Dealing with the Visual

Dealing with the Visual: Art History, Aesthetics and Visual Culture. Edited by CAROLINE VAN ECK and EDWARD WINTERS. Ashgate. 2005. pp. xvi + 304. 84 b & w figures. £65.00 (hbk). THE IDENTIFICATION of ‘the visual’ as a field of study follows hard on the heels of ‘the political’ and ‘the ethical’. Depending on one's perspective, the grammatical awkwardness of such terms signals either a forced attempt to give substance and weight to work that lacks the necessary rigour or a welcome departure from traditional approaches. For its proponents, reference to ‘the visual’ provides a way of overcoming the deep-rooted prejudices and assumptions that are built into the older disciplinary designations. In wresting the wider field of visual culture from its subsumption under art history, they have sought to circumvent the privileging of the fine arts over popular culture and to open up new areas of enquiry. It is perhaps inevitable that the readjustment of disciplinary boundaries that were established in the nineteenth century should put pressure on language. Those who have sought to win intellectual and institutional authority for emergent disciplines such as cultural studies have insisted on the need to adopt a less prejudiced vocabulary. However, as the editors of this valuable collection of essays point out, the central paradox of the study of visual culture (as it is currently practiced) is its lack of attention to the specifically visual. Although its roots are still relatively shallow, they are tightly wrapped around twentieth-century models of analysis that are derived from general linguistics, semiotics, and structuralism. By shifting attention to the wider signifying systems within which works of art are made and received, practitioners of visual studies have tended to overlook the specific aesthetic properties of individual works of art and to treat them instead as social and historical documents that are of no greater intrinsic value or interest than other cultural products such as advertising, fashion, and soap operas

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