U.C. Berkeley History of Art

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COURSES FALL 2007

Histart 192F.2

UG SEMINAR: UNDERSTANDING VISUAL CULTURE (4 UNITS)
Fridays 10:00-1:00
308B Doe, CCN 05592
Catherine Zuromskis

Art historians have long examined fine art and its relations to history, psychology, philosophy, and aesthetics. But what about other kinds of images? Might we apply similar frameworks for visual analysis to better understand advertising images, print media, and popular entertainment? And if not, why not? This course will offer an introduction to the growing academic interest in the study of "visual culture." A trajectory of visual analysis that situates itself between disciplines like art history, anthropology, cultural studies, critical theory, and history (to name only a few), visual culture is ripe with possibilities for new kinds of intellectual work. This course will engage this explicitly interdisciplinary approach, exploring a wide range of visual materials including film, television, photography, painting, advertising, and digital media.

We will explore visual culture as a methodology through a series of case studies focusing on such culturally ambiguous subjects as photography in the museum, the work of Andy Warhol, representations of 9/11 and the Iraq war, and digital visual networks like Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube. But the growing popularity of visual culture has also raised controversy and invited significant challenges from other academic disciplines. In order to better understand these challenges and assess their validity, this course will also interrogate visual culture itself as an historical object. Combining examinations of visual culture’s theoretical underpinnings in Frankfurt School philosophy, Birmingham-era cultural studies, and French post-structuralist theory with studies of visual culture as a discipline, we will ask: why visual culture and why now? What technological, historical, and social conditions have lead to this pointed collapsing of fine art and mass culture? What are the political possibilities and limitations of this mode of scholarship?

And does visual culture offer a newer and more relevant mode of academic scholarship or does it instead signal a degradation of critical intellectual work? Readings for this course may include work by Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes, Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, W. J. T. Mitchell, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Constance Penley, James Elkins, Douglas Crimp, and Lauren Berlant. Students will also formulate their own conclusions about visual culture and its legitimacy through in-class presentations, short response papers, and a final research project on a topic of their choosing.