a technology of evidence production.
Seeing “through” the eye, then, has become my pedagogical and research method for the critical practice of visual culture studies. I mean seeing through in a double sense: that of seeing past or beyond what Guy Debord called the “spectacle” of illusions generated by capital, and that of seeing by means of a critique of the frameworks and templates that impose themselves on our perceptions. My most recent projects have involved questions of race and mental illness, so my DuBois lectures at Harvard in 2010 were entitled “Seeing through Race” rather than simply “Seeing Race.” And my current work is on a book entitled Seeing through Madness, which aims both to see beyond the medical framework and to deploy the concept of madness as a critical optic for understanding forms of collective folly and irrationality.
My next project will be a pedagogical and exhibition strategy entitled “Metapictures,” an outgrowth of an essay that I wrote back in the nineties. The exhibition has already taken place, at the Overseas Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT) in Beijing, where we assembled over two hundred images that reflect on the nature of the image in eleven thematic “clouds”: pictures about picturing, about vision, about the multistability of images, about the relation of images to language, about their place in history as what Benjamin called “dialectical images,” and about their tendency to come alive in the phenomenon I call the “biopicture.” This exhibition employed four different display strategies, inspired by Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne and by André Malraux’s Le Musée Imaginaire: the same images were hung from the ceiling, strewn on the floor, mounted on the wall, and presented in an interactive format on a screen.
Q: Do you think there is a tension between the current institutionalization of the field of visual culture studies and the renegade, interdisciplinary, and chaotic energies that were so central to its foundation? Can or should visual culture studies still serve as a platform for critiquing traditional disciplinary institutions in the current academic climate? Given the influence visual culture studies has had on curatorial practices, museums, and other art institutions, in what ways can visual culture studies still serve as a platform for critique in these spaces?
A: I am sure there is a tension of the sort you describe, and I hope it will continue to be productive. Institutionalization has an inevitable normalizing effect, and I hope that the anarchistic tendencies of visual culture will not be overwhelmed by programs, requirements, and bureaucracy. At the same time, I feel that the contemporary moment in the humanities is one that renders many of the institutions of academic research and teaching quite precarious. If by “traditional disciplinary institutions” you mean art history, I have never felt that visual studies was the enemy of old‐fashioned art history. On the contrary, I have always viewed it as a necessary supplement to the study of works of visual art, if a sometimes “dangerous supplement” (to use Derrida’s terms). Dangerous only because it invites secondary reflection on what it means to see something as a work of art in the first place, rather than taking for granted a prescribed routine. In that sense, I think of visual culture as often allied with the artistic producers, the practitioners who create objects and experiences for us, just as much as with the historians and curators who frame its consumption. My own work has led me deeper into the foundations of art history through its more adventurous ambitions; for example, the project of an “image science” or general iconology would track the migrations of both verbal and visual metaphors across culture. Seeing through Madness contains a crucial chapter on the Mnemosyne Bilderatlas that shows how Aby Warburg’s grand project of a universal atlas of human emotions (the Pathosformel, “pathos formula”) was somewhere between a symptom and a therapeutic practice for managing his own mental suffering. Warburg’s atlas was capable of embracing Botticelli’s nymphs, Mussolini’s coronation, and the launching of the first zeppelin. What does it mean to want to “see it all,” to capture totalities with visual technologies? Georges Didi‐Huberman has suggested that Warburg’s effort to “set art history in motion” might have unleashed “something dangerous, something I would call symptomatic.”
To create a knowledge‐montage was … to reject the matrices of intelligibility. To break through the age‐old guard rails. This movement[,] with its new ‘allure’ of knowledge, created the possibility of vertigo … The image is not a closed field of knowledge; it is a whirling, centrifugal field. It is not a “field of knowledge” like any other. (Didi‐Huberman 2004, 12–13)
I suppose, therefore, that my message to visual culture studies in its relation to traditional disciplinary institutions is this: let’s stick together and learn from each other, and repel the barbarians and bean counters invading the upper reaches of academia. The heady days when visual culture was deemed worthy of denunciation by the editors of October magazine are long gone. We should be grateful that they took us seriously enough to attack us and helped in this way to launch us as a mildly insurrectionary movement.
Q: Visual culture studies has long sought to connect the work of the academy to activism and public scholarship outside the classroom or a university setting. How do you see the future of visual culture studies as a form of political action?
A: I am all for visual culture studies serving as a source of ideas and tactics for the critical exposure of the spectacle. But I don’t see it as uniquely positioned as a form of political action—not any more than other disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. We need historians, philosophers, literary scholars, art critics, anthropologists, game theorists and designers, political scientists, psychologists, queer theorists, disability studies, sound studies, editors, curators, environmentalists, and outsider artists to mobilize around the oldest objective of the humanities: to stay human while we are finding out what that could mean for the survival of our species—and many others as well.
References
1 Blake, William. 1982. “Descriptions of the Last Judgment.” In The Complete Poetry of William Blake, edited by David Erdman, 552–4. New York: Doubleday.
2 Didi‐Huberman, Georges. 2004. “Knowledge: Movement (The Man Who Spoke to Butterflies).” Foreword to Michaud, Philippe‐Alain, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, translated by Sophie Hawkes, 7–19. New York: Zone Books.
3 Forensic Architecture. n.d. Eyal Weizman > Forensic Architecture. https://forensic‐architecture.org/about/team/member/eyal‐weizman.
4 Goodman, Nelson. 1968. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs‐Merrill.
5 Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
6 Mitchell, W. J. T. 2005. “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction.” In W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
7 Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
8 Wilden, Anthony. 1972. System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange. London: Tavistock Publications.
Chapter 4 A Conversation
with Douglas Crimp
The following is excerpted from a conversation conducted on February 16, 2019 between Douglas Crimp and two of this volume’s editors, Joan Saab and Catherine Zuromskis. Our discussion drew from a set of general questions the editors had devised to reflect on the status of visual studies today, and from our responses to Crimp’s recent book Before Pictures (Crimp 2016). We also include passages from some of Crimp’s most influential works of scholarship in the field of visual studies that informed our conversation. Editorial brackets [] mark material supplemented by the volume editors both in the discussion and in the excerpts.
Q: Visual culture studies has long sought to connect the work