The “visual studies” described in these transcripts was a particular intervention in art history that began in the mid-1980s, but it is not the only version of the history or identity of the field. Art history was woefully undertheorized in that era. French philosophy, British cultural studies, and German critical theory had resulted in vigorous and virulent debate in literature and film in their encounters with semiotics, structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxist and feminist theory, as well as the varied philosophies that accompanied them (queer theory, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and other critical engagements followed soon after). Art history had remained remote from these influences, and the defense against theory came from many different positions. Scholars who saw the supremacy of the object, connoisseurship, and formal analysis threatened were joined by others who felt the legitimacy conferred by their training and credentials under threat from expertise in fields to which they had little access except through difficult and obscure-seeming texts.
Battles over theory divided departments, made and ruined careers, and transformed the discipline of art history. Many visual studies–affiliated art historians turned away from visual analysis to the study of institutional practices. Some managed a synthesis of the formal qualities of works and their social production. Some expanded their discussions to dialogue with anthropology, fashion, media, history, literature, history of science, or other disciplines in which visual representations are produced or circulate. But even now, the entrenched resistance to the study of mass media and broader domains of visual imagery and production is part of the backlash against visual studies in art history (perhaps, more properly, Art History), or, at least, a continuation of the impulse that resisted its influence. The carcass of traditional art history has been pretty well picked dry, even if it continues to be preserved and venerated in some of the citadels and cloisters. But the “visual studies” outlined here is equally exhausted, at the self-confessed “end” outlined in your volume, bidding itself farewell.
Why? Remember, the challenge was not just to reread the canonical works through new lenses, but to bring new objects of study and analysis into view while developing a unique methodological approach. Two things happened along the way. The quest for a methodology specific to visuality failed to materialize from this confluence of theoretical contributions, and the commitment to aesthetics as a specialized mode of knowledge and arena of cultural production evaporated. Exceptions can be cited in individual works, of course, but in broad terms the intellectual inquiry into the historicity of vision, interest in visual epistemology, attention to the specificity of visual means and methods, concern for embodied cognition and systems approaches to the social complex of visual culture, all of which have developed considerably over the last three or four decades, were simply ignored by “visual studies” as conceived here. Meanwhile, the world was changing.
Methodological transformation came at the price of blindness, a peculiar avoidance of attention to visual specificity, as if in compensatory response to the old tenets of a retrogressive-seeming formalism, with its attachment to notions of inherent, essential, and even self-evident value. The method of visual studies, by its own admission throughout this tract, was often practiced at the expense of visuality. Belief in the distinct capacity of images to produce both sense (coherence and legibility) and meaning (referential and replete expression) on terms that are distinct from those of language was sacrificed in favor of ideological critique. In other quarters, discussions of visual epistemology, design, media, and information studies, cognition and vision, and new materialisms were surging into view. These realms were fed in part by systems theory, by cybernetics and digital media studies, but also by the long-standing examination of the specificity of vision. These discourses are not constrained by either attention to or reaction against art history, that tiny hothouse object in the larger culture of visual forms, but are vigorous aspects of many multidisciplinary fields.
Nineteenth-century mass production changed the game in visual arts, with commercial and entertainment images overwhelming those of the fine art arena (giving fine art a newly defined identity). But since the invention of networked digital media, we negotiate most of our daily business through the graphical formats of interface. Visuality plays a dramatically different role in contemporary life than at any other point in human history, organizing knowledge, information, communication, and the exchanges of power, money, and units of cultural value in unprecedented ways, with unparalleled speed, volume, and effect. The critical tools needed to understand these environments have to come from fields of cognitive studies, design, and interface studies. Their history is not encompassed in the esoteric knowledge domains of poststructuralist theory, however useful it is as an accessory or adjunct. The point is not to jettison what is valuable, but to lift our heads up from the narrow view into which attention has been funneled by academic silos and disciplinary constraints, and revisit the long and rich history of studies of vision, visuality, and epistemology as they have intersected with design.
This version of visual studies is deeply humanistic, highly articulate and self-conscious, with its roots in architecture, graphical forms of knowledge production, printing and the book, page layout and composition, the history and cultural valence of typography, visualization of information and knowledge in graphical and diagrammatic forms, cartography from an array of interpretative and thematic traditions, illustration, fashion, urban planning, industrial design, user interface, artificial vision, and digital design—in short, all of the domains in which visuality is an essential means of production. Design was fine art’s dialogue with utopia, certainly in the visions of the late nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts, Secessionist, and then twentieth-century Constructivist and related movements and their legacies. That tradition of visual studies is far from exhausted, and it is the domain in which my work has developed over the same thirty years that I watched the rise and now self-confessed exhaustion of the visual studies within the orbit of art history.
In the mid-1980s, pursuing an interdisciplinary degree that combined film studies, the visual arts, environment design, and the history of writing, I had only a distant sense of the art-historical community’s interest in theory, limited to what I gleaned from the work of Norman Bryson and Victor Burgin. I sent out feelers on the Berkeley campus to see if a full-fledged visual studies program might take root. I visited the remains of György Kepes’s experimental foothold at MIT, went to the Carpenter Center at Harvard to learn from what was left of their Bauhaus legacy, sought out all the then-dying embers of the legacy of Constructivist, De Stijl, and the other design movements whose precepts had been codified in design curricula as well as professional practices. The visionary work of László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, Herbert Bayer, Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Anni and Josef Albers, and others was shaped by utopian visions of transformation and change. Those aspirations, like all of the socialist agenda, met their tempered fate in various ways, but the crucible of intellectual and creative thought gave rise to a full-fledged engagement with visuality in systematic methodological and practical ways. As a method, this tradition of visual studies has a long history stretching into antiquity, into the use of visual means to produce pattern, idea, form, tools, decoration, communication, and expression. That discourse has never found a place in the “visual studies” that is now declaring itself at an end. Why?
Humanistic as well as scientific and technical fields depend on visual knowledge and its transmission in ways that are newly urgent even if they go back to classical times, such as the creation and display of information in graphical form. Certain disciplines, like architecture, rely on visual methods as the core instruments of their existence—handwriting does not exist except in examples, and the great copybooks and manuals of penmanship and lettering are testimony to the nuances of class, station, and function to which these models were put. The rhetorical structure of argument is outlined in diagrammatic form that is explicitly graphic. The “laws of form” central to formal logic and its ambitious dreams of a totalizing capacity to encode knowledge, the imaginative designs of philosophical languages, the “real” character of John Wilkins, the diagrammatic virtuosity of Robert Fludd—these strains of visual thinking and expression can only be understood using a critical vocabulary informed by reference to specific properties of visual forms. Humbert de Superville, Charles Blanc, John Ruskin, Otto Neurath, Owen Jones, the Gestalt psychologists, theorists of Constructivist production of knowledge (visual and other), Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Stephen Kosslyn—the list could go on an on, establishing a rich historical and theoretical foundation for visual studies from a broad array of contemporary fields highly relevant to pressing concerns in the present. Rarely codified into a curriculum, such a foundation would be useful and practical across many realms of applied and theoretical knowledge and research. Visual studies is ahead of us, not behind, but it will be formulated from different sources and with other aspirations than the field whose demise you have detailed.