Irit Rogoff: Studying Visual Culture
How will you utilize your own word to describe the visual culture? What will be included and/or conflated inside?
Visual culture pertains to the subjects, objects, media, and people who are in that person’s or group’s environment. How and where that person or group of people interpret and interact with those factors surrounding them can offer manipulative thoughts and actions depending on the situation. This can then lead to political, historical, and other contextual questions to either create more new visual culture or similar ideas. Visual culture is all around us all the time, especially in very urban or technologically growing societies.
Why is it important to be able to ask “new and alternative” questions in visual culture?
New and alternative questions allow cultures to be more creative with ideas in order to move forward politically, scientifically, or even artistically. If we continue to ask the same old questions, then we will not learn anything new through research. Remaining stagnant in a fast-paced society (especially in the U.S.) would silence the voices of feminists, minorities, and entrepreneurs because no one would be asking new questions. Because most people want to live in a free world, we do ask new questions, and we learn new information every day because of it. We learn from each other through analyzing different perspectives of how other people translate their visual culture.
How will you utilize your own word to restate Rogoff’s arguments on “speaking about” and “speaking to?”
Speaking about for example, an article, means that you are analyzing it for what the writer is trying to say, but there is an inevitable problem at hand when doing this. When speaking “about” the article, the speaker is also subconsciously bringing their own biases into the story. Instead of speaking “about” the article, they should speak “to” it in order to take advantage of their personal biases which will then bring attention to asking new questions and making new points to the conversation.
Rogoff mentions her opinions about using “curious eyes” to replace “the good eyes.” What do you think about her comments? Agree or disagree? Please make your own arguments.
I agree with Rogoff when she suggests that the “curious eye” can open doors to new opportunities, ideas, and translations. When talking about the “good eye,” it is very basic in a sense that it only appeals to what someone is actually seeing. Looking beyond what is right in front with curiosity is what people instinctively need in order to continue moving forward in theoretical and even problem solving situations.
What does the term “gaze” mean in visual cultural studies?
When studying visual culture, “gaze” is the word for having a strong desire to either understand what they are seeing at a deeper level, or to want to have and keep what they are looking at. In art history, “gaze” has been commonly tied to the sexualization and objectification of women in art works.
What possibilities could be brought to us by making, seeing, and living critically in visual culture?
The possibilities are endless when someone living in a visual culture can make and see critically but some examples are engaging more in feminist culture, accepting people who are different from us as friends and learning from them, or building a sculpture that will force people to question their own existences. If we engaged more in feminist cultures then less women would be sexually assulted because we’d raise our kids to be more respectful. If we made friends with people from different cultural backgrounds there would be less violence and killing in the world. Lastly, if we all questioned our own lives then we could be encouraged to live for something that matters to us and others around us. Yes, the world will never be perfect, but having living critically in a visual culture can allow us to open our minds to new possibilities.
Prepare one question that you generate from reading this article and ask it during our class discussion.
Have you ever seen anything that made you change your mind about something?
Interesting Quotes:
“The insistence on the contingent, subjective, and the constantly reproduced state of meanings in the visual field is equally significant for the institutional or disciplinary location of this work.”
“Much of the practice of intellectual work within the framework of cultural problematics has to do with being able to ask new and alternative questions, rather than reproducing old knowledge by asking old questions.”
“The discussion of spectatorship in (rather than and) sexual and cultural difference, begun with feminist film theory and continued by the critical discourses of minority and emergent cultures, concerns itself with the gaze as desire, which splits spectatorship into the arena of desiring subjects and desired objects.”
Jochen Gerz “The Gift” (2008-2009) https://jochengerz.eu/works/the-gift
Vera Frenkel “Body Missing” (1994-2008) https://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/media.php?NumObjet=69060
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