Short of going through life
with our eyes closed, we cannot avoid road signs, advertising, maps, artworks,
posters, graffiti, television and computer screens. They all present us with
images that are an integral part of our lives to a point where we decode them
in a quasi-automatic manner. Yet, we have been trained to recognize and
understand representations of all kinds. From the very moment we are presented
with associations between pictograms and words as an early approach to learning
vocabulary all the way to graduate academic disciplines such as art history and
semiotics, we become unassuming experts of the visual. Maybe this widespread
and inevitable familiarity with the visual explains the fact that there is no
one discipline that can pretend to encompass all that constitutes "the
visual". Or is there?

With The Study of the Visual After the Cultural Turn, Margaret
Dikovitskaya aims to demonstrate that Visual Studies have emerged in American
academia as the ultimate distinct field for the study of visual culture over
the last decades. This is no small task considering that, although this
interdisciplinary area of research splicing various aspects of anthropology,
art history, film studies, linguistics and comparative literature has existed
since the 1980s, it has yet to be the object of a consensus regarding its
objectives, definitions and methods. What’s more, its applications vary from
one institution to the other and, in spite of a growing number of adepts, it is
still more often than not aggregated to aesthetics or cultural studies.

The author, far from being
deterred by this state of affairs, sees these discrepancies as an incentive to
develop a common ground for working in the field of the visual. To be exact,
Dikovitskaya aspires to shed new light on this area of study by looking at the
way in which an intersection of art history and cultural studies has generated
new ways to consider the visual. Her starting point is the hypothesis according
to which deconstructionist criticism is responsible for a cultural turn that
has helped redefine the status of culture. Where cultural phenomenon was
previously seen as the mere response to social, political and economic
processes, it has now come to be perceived as their cause.

In order to get the lay of
this as yet unexplored theoretical land, the author embarked on an extensive
series of interviews of faculty members attached to various American universities.
Among the academics who have collaborated to the project, some are established
authorities such as Douglas Crimp, Anne Friedberg, Nicholas Mirzoeff. In order
to get a range of theoretical standpoints, the academics were divided into
three representative clusters: those who believe visual studies to be an
appropriate extension of art history, the proponents of a new focus independent
of art history but related to digital and virtual technologies and those who
view visual studies as a threat to art history. Considering that an academic
field is defined by the object of study, the basic assumptions underpinning the
methodology and the history of the discipline itself, it comes as no surprise
that the author should consider this epistemological effort as a pioneering
attempt to present a historiographic account.

The structure of the book is
quite straightforward: an introduction followed by a bibliographical essay, two
chapters, a conclusion and a substantial appendix. The introductory
bibliographic essay retraces all American publications pertaining to visual
culture and provides succinct analyses of each tome’s specific contribution. If
this first part of the book reads more like an attempt to gather the
preliminary material from which an analysis could eventually be derived, the
second part provides some insight into the turn that seems to have brought
about this new field as well as concerns regarding potential theoretical
frameworks. This chapter aims to determine what the potential objects and methodologies
of this emerging discipline could be, but the focus remains on art history, its
methods and its objects of study. Indeed, the resulting concluding remarks
serve the purpose of asserting the importance of visual studies by suggesting
that they have come to subsume art history: "Given that visual studies
treat all images as worthy of investigation and implicated in relations of
power and history, from the perspective of proponents of the new field, art
history is encompassed by visual studies and becomes, in effect, part of this
new field’s own history."

For all the material
gathered, Dikovitskaya is left with a comparatively flimsy conclusion: visual
culture is in the making. Pointing more to the need to redefine art history on
the basis of new objects of study — such as virtual reality and video art —
than to the legitimacy of a brand new field of research, this book still has
the merit of being an exhaustive account of the various forms of engagement
with visual culture. The collection of interviews alone is of great interest
for any graduate student concerned with visual studies and its potential
objects. It is also likely to be of interest for academics involved in
researching and teaching such matters as it is an informed point of view on the
way disciplines have the potential to evolve.

© 2006 Martine Rouleau

Martine Rouleau is Tate Fellow at
the London Consortium (Birkbeck College, University of London) where she is
currently a PhD candidate. She obtained a Masters in Communication from the Université
du Québec à Montréal in 2002.

Categories: Philosophical, ArtAndPhotography