction to Visual Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, kap. 3

George Simmel: Hvordan er samfundet muligt? Ekskurs om sansernes sociologi.

Kjeld Stockholm: Vejen til blind forståelse

Oswald Spenglers: “Der Untergang des Abendlandes” (1918)

Class 4: Visual meets function

Discuss the concept of objectified and power structure gaze in relation to the Narcisus myth.

Based on Spengler’s view of history and culture, discuss the role of visual culture within art.

Based on this Foucault quote “Everyone locked up in his cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name and showing himself when asked – it is the great review of the living and the dead.”  analyse social functions and developments within the web.

Class 5: Visual faith

Richard K. Sherwin Visual Literacy in Action, from Visual Literacy

Jacques Rancière, The future of the Image, the surface of Design, are some things unrepresentable?

Marshal McLuhan, The photograph from Understanding Media. John Berger, chapter 7 from Ways of seeing.

Based on texts read until now, please choose one of the topics below to expand/contextualise within Visual Culture Theory:

Resemblance
Simulation
Performance
Tempo

Class 6: I see therefore I exist

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The intertwining -The Chiasm from The Invisible and the Invisible.

Fred Ritchin, Foreword to the new edition, the pixellated press, Photographing the Invisible from In our own image – The coming revolution in Photography, 1999 Aperture Foundation, NY.

Tony Schwartz, How commercials work from Media – the second God, Doubleday, 1983.

Stuart Ewen, Form follows Waste; from All Consuming images

Link Optical Illusions

The Top Ten Doctored Photos from The Times

Class 7 & 8 ART: Culture x visual

Umberto Eco, A theory of Semiotics

Jean Baudrillard, The consumer society.

Zygmunt Baumann, Tourists and vagabonds from Globalisation.

Marshal McLuhan, Movies – the reel world, Radio – the tribal drum, Television – the timid giant.

Arif Dirlik, The global in the local, in Global and Local. Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (eds)

Luc CourChesne, The contruction of Experience: Turning Spectators into Visitors from New Screen Media, Cinema, Art, Narrative, British Film Institute, 2002.

WJT Mitchell, Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation.

courchel.net

http://www.scintilla.utwente.nl/asdfhjkl

Eco:
semiotics-links

Mitchell:
Video Clips

Dirlik Pdf:

Link to Discontinuous landscapes

Book: Eyes, lies and illusions, The art of Deception (Hardcover), Laurent Mannoni, Werner Nekes (Author), Marina Warner (Authors)

Class 9 & 10 Web and self

Matthias Bruhn and Vera Dunkel, The image as cultural technology, from James Elkins (ed) Visual Literacy

Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative cinema, in Brian Wallis(ed) Art After Modernism. Rethinking Representation.

Cornelius Castoriadis, The world in fragments and Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary.

James Elkins, What is visual Literacy from Visual Studies.

Paul Ricoeur, Imagination and Discourse in Action, in Rethinking imagination, Gillian Robinson and John Rundell (eds).

Marshal McLuhan, The gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis; Ads: Keeping upset with the Joneses from Understanding Media.

Links:

Senseable visuals
Britain from above – communication
Dopplr
xRef Manifest
Then The Project
Bubblr
We Tell Stories

look here

Looking at one’s self, looking at other people, voyeurism and surveillance became central concerns for many photographers.

From the article How we looked, BJP 24/06/09.

The act of looking and the question of the (male) gaze became central in the 1970s: In Laurie Anderson’s work Object/Objection/Objectivity (Fully Automated Nikon) she photographed the men who verbally assaulted her in the streets of New York, later covering their eyes with a white band in the finished images, negating and criminalising the male gaze.

Our cultures’ obsession with sex and sexuality is very apparent in most of the commercial images surrounding us. The question of portraying (sexual) identity, the balance between subject/object, how we look and see each other, is as relevant as ever.

Man Ray (August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976):

Diane Arbus (14 March 1923 – 26 July 1971):

Helmut Newton (31 October 1920 – 23 January 2004):

Nobuyoshi Araki (born May 25, 1940):

Sally Mann (Born May 1, 1951):

Bettina Rheims (born December 18, 1952):

Richard Kern (born 1954):

(You can see some fascinating footage of Kern shooting girls here.)

Cindy Sherman (born Jan 19, 1954):

Catherine Opie (born 1961):

Juergen Teller (born 1964):

Wolfgang Tillmans (born 15 August 1968):

More on the subject of identity and gender in the latest issue of Danish Photo Mag Filter – for fotografi #3, Theme: Normality.

the architecture of art

I relate quite well to Hendrik Kerstens and Susan Worsham’s desire to photograph personal things like family and pregnancy. In fact the Worsham fruit image reminds me somewhat of my AoA project.

