Table Of ContentVisual Studies
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Visual Studies
A Skeptical Introduction
James Elkins
Routledge
New York and London
Published in 2003 by
Routledge
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New York, NY 10001
www.routledge-ny.com
Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
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London EC4P 4EE
www.routledge.co.uk
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.
Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America on acid free paper.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or here-
after invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage
or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Elkins, James, 1955-
Visual studies : a skeptical introduction / James Elkins.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-415-96680-9 (HB : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-415-96681-7 (PB : alk. paper)
1. Art and society. 2. Culture. 3. Visual communication. 4. Visual perception. 5.
Visual literacy. 6. Communication and culture. I. Title.
N72.S6E45 2003
700’.1—dc21 2003013585
The text of this book was composed in Scala, with Veljovic and Scala Sans as display
faces. Book design by Dutton & Sherman Design. Printed and bound in the United
States of American by Edwards Brothers, Inc.
Contents
Preface vii
1. What Is Visual Studies? 1
2. The Subjects of Visual Studies 31
3. Ten Ways to Make Visual Studies More Difficult 63
4. What Is Visual Literacy? 125
Envoi 197
Notes 203
Sources and permissions 223
Index 227
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Preface
Visual studies is poisedto become one of the most interesting and
conceptually challenging subjects that has emerged in academic life
in the last several decades. It can be the place where questions of
visuality are discussed—where people from different disciplines
come to discover new ways of understanding images. Visual studies
has the potential to contribute a voice significantly different from the
text-based practices that are preeminent in the humanities and it has
the capacity to uncover connections between parts of the university
that are now largely disjointed.
Yet in order for visual studies to become the field that I think it
can be—the field toward which it is tending—it has to become more
ambitious about its purview, more demanding in its analyses, and
above all more difficult. The field, which is barely a decade old, has
already produced a number of excellent texts written at a very high
level of scholarship: I think, for example, of essays by Douglas
Crimp, Fredric Jameson, Irit Rogoff, and Jay Bernstein, among many
others. At the same time it has generated anthologies and books that
are more celebratory than reflective and it has given rise to a grow-
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Preface
ing literature of undistinguished cultural criticism. It is relatively
easy to write an acceptable visual-culture essay on any number of
subjects, from The Sixth Sense to Six Flags Great America. As the
field grows, it needs to take that ease seriously.
This book can be used as an introduction to visual studies, pro-
vided it’s understood that a field so recently named and so scattered
in its purposes cannot really be introduced. Readers new to the sub-
ject will be able to find their way into the literature and make up their
own minds on the contested issues. In that sense this is an ordinary
introduction. It is a “skeptical introduction” because my main pur-
pose is not to survey the field but to raise the ante. I want to make
life harder—and therefore more interesting—for people who love
the visual world as much as I do.
This book starts slowly, surveying existing programs, perusing
the bibliography, looking at leading concepts such as interdiscipli-
narity. After that the argument gathers speed and becomes more crit-
ical. I thought it would be best to begin with a sober assessment
because there is still no book that considers the field as a whole. If
you’re more interested in polemics than protocol, you may want to
begin with chapter 3.
I owe thanks to my colleagues, especially George Roeder, Maud
Lavin, and Joe Grigely, for giving me so many ideas over the last few
years as we at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago have devel-
oped our own visual studies program. Thanks also to Laurie Palmer,
Gregg Bordowitz, Margaret Olin, and Roderick Coover for their work
in a faculty seminar that led to the creation of the program; and to
Tom Mitchell for sharing his unpublished lectures. Michael Ann
Holly read a proposal for this book and offered useful comments.
Hans Dam Christiansen of the University of Copenhagen, Jill Casid,
Melinda Szaloky, and Edward Branigan, Peter Blank, Michael
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Preface
Newman, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, David Bordwell, Sunil Manghani,
Jeff Skoller, and Tom Gunning gave me helpful advice. Ziauddin
Sardar, Ashis Nandy, and Ravi Vasudevan helped me find Indian and
Southeast Asian universities interested in visual culture. Hannah
Bennett of the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries provided a useful list
of European periodicals. I found Margarita Dikovitskaya’s disserta-
tion on the rise of visual studies to be an excellent resource. And
finally, special thanks to the Chicago Theory Group: omni re scibili et
quibusdam aliis.
Paris, Dublin, Chicago 2002
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