Visual Culture

Visual Culture has accessibility to “everyone”.  I embrace this term wholeheartedly knowing the “elitist” attitudes that are dismissed conceptually.  Visual culture speaks to the student in inner city through graffiti and the hip hop culture.  It resonates throughout other students in manga and anime.  This all encompassing term for those things that demand response from our visual sense breaks down barriers that formerly were erected through art history. 

Participating in graduate art history seminars for me were challenging and intimidating!  Wordsmiths with astounding vocabularies presented art historical lectures employing dual projectors.  These scholarly pursuits felt so elitist that some students became disenfranchised and left the program.  

The wave of Postmodernist Theory seems to have expanded our understanding of the Visual Culture.  No longer do I have to show traditional artforms like painting, drawing, and pottery.  I feel liberated to discuss installations, skateboard art, collaborative community murals, and  design in everyday life items.    Now students can understand the scope and breadth of how art touches our lives continually and its necessity for human existence.

I recently returned from a trip to the Southwestern United States and was thrilled to see the pictographs and petroglyphs on the rocks near dwellings of ancient Native Americans.  My imagination recreated some aspects from their lives of continual struggle to gather and grow food, search for water supplies, and provide shelter and clothing for their families.  How were the pictographs painted on the rock faces valued?  What compelled many of the Native Americans to use a sharp rock to carve petroglyphs?  I found very little existing evidence that they showed concern for Science, Technology, English and Math (STEM). 

Why isn’t this prehistoric need to create and communicate visually apparent to more people?  I challenge anyone reading this to enlighten as many other people as you can about this relevant issue. 

And by the way, thank you to Postmodernism for making art more relevant and accessible! Now …..GO Spread the WORD………………

-Dr. Judith Haynes