Journal of Visual Culture recent issues

Questionnaire on Barack Obama

Smith, M., JVC Editorial Group, — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

Obama as Icon

Mitchell, W.J.T. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

Obama's Whiteness

Smith, S. M. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

Just Joking? Chimps, Obama and Racial Stereotype

Apel, D. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

I Believe In Miracles

Gbadamosi, R. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

Recognizing Obama: Image and Beyond?

Radhakrishnan, R. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

My Green Crush

Miller, T. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

Impact of Grassroots Activism

Bobo, J. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

What Happened in Vegas

Myers, J., Willsdon, D., Yarbrough, M. E., Berlant, L. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

Dear journal of visual culture

Berlant, L. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

The New Aesthetics of Patriotism

Sturken, M. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

Obama and Shepard Fairey: The Copy and Political Iconography in the Age of the Demake

Cartwright, L., Mandiberg, S. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

Radicalizing Refamiliarization

Armitage, J., Garnett, J. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

Obama Sightings

Margolin, V. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

You Killed Barack Obama, 2008

Zylinska, J. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

The Modern Prince . . . 'to come'?

Spivak, G. C. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

The Afrogeek-in-Chief: Obama and our New Media Ecology

Everett, A. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

Obama on Flickr

Stallabrass, J. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

Perpetual Evocations

Cashmore, E. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

Visualizing Barack Obama

Rowe, J. C. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

Other Obamas

Harvey, R. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

Obama's BlackBerry, or This Is Not a Technology of Destruction

Marez, C. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

From 'Keep on Pushing' to 'Only in America': Racial Symbolism and the Obama Campaign

Young, C. A . — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

An End to the American Civil War?

Mirzoeff, N. — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:46:01 PST

Mapping City Crime and the New Aesthetic of Danger

Wallace, A. — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:05:30 PDT

This article investigates the recent proliferation of crime-mapping software applications provided by police departments in dozens of US cities. In these maps, urban space is rendered according to prevailing notions of criminality, constructing a landscape of danger that borrows from and contributes to the wider visual culture of crime. In the aesthetic rendering of illegality, place is represented with the aim of revealing information with a social purpose, and in so doing it re-imagines real space according to dominant values about the nature of crime, criminals, and urban space. While the adoption of such mapping programs is justified using the rhetoric of community empowerment, their design supports a neo-liberal agenda of individual responsibility over safety in the context of outsourced security.

The Future Gaze: City Panoramas as Politico-Emotive Geographies

Jansson, A., Lagerkvist, A. — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:05:30 PDT

In this article, we show how the abstract city — media representations of city panoramas and the factual physical silhouette standing in for the city itself in the distance — is constituted as an emotive geography and how the production of such vistas is a political project, whose aim is to activate a future gaze . Through analysing two cities — Montreal in 1967 and contemporary Shanghai — we demonstrate how the mediatized production of urban panoramas sustains a sense of futurity through two (overlapping) forms: the conjunctional and the hyper-representational. We argue that together these panoramas invite an emotive future gaze which, through the combination of practical enactment, haptic movement in the city and political vision, constitutes an ideological force of modern urbanism. By introducing the conceptual framework of encapsulation/decapsulation, we propose a way of deepening the understanding of the symbolic and emotional negotiations involved in the production of spectacular city landscapes.

Cripping Heterosexuality, Queering Able-Bodiedness: Murderball, Brokeback Mountain and the Contested Masculine Body

Barounis, C. — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:05:30 PDT

Extending recent scholarship on the intersections between disability studies and queer theory, this article engages in a comparative reading of the films Murderball (dir. Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro) and Brokeback Mountain (dir. Ang Lee), both released in 2005. The popularity of these two particular films, the author suggests, demonstrates a powerful cultural backlash against those representational histories that have conflated feminization, male homosexuality, and disability. Both films successfully remasculinize their subjects, celebrating queerness and disability as the inevitable product of the hypermasculine body. But, ironically, the rhetoric of masculinity that these narratives share is also the source of their antagonism. The author argues that Murderball's `crip' critique of able-bodiedness relies on repeated heteromasculine performances, while Brokeback Mountain's queer hypermasculinity is deeply invested in an ethic of able-bodiedness. Thus a close reading of both films exposes masculinity as the visual mechanism through which disability and homosexuality are beginning to discipline one another on the contemporary cultural stage.

