Art historian Richard Meyer, directs a new graduate program in visual studies. The emerging field looks beyond canonical works of art. "Visual studies addresses a far wider sweep of visual objects and experiences [than traditional art history]," Meyer said.
For Vanessa Schwartz, images are the archives. She brings the questions and methods of film studies, art history, and anthropology to Modern European history in studies of Paris and the late 19th century, and in new work about "Frenchness" and film.
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Critical Vision
By Katherine Yungmee Kim
When Megan Kendrick, a doctoral candidate in history, is doing research
for her dissertation on hotels in Los Angeles, she studies old
postcards and photographs. She uses advertisements, film reels, maps
and blueprints as primary research materials to investigate how the
tourism industry played a role in creating an identity for Los Angeles.
Kendrick is part of the new generation of scholars being trained at USC
College in visual studies, an emerging interdisciplinary field that
examines the historical, cultural and social power of the visual.
“We will need to come to terms with the fact that our society reads
differently than it did 20 years ago,” said Kendrick, who works with
Phil Ethington and Vanessa Schwartz. “The future of teaching and of
scholarship will be reliant on a deep understanding of how the visual
informs our processes of learning and communicating.”
The proliferation of images in our society, coupled with the
ever-increasing speed of technology, has led scholars to critically
examine visual artifacts and experiences, whether in art museums or
photo albums, or in movie multiplexes or magnetic resonance labs.
Visual studies is an area that successfully integrates USC’s strategic
interests in globalization, communication and urbanization.
Incorporating scholars from other schools across USC — the Annenberg
School for Communication, the School of Cinema-Television, the School
of Fine Arts — the College has emerged as the engine behind the effort
to promote trans-school and interdisciplinary scholarship and
collaborations in this exciting new field.
Institutionalizing the Visual
“We are building an intellectual community on campus,” said Richard
Meyer, associate professor of art history. “USC is a site for the
production of new knowledges and the exchange for adventurous ideas in
the study of the visual and the history of visual culture.”
Many professors from different disciplines are involved in this community. Click here for more on their work.
As the director of a new graduate certificate program in visual
studies, Meyer oversaw the program’s launch this winter. Housed in the
College, the certificate program is open to students who are already
enrolled in a Ph.D. program at USC. By taking an introductory course in
visual studies, a multidisciplinary team-taught seminar and two
additional courses, students will learn to critically analyze visual
objects and experiences in their own scholarship. The new approach
bolsters and challenges students to move outside of their own
traditional disciplinary training.
“Visual studies is a compelling intellectual framework because it is
not limited to any discipline, geographical region, historical period
or methodology,” explained Professor Akira Mizuta Lippit, a new faculty
hire who teaches in the departments of comparative literature, East
Asian languages and cultures, and critical studies. “What it does
provide is a sensibility, an opportunity to look at what is often
overlooked, everyday and familiar objects as well as the more obscure
and distant things that retreat from sight.
“It is a sensibility that forces one to question and reexamine
virtually everything,” Lippit added, “that has allowed some to discover
new objects and ways of looking and thinking, and others to discover
new ways of looking at and thinking about familiar objects.”
This spring, American studies and religion scholar Jane Iwamura and
anthropologist Nancy Lutkehaus have teamed up to teach “Picturing
Paradise.” The visual studies seminar addresses the representations of
place, landscapes and people associated with Western ideas about
paradise on earth, images of utopia and Shangri-Las.
Bill Deverell, professor of history, and Roberto Lint-Sagarena,
assistant professor of religion and American studies and ethnicity, are
leading a second seminar, “Envisioning Frontiers and Borderlands.” The
course examines the American concept of the frontier — how the West was
conceived, how visual symbols have been central to the region’s history
and how intersections of race, ethnicity, gender and religion have
informed the idea of the American West.
Taught at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West,
which Deverell directs, the seminar utilizes the Huntington Library’s
collections of archival materials, such as maps and photographs.
The Huntington is not the only Los Angeles resource that USC is
collaborating with — Malcolm Baker, professor of art history, teaches a
course on the history of art collecting and display at the Getty Museum
and Research Institute. Also, the recent establishment of the USC Shoah
Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education further
strengthens visual studies in the College.
Seeds of the Program
“The image can be as much a source of insight as the word,” said
University Professor Leo Braudy. Realizing this allows students and
scholars to recognize that their fields are not isolated areas of
study, but have important and fertile intersections with other fields,
he said.
“Insight has little respect for academic traditions,” said Braudy, the
Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature and professor of
English and art history. “There are insights that come from digging
deeper into a subject and there are insights that arise from an
appreciation of the connection between seemingly distant subjects. Both
are valuable.”
Indeed it was Braudy who co-chaired the Visual Culture Initiative — the
original visual studies seminar that brought many leading scholars to
USC — with art historian Nancy Troy. Galvanized by the initiative’s
success, the then dean of academic programs, Sally Pratt, began regular
gatherings for humanists to discuss visual culture at the College.