The title, The Architecture of Art, was meant to be tongue in cheek, making the connection between two different kinds of creation; the construction of a child (Arthur, my son) and the much less wondrous making of an image.

There is no doubt that having a child is an amazing experience; so surely the greatest art must be the combination of the two, the study of the wonder of nature and humanity combined?

A pregnant body is certainly worth studying, as is any human shape and the changes it goes through. After all, it is the shell we lead our lives in, our minds are bound to it, as is our feelings. Ideally I’d like to capture a glimpse of what goes on behind the mask, the combination of feeling and flesh.

I started pointing the camera at myself when I was very young. Partly because I was the subject closest at hand, but also because I was exploring identity through image making. I doubt I would have decided to follow a creative career, had it not been for a course on “sex and sexuality in contemporary art” I took while at uni – and more importantly the support of the course leader, Rune Gade. Until I met Rune, I had kept my staged “self-portraits” more or less secret.

In June 2008, when I had just joined artreview.com, critic Laura McLean-Ferris wrote a bit about my work in relation to anonymity in Roundup #10: The Best Artists This Week on artreview.com:

“…interestingly, much of the work explores portraiture as a representational trap, and many of her images of women in particular are fragmentary images of body parts, such as legs and stomachs.
The figures here seem caught in a bind, unable to represent themselves through image-making. The viewer, the photographer and the subject are all part of a process of refusal and small resistance.”

I like this in relation to the self portraits, since to some extend the viewer, photographer and the subject are one and the same, and still there is the same process of resistance going on. I think that is because I have accepted that it’s impossible to capture a person in an image, all we can do is represent them, and how we chose to do so will always be somewhat political, or at least, cultural. By twisting things a little, maybe we can make people think about their culture and how they unwittingly read images. More on that in the classic Ways of Seeing.

More images from the AoA project on Flickr and ArtReview.

hendrik kerstens

When looking at last years prize winners for the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in London, I came across this image, by Hendrik Kerstens. I really like how he’s made the plastic bag look like a sculpture. It’s so simple, but a very strong image that kept popping up in my mind since I saw it. The girl in the photographs is Kerstens daughter.

“Hendrik Kerstens was born in 1956 in The Hague, Netherlands. Winner of the 2001 Dutch Panl Award Kerstens is a self-taught photographer who initially turned to a model close at hand, his daughter Paula. Since starting to photograph Paula in 1995 Kersten’s work has been exhibited in over 40 exhibitions across Europe and the United States. In his portraits Paula is always depicted as being austere, serene and illuminated with a characteristic ‘dutch’ light. In September he will open his first solo New York exhibition at the Witzenhausen Gallery. Kersten’s short-listed portrait was conceived in New York when he noticed the excessive amount of plastic bags given away in shops. As a humorous reaction to this environmental problem he photographed the plastic bag in the style of a seventeenth century cap.”

susan worsham

Every day Flak Photo features a new photo, which shows up on my Facebook Home page. Today it was this image by Susan Worsham. There’s some really interesting, odd and inspiring work on her website.

“SOME FOX TRAILS IN VIRGINIA
This series of photographs is taken in and around Virginia, the place in which I grew up. The title comes from a book written by my father’s ancestor, to show the lineage of the Fox family in Virginia. For my own purpose, it acts as a metaphorical map, of the rediscovered paths of my childhood home.
At the age of 34, I came back to Virginia to care for my mother, who died shortly after my return. As the last of my family passed, I turned my lens to old friends, and their new families. I photographed the house in which I grew up. The man that lives there now houses snakes in my father’s old office, and rests them in my old bedroom, while he changes their cages. My mother always promised that there were no snakes in my room, and now that she is gone, there are.”

caroline blinder

My favorite academic has to be my sister, Caroline Blinder, who currently teaches English and American Literature (& some film and photography) at Goldsmiths College. She is a wonderful person with a thoughtful and kind personality. And she is also very creative, albeit she rarely has time to do her own fiction or photography.

Some of her writings on photography..:

‘Another kind of Patriotism: Robert Frank’s The Americans’, in Sas Mays, ed. Photography and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005)

‘Love Under the Sky: On Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac’, in Rui Carvalho Homen and Maria de Fatima Lambert, eds, Writing and Seeing: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005)

‘Between the Unimagined and the Imagined: Photographic Aesthetics and Literary Illumination in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, In: Wim Tigges,ed. Moments of Moment: Aspects of the Literary Epiphany (Amsterdam/Atlanta: DQR Studies in English Literature Series, June 1999)

‘The Transparent Eyeball: Emerson and Walker Evans’, Mosaic, a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, Vol. 37, No. 4, Dec. 2004.

