Art: History: Visual: Culture

This innovative collection of essays offers exciting new research and thoughtful reflection on the subject of visual culture and its relationship to art history.

• Brings together innovative scholarship by major scholars.
  
• Engages with cross-cultural questions, asking if attention to visual culture is a western preoccupation.
  
• Draws on a wide range of cultures, locations and historical periods, from the eighth century China to contemporary South Africa, from Byzantium to early modern and modern Europe.
  
• Covers a wealth of visual forms and media including photography, film, painting, sculpture, drawing, installation and the decorative arts

1. Art History Visual Culture: Deborah Cherry.

2. Oneiric Horizons and Dissolving Bodies: Buddhist Cave Shrine as Mirror Hall: Eugene Wang.

3. Senses and Sensibility in Byzantium: Liz James.

4. Gendering the Period Eye: Deschi de Parto and Renaissance Visual Culture: Adrian WB Randolph.

5. Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century British Portaiture: Angela H. Rosenthal.

6. Making Sense out of the Visual: Aboriginal Presentations and Representations in Nineteenth-Century Canad: Ruth B Phillips.

7. Framing the Colony: Houses of Algeria Photographed: Zeynep Çelik.

8. ‘Modest Recording Instruments’: Science, Surrealism and Visuality: David Lomas.

9. Art Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Criticism, Art History and Contemporary Art: Peter Osborne.

10. History as the Main Complaint: William Kentridge and the Making of Post-Apartheid South Africa: Jessica Dubow and Ruth Rosengarten.

Notes on Contributors.

Index.

Colour plate section falls between pages 90 and 91.

Deborah Cherry is Editor of Art History and Professor of the History of Art at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. Her publications include The Edwardian Era (1987), Treatise on the Sublime (1990), Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (1993), Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture (2000), and Speak English (2002). She is currently completing Living with the Dead: Reinventing the Victorians in the Twentieth Century and working on a study of contemporary installation art. Visual culture and its relationship to art history have been the subject of vigorous debate in recent years. This major new collection of essays brings together innovative scholarship on the subject by leading scholars.

Drawing on a wide range of cultures, locations and historical periods, from eighth-century China to present-day South Africa, from Byzantium to early modern and modern Europe, the contributors consider theories of visuality, looking and the gaze. They explore the ways in which art history exceeds the visual, offering more than a study of images, and they make connections between vision and space, between vision and the body, and between vision, aesthetics and the senses.

Offering exciting research and thoughtful reflection on one of the most pressing concerns of contemporary scholarship, this collection has been acclaimed as ‘essential reading for anyone in visual studies’.