The College already had a master’s program at the Center in Visual
Anthropology where students worked towards producing scholarly and
professional ethnographic films. Undergraduates could study visual
culture through a minor program in art history. But Pratt, professor of
Slavic languages and literatures, envisioned a broader, more
interdisciplinary effort.
That led, in fall 2003, to the Literary, Visual, Material and Culture
(LVMC) Initiative, designed to explore relationships between images,
texts and objects, with their many overlaps, tensions and
interpretations. Chaired by Meyer, the LVMC’s primary goals were to
facilitate conversations among the faculty across campus, to showcase
faculty works-in-progress and to provide team-taught classes.
LVMC inspired individual faculty to pursue further collaborative
projects. Historian and visual culture scholar Vanessa Schwartz worked
with Anne Friedberg of Cinema-TV and Marita Sturken of Annenberg to
establish the Visual Culture Project. Funded by a Zumberge grant, the
project helped bring outside scholars to USC to discuss visual culture
research including the global image, the brain and vision and sensory
perception.
Meanwhile, with funds from the Provost, Meyer, Schwartz and Friedberg
created the Visual Studies Research Lab. With this funding, they hosted
a visual studies summit, “In the Visual Laboratory,” in early December
2005, bringing together faculty from across the campus to share their
work with colleagues and students.
“LVMC really provided an opportunity and the framework for faculty to
organize themselves,” said Schwartz, associate professor of history.
“Without it, we just wouldn’t have had the traction.”
Changing the Way We Think
Schwartz was trained as a historian of Modern Europe, but her interest
in culture and the importance of representation led her to stray to
literature, art history and film studies — each of which expanded her
tool set beyond those used in traditional historical research. These
allowed her to ask questions about looking and entertainment not
usually asked by French historians.
Her first book, Spectacular Realities
(University of California Press, 1998), examined how wax museums,
panoramas and the city morgue prepared the groundwork for the
experience of the cinema, while they were also ingredients of an
emergent mass culture.
Since then, Schwartz has expanded her research on Paris. She is
particularly interested in the Eiffel Tower as an urban icon, about the
significance and signification of the structure itself. What is the
meaning of the tower? What does it conjure and how does it denote a
place and time? Her “Urban Icons Project” with Phil Ethington,
professor of history, began as a conference, but has become a
multimedia scholarly project. “It is not just a history of urban visual
culture,” said Schwartz. “It is also an historical argument in visual
form.” To visit the project online, click here.
It seems like an obvious sequitur that after studying fin-de-siècle
Paris, the Eiffel Tower and the advent of cinema that Schwartz’s next
topic would question the very notion of Frenchness itself. Her
latest project, “ ‘It’s So French’: Nationality and Internationalism in
French and American Cinema, 1945–1968,” explores postwar
Franco-American relations as well as the Cannes Film Festival, Brigitte
Bardot and conceptions of cosmopolitanism.
Historians interested in visual studies examine visual representations
— whether films, art or icons, said Steve Ross, professor and chair of
history, to see how they open up implications about the past and the
present.
At the College, “we are at the cutting edge of what visual culture is,”
he added. “We are looking at what it is to take visual objects as
historical sources, not just photographs or films as illustrations, but
looking at the visual as primary documents.”
What the Future Holds
Richard Meyer’s work on arts censorship necessarily goes beyond the
boundaries of conventional art history and canonical “high” art. For
his award-winning book, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art
(Oxford University Press, 2001), he analyzed protest posters, court
transcripts and TV news stories alongside oil paintings and art
photographs. Meyer and colleague Nancy Troy are teaching a new graduate
seminar entitled “Marketing the Modern: The Visual Culture of
Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” He is also co-authoring a book for the UC
Press on the 1940s tabloid photographer Weegee.
As a graduate student, Meyer debated with his advisers about the
importance of studying photography in an art historical context.
“That’s not really art,” they told him, anchored in their own training
in canonical painting and sculpture.
The memory struck him, he said, when his students came to him wanting
to study digital art and culture. At first, he discouraged them saying,
“That’s not really art. Photography is.”
“One of the most difficult things for both faculty and students is to
step outside the limits of our own intellectual formation to see what
we can learn both from older and younger generations,” Meyer said.
Younger scholars have grown up with the Internet and a tremendous
amount of visual material on the Web and will have an easier time
thinking about the visual in academia, compared with older scholars who
might be more resistant, reluctant to step outside the boundaries of
their discipline, Ross predicted. “I don’t think it’s disagreement,”
said Ross, “as much as it is not being clued into it.”
Clued in or not, it’s clear that in our image-dense world, the field of
visual studies is here to stay. Also clear is that USC faculty, in the
College and beyond, are poised to play a key role in defining and
shaping what the field will become.
“The future for visual studies is bounded only by our own imaginations
and, of course, the resources that we need to pursue it thoroughly and
responsibly,” said Braudy. “It isn’t just a field in itself but an
approach to knowledge and understanding that could affect many fields.
Its more widespread effect will be [felt] as professors and students
realize how some of its approaches and methods will fruitfully open up
new aspects of their own work.” |
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