‘Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places: Brassaï’s Photographs in André Breton’s Mad Love”, Photography and Surrealism Vol. History of Photography, Aug. 2005.

‘All Things either Good or Ungood’: American Pictures Revisited in Jacob Holdt’s United States 1970-1975, in Deutche Börse Photography Prize 2008 (London: The Photographers’ Gallery, 2008).

Forthcoming this year:

‘Alfred Stieglitz’s Cameraworks and 291′, in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker eds. The Modernist Magazine Project (Oxford: OUP, 2009).

Not So Innocent: ‘Vision and Culpability in Weegee’s Children’, in Jeanne Perreault ed. Histories/ Stories / Photographies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

“Memento Mori: Artifacts and Still Lives in the work of Wright Morris” in Photography and Literature, ed, by Mick Gidley (London: Peter Lang, 2009).

Hopefully we can get her to post some writings on here!

video

When I left high school I thought maybe I wanted to be a movie director.. so I went to London and found work as a runner for a production company, Activate Productions, which mainly did music videos. Since then (this was 1995) it has become much easier to make videos in the comfort of your own home, and I still like to play around with it once in a while. On ArtReview I met some people who were doing a project that sounded like fun…

The Exquisite Corpse Video Project (ECVP) is a unique video collaboration of 36 artists from 16 countries, inspired by the Surrealist invention, the “Exquisite Corpse”. The project is coordinated by the Brazilian video-artist Kika Nicolela.

Using the semi-blind, sequential method of the surrealists’ game, ECVP participants create video art in response to the final ten seconds of the previous member’s work. Each member is asked to incorporate these seconds into their piece, creating transitions as they please, until everyone’s vision is threaded together into an instigating final “corpse.”

ECVP Screenings and exhibitions have been taking place in various countries since June, such as Sweeden, USA, Greece, Canada, Brazil, Australia and South Africa. A book about the project will be released in the first semester of 2009.

An interview with some of the project members can be read here.

See if you can spot my one minute here:

more about "CORPSE#9 on Vimeo", posted with vodpod

The Vitruvian Woman

The Vitruvian Woman is a multimedia sculpture created by 34 artists from around the world. Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch; The Vitruvian Man, which idealises the classic proportions of the human body, in his case the male body, The Vitruvian Woman sets out to trace the multidimensionality of womanhood in a flow of five three-minute video sequences reflecting the nine bodily regions: the head, heart, stomach, sexual organ, right arm, left arm, left leg, right leg and feet.

Exhibitions:
2009 | December 14 – 23 | Video Installation at Video Dia Loghi 2009, Video festival, Torino, Italy
2009 | March 14 – April 19 | Debut Screening at Formverk Art Space, Eskilstuna, Sweden

My piece from the Vitruvian:

& here’s a couple from college:

more about "Flickr Video Embed: follow me", posted with vodpod

chris cunningham

Cunningham is mainly known as a director, but he’s a man of many talents – and definitely someone who has inspired me.
When I was 19 I worked as a runner for a London production company that Cunningham had just signed up with. He was 24 and just starting out as video director.

“Chris Cunningham is an acclaimed English music video film director and video artist. He was born in Reading, Berkshire in 1970 and grew up in Lakenheath, Suffolk.

The video collection The Work of Director Chris Cunningham was released in November 2004 as part of the Directors Label set. This DVD includes selected highlights from 1995–2000.

In 1989, Cunningham worked at Spitting Image, building animatronic robot arms and sculpting caricatures for the TV series. In 1990 he worked on sculpture and animatronics for the film Alien.

After seeing Cunningham’s work on the 1994 film version Judge Dredd, Stanley Kubrick head hunted Cunningham to design and supervise animatronic tests of the central robot child character in his version of the film A.I. Cunningham worked for over a year on the film A.I., before leaving to pursue a career as a director.

Earlier work in film included model making, prosthetic make-up and concept illustrations for Hardware and Dust Devil with director Richard Stanley, as well as Nightbreed. In 1990–1992 he contributed the occasional cover painting and strip for Judge Dredd Megazine, working under the pseudonym Chris Halls, the surname of his stepfather.

Cunningham has created photography and cover artwork for various people including Bjork’s All Is Full Of Love, Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker and Come to Daddy.

In 2008, Cunningham produced a fashion shoot for Dazed & Confused using Grace Jones as a model to create “Nubian versions” of Rubber Johnny.[6] In an interview for BBC’s “The Culture Show”, it was suggested that the collaboration may expand into a video project.

In November 2008, Cunningham followed on with another photoshoot for Vice Magazine.”

Grace Jones by Chris Cunningham
Originally uploaded by ֹDazed & Confused Mag