The Apartheid Museum: Performing a Spatial Dialectics

Rankin, E., Schmidt, L. — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:05:30 PDT

The Apartheid Museum in South Africa is read through the lens of a condition of `prepossession', where histories of trauma continue to haunt a site while manifesting affectively through spatial ambiguities, which lead to an experience of `empathetic unsettledness'. Paradoxes concerning the provenance of the building and its location are discussed. An analysis follows of changing registers of spatiality through selected key areas of the complex, with reference to Henri Lefebvre's analysis of alternative experiences of space. His notion of `lived' space is applicable to trauma architecture as discussed by concentration camp researcher Wolfgang Sofsky. It is argued that the building critically performs a content which exceeds the limits of representation, thus engendering a sense of embodied unease. Further complications include the appropriation of suffering in dialectical tension with a moving commemoration of apartheid iniquities.

`Twice Untitled' and Other Shows

Melville, S. — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:05:30 PDT

Signs of Conflict: Political Posters of Lebanon's Civil War (1975--1990) Planet Discovery Exhibition Hall, Beirut, 12--21 April

Elias, C. — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:05:30 PDT

Editorial: Introduction

Cooley, H. R. — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:31:06 PST

Marking Time, Figuring Space: Gesture and the Embodied Moment

Schneckloth, S. — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:31:06 PST

This article addresses the role played by gesture in theorizing embodiment in drawing practice. The gesture here is cast simultaneously as the material trace left on the drawing surface as well as an intentional act geared toward enabling participatory spectatorship. Both forms of the gesture are enacted through attention to embodiment in drawing as performed through the organs of artist and audience. The surface of a drawing affords openings for gesture's potential to convey meaning beyond the semiotic and as a site for ongoing physical and aesthetic intervention on the part of the spectator. Drawing's capacity for enabling multiple forms of embodiment positions it uniquely in the landscape of contemporary art as a site of vision, touch, and experience.

Within/Without: Awareness and the Practice of Seeing

Robinson, M. — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:31:06 PST

My practice seeks to give visual expression to the experience of an inner world as it relates to the outer world. This experience has been explored through parallel practices of contemplation, including art making, meditation, and yoga asana. In this article, I describe art making as recording the experience of movement through space and time. I explore the themes of impermanence and interdependence as they have surfaced through contemplation. I also briefly discuss ethical implications and social responsibility as they relate to the notions of impermanence and interdependence.

Winogradsky Rothko: Bacterial Ecosystem as Pastoral Landscape

Wightman, J. — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:31:06 PST

Made in the dimensions of a Mark Rothko painting, a steel and glass frame was filled with mud and water. By applying a microbiology technique developed by a 19th-century soil scientist, Sergei Winogradsky, pigmented bacteria that existed in the mud and water composed a landscape. As bacteria colonize their optimal zones, they change their environments by depleting their resources and releasing by-products. As a bacterial species reaches its carrying capacity, the environment no longer hospitable to the original colonizer may now be the optimal environment for a potential successor to that zone resulting in an evolving color-field of living pigments. The appearance/disappearance of color indicates both procurement and loss of finite material resources; the agents that act out upon the landscape and synthesize change become acted upon by their consequentially changed world. For this article, the ecological industry of the figure and field of Winogradsky Rothko serves as a point of departure for thinking toward a notion of ecological rationality.

The Hostess Project

Robbins, K. — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:31:06 PST

In an effort to further inhabit my grandmother's memories as a young wife, I began an autobiographical, photographic record of my experiences with her recipe journal. The Hostess Project is as much a social experiment as a nostalgic experience. I dress in her clothing, prepare meals based on her hand-written recipes, serve invited guests, and perform the role of hostess. I prepare dishes based on her hand-written instruction: her recipes. Aspics, croquettes, meatloaf with pickle and egg garnish . . . And I photograph the results. This article describes the origins of The Hostess Project and explores the relationship between time and memory, photography and memory, and food and memory.

The Terrain of the Long Take

Kissel, L. — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:31:06 PST

This autobiographical essay examines my inclination towards the use of the long take in documentary film and video. I discuss how my documentary practice is dominated by the take in duration; the ways in which I use the time of the frame to draw closer, in an intuitive way, to the profilmic; and how the long take makes visible the complexities of living through the representation of landscape, space, and time. I describe the process of framing my subject, what the long take signifies in the moment of its capture, as well as what the duration of my frame might express to an audience in search of meaning. I also consider the possibility that the long take is an autobiographical impulse, derived from the experience of inhabiting a landscape that is itself both time and space.

