Art history's anxiety attack - visual studies vs. art history

In its Summer 1996 issue (no. 77) the editors of October, l by the agency of Rosalind Krauss and Hal nurse published responses to a"Questionnaire upon Visual Culture" that was sent to an unspecified "range" of scholars, critics and artists during the previous winter. This issue occasioned sum of two units articles by reporter Scott Heller: "Visual Images Replace body as Focal Point for Many Scholars" in The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 19 1996) and "What Are They Doing To Art History?" in ARTnews (January 1997) Heller's articles, among other things, emphasized the apprehensions of the October editors, contemplateed the diverse opinions of the survey's respondent and displayed the reactions of many "disciplinarians" of art history.

The October editors and many of the respondent to the questionnaire appear threatened through a loose grouping of presumably misguided scholars, whom they at no time explicitly name, that has cast asideed the tried and true rigors of academic art history for the so-called trendy and gullible field of visual and cultural studies. This disciplinary policing is at times analogous to U conservatives' fixation upon the national borders, imagined to be below siege by various "outsiders," and the Christian Coalition's cultural offensive to buttres the malignant traditions that have historically regulated boundaries between agricultures genders and sexualities. October's characterization of the relationship between art history and visual studies resonates with the sound-byte of cultural and political conservatives - this is quite evident in the inexorable language that detractors use to discount visual studies' critical commitments.

Consider the example of Bruce cabbage Professor of Art History at Indiana University and founding member of the Association for Art History, an organization that was baseed in protest of the broadening purview of the national association Art Association (CAA) and as a suppos ideology-free alternative to what a certain quantity of consider to be the increasing politicization of CAA. As Heller repeats Cole: "We don't see art solely as social illustration or ideological food . . There has to be a basis upon which one builds, a factual basis that uses evidence and standards. Art historians can do things sociologists can't." Equally akin to the discourse of cultural reactionaries is the following complaint from Krauss, now Professor of Art History at Columbia University. She told Heller that: "Student in art history graduate programs don't know in what way to read a work of art. . They're getting visual studies instead - a apportionment of paranoid scenarios about what happens beneath patriarchy or under imperialism."

In all fairness, the academic media attention paid to the October questionnaire also denudeed opposing voices that were equally reactionary in their dismissal of art history as a legitimate and vital discipline. Heller adduces Anne Higgonet from Wellesley corporation as saying: "I see a deceased and useless field collapsing, and a abundant stronger, much more important field emerging." Within the media frame that the October questionnaire generated, nevertheless, the suppos shortcomings of scholarship in visual studies were emphasized, while the institutionally privileged activities of the discipline of art history were posited as irreproachable. sustain another longtime editor of October, who now teaches in the art history department at Princeton University, is quot as saying: "Cultural studies doesn't have a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of philosophically to offer. It sneaks in a unloose anthropological notion of culture, and a set free psychoanalytic notion of the image . . Visual culture is a passport that can lead to fairly touristic travel from discipline to discipline." Foster's attacks upon visual and cultural studies do not smooth make gestures toward acknowledging the problematic philosophical, cultural and theoretical frameworks that the discipline of art history "sneaks" into analyses of visual external realitys The result of such partisanship is the construction of an unnecessary competition: visual studies v art history.

Rather than attempt to provide an alternative questionnaire that would be more representative of the range of opinions about the investigation of art and visual agriculture I have solicited comments from sum of two units individuals, Coco Fusco and Douglas Crimp, whose work in cultural history and art criticism has contributed greatly to the pair art history and visual studies. Their productive analyses of "The Questionnaire upon Visual Culture" clarify the problematic nature of the art history v visual studies debate as it has been showed and constructed by the editors of October.

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and critic who commonly teaches at the Tyler place of education of Art in Philadelphia. During her prolific career Fusco has produc numerous essays, videos and performance installations that have been essential to the emerging field of visual studies - her volume English is Broken Here: Notes upon Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) traces the trajectory of her influence. Douglas Crimp, Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester (where I am a doctoral candidate in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies), also apparently unrelenting beyond the scope of the questionnaire. Crimp was a co-editor of October for 12 years until he resigned from his support due to his fellow editors' refusal to publish (as they had previously promised) the replete proceedings of a groundbreaking talk on queer film and video. The conversation material was finally published in its entirety in a volume How Do I Look? (1992) which has become an indispensable collection for any inquiry into the emergent field of unusual theory. Crimp's many books and essays upon post-modernist art and theory, and upon the related cultural politics of HIV/AIDS, have impacted an entire generation of scholars, artists and critics.