INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL CULTURE
What is visual?
Seeing/sight. Anything visual is physical.
Relating to seeing/sight - anything you can see.
The term 'visual' is the thing that distinguishes it from Philosophy (very much about theoretical ideas, based on a language of ideas rather than based on phenominas that are in the world).
Visual culture is particularly interested in the things that we can see. In a context of culture; if you make a piece of work and keep it in your room and no one ever sees it, it's not culture. Very much visual but it is not culture because it's kept hidden in your room.
What is 'Culture'?
- In some way out of the concerns of every day life, outside of everyday needs (eating, sleeping, working etc) in our spare time we create some kind of cultural project. The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively. Images of things that are reproduced, things we can see, study and experience.
- The ideas, customs, and the social behaviour of particular people or society. You can be described as a cultural group - Art school. Other art courses in UK involved in the same culture. Buildings you get access to, time you get up in the morning.
- Visual Culture is a versatile ‘field'.
''Visual events in which information, meaning or pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology''
(Technology here is understood broadly but equals the 'reproducibility' of the 'image')
''It's focus is on how visual events work and what they do, rather than just the ideasthey represent or the reality they purport to depict” (Martin Jay, Journal of Visual Culture)
While the image remains a focal point, it is the relations between images and consumers that are evaluated for their cultural significance, not just the image in and of itself.
OBJECTS OF VISUAL CULTURE STUDY
What is a focal point? How do you select a focal point?
Graffiti
People who graffiti often have the same taste in music, fashion taste and activities in urban spaces that are beyond spray painting. Not to provide a description of this image and whether you like it. How is it understood as a cultural context? Writing an essay about something you like and talking about why you like it etc is not interesting, it's often good to write about something that annoys you - because you have such a strong opinion, that can be expressed and provide a critical engagement with that subject.
Images of War: Visual culture particularly develops on images of conflict or war, closely tied into Photography but also other art practices that have evolved out of questioning this type of imagery. In terms of visual culture, you can use this image as a starting point and one argument point is that none of us will have a real interaction, or embodied experience of this type of conflict. Even though we fight as a nation 'we are at war' we dont experience it ourselves so the only understanding we have of the war is through images. Then examining these images, what do they say? What's being left out of this image? What's being included? This is a photograph of an event, but why has this specific photo been selected to show on the media? What is the ideology, the mechanic behind that image? Looking at the presentation of this conflict.
Gender:
Ideas of beauty, ideas of the feminine body.
Punks are subculure, skaters are subculture, and pageants are a subculture too. As hard as it is to understand, it is a thing. There are a collective group of people within a subculture with it's own codes and languages. The adaptation of that culture including 'pushy mums' through their children (shown through TV documentaries).
Looking towards American culture, gender construction and the values of children. For example there isn't any male pageants for this age range in America - the idea of how women/girls should look and having that enforced on you from such a young age. Forcing the 'idea of beauty' on children.
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