Will Straw, Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America. New York: PPP Publications/Andrew Roth Gallery, 2006.192 pp. 194 col. illus. ISBN 978-0971548046

Vernallis, C. — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:31:06 PST

Malcolm Miles, Cities and Cultures. Oxford: Routledge, 2007. 243 pp. ISBN 978 0415354431

Harris, A. — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:31:06 PST

Stephen Pattison, Seeing Things: Deepening Relations with Visual Artefacts. London: SCM Press, 2007. ISBN 9780334041498

Coopmans, C. — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:31:06 PST

Samia Mehrez, Egypt's Culture Wars: Politics and Practice. London: Routledge, 2008. 352 pp. ISBN 978 0 415 42897 2

Ramadan, D. A. — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:31:06 PST

Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image. London: Verso, 2007. 160 pp. ISBN 1844671070

Emerling, J. — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:31:06 PST

Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn

Moxey, K. — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:20:26 PDT

What are the challenges and opportunities posed to the dominant interpretive paradigms of visual studies by the rise of a new fascination with the object? How can the study of visual culture respond to what has been variously termed a `pictorial' or an `iconic' turn? Can this phenomenological concern for the power of the image to determine its own reception be incorporated into approaches that emphasize its political implications? Is it possible to conceive of the image as both a representation and a presentation at the same time?

Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics

Murray, S. — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:20:26 PDT

In this article, the author argues that the social use of digital photography, as represented on Flickr, signals a shift in the engagement with the everyday image, as it has become less about the special or rarefied moments of domestic living and more about an immediate, rather fleeting, display and collection of one's discovery and framing of the small and mundane. In this way, photography is no longer just the embalmer of time that André Bazin once spoke of, but rather a more alive, immediate, and often transitory practice/form. In addition, the everyday image becomes something that even the amateur can create and comment on with relative authority and ease, which works to break down the traditional bifurcation of amateur versus professional categories in image-making.

Veiled Subjects: Shirin Neshat and Non-liberatory Agency

Rounthwaite, A. — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:20:26 PDT

The controversy over Shirin Neshat's representations of Muslim women has been dominated by interpretations that use an unexamined liberatory model of agency to understand the artist and her subjects. Consequently, criticism of Neshat has become polarized by readings of Islam and women's agency as fundamentally incompatible, and the possibility of female subjects whose agency is grounded in and who aspire to Islamic values has been ignored. Using Saba Mahmood's theory of non-liberatory agency as a way to approach women's embodiment in Islamic culture, this article provides re-readings of the films Turbulent, Rapture and Fervor that suggest how Neshat's art can be read as depicting pious Islamic modes of embodiment.

Seeing Differently: From Antonioni's Blow Up (1966) to Shezad Dawood's Make It Big (2005)

Jones, A. — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:20:26 PDT

This article makes use of London-based artist Shezad Dawood's 2005 reworking of Antonioni's 1966 Blow Up in his photographic and installation work Make It Big to explore a shifting regime of vision and power in Euro-American culture between the 1960s and the present. Via an analysis and comparison of the terms of vision and knowing in Blow Up and Make It Big, the author argues that Dawood's project articulates a subject that is newly hybrid and networked. Working postcolonial theory against new media theory, the article also puts pressure on the tendency in debates about new media to attribute all shifts in contemporary experience to the advent of the digital, arguing that these debates fail to acknowledge fully the crucial importance of broad social and political shifts since the Second World War, such as the migration of people across borders, transformations in concepts of identity and belonging, and changes in the way intellectual, aesthetic and financial capital circulates.

documenta 12: A Dissection

Rehberg, V. — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:20:26 PDT

Vienna Inc.: The Analytic documenta

Bishop, C. — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:20:26 PDT

The Death of a Project

Cunningham, D., Martin, S. — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:20:26 PDT

The Concept of Education at documenta 12

Willsdon, D. — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:20:26 PDT

Gandhi Burger

Grof, F., Naudy, J.-B., Fiduccia, J. — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:20:26 PDT

Infancy, History and Rehabilitation at documenta 12

Spira, A. — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:20:26 PDT

The Ties that Bind: Women Artists at documenta 12

Esner, R. — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:20:26 PDT

On Formalism and Tinkering with the Political on the Far Side of the Subject at documenta 12

Steiner, S. — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:20:26 PDT

Museum Theatrum: The Caprice of documenta 12

Baker, K. — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:20:26 PDT