Invited Commentary: Alternate Views on the Visual Turn
Elizabeth Otto, Department of Visual Studies, the State University of
New York at Buffalo

Interdisciplinary thinking is one of the richest elements of academic
scholarship in recent years; but such interdisciplinarity often
involves hard work and--particularly for scholars already established
in a field--some risk. It was therefore a great pleasure to read the
thoughtful and varied essays on history's turn to the visual from
distinguished historians David Crew, Lee Palmer Wandel and Paul
Betts. As an art historian currently collaborating with colleagues to
build an interdisciplinary department of visual studies, I was
particularly interested to read such considered and knowledgeable
engagements with the matter of the visual in history. In my
commentary, I will start out addressing the individual essays and
then move on to broader questions they collectively raise for
historically-informed engagement with the visual field.

David Crew's essay, "What Can We Learn from a Visual Turn?
Photography, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust," engages recent
literature on photography--a medium with a fraught history for its
teetering art/documentary status and its often false promises of
revealing truth--and the heartbreaking terrain of Nazi and Holocaust
histories. The issues Crew addresses include what was visible to
ordinary Germans; evidence of viewers' or photographers' denial,
collaboration, and resistance; and authorship, fiction and presumed
fact. The texts he reviews and weaves together use photography to go
to the heart of how we conceive of and interpret Germany's darkest
historical periods. While Crew points out that historians in Germany
have often ignored visual and even photographic evidence, we must
also remember that others in Germany were among the first to take
photography seriously as a form of documentation and art. This is
evidenced, for example, through the tremendous range of photographic
journals, books and exhibitions of the Weimar Republic, some of them
directly connected with particular political parties.[1] The German
engagement with photography in the early twentieth-century would have
far-reaching consequences. For it was in the cultural context of
Germany that young Alfred Stieglitz became a photographer; he
subsequently returned to the US to facilitate a revolution in
photographic practices and exhibitions, fostering the careers of an
entire generation of photographers. As Crew suggests, there is still
much to be understood about "the ways in which photographs have been
used by Germans in the past." This essay does much to help us
understand the uses and limits of this powerful medium during
historical events from the 1930s through the 1960s.

In "The Visual Turn in Early Modern German History," Lee Palmer
Wandel traces the engagement with early modern central-European
visual culture back to the start of the 1980s. Her essay hints at a
level of intellectual engagement between historians and art
historians which may be lacking among scholars of the modern period.
Wandel also looks to the future of the visual turn by identifying key
sites of inquiry which allow for the investigation of new fields of
knowledge, such as emblem books, the meditative practices which
informed Jesuit arts' work, maps, categories of "wonder" and the
influence of religion (Protestantism vs. Catholicism) on artistic
production.

Paul Betts's "Some Reflections on the ‘Visual Turn'" specifically
problematizes the "logocentrism" of the discipline of history, which
has hobbled historians by teaching them to focus exclusively on
textual evidence. He outlines aspects of what the visual turn could
offer historians in the future. Work with visual evidence might help
reveal how power is visualized and disseminated, the ways in which
images are implicated in the social construction of truth and the
ramifications of self-presentation and representation in private and
public realms.

Even as these essays illuminate essential aspects of the meeting of
history and the visual field, they also raise further questions. For
example, how does the recent broadening of historical inquiry through
new and complex discourses around women's and gender history or
colonial history parallel a growing discussion of the need to
similarly rethink limitations on objects and archives from which
historians form their inquiries and draw their conclusions? Wandel's
essay points to this most starkly, when she asserts that it was
precisely in publications which dealt with objects of little
aesthetic or monetary value to people of the twentieth century
(limewood sculptures and woodblock prints) that the engagement with
"visual culture" in early modern central Europe began. By focusing on
ephemera and neglected objects, we may be able to access new
historical frameworks. How might the investigation of the visual
experience of street cultures shape our understanding of particular
historical events? Does looking at such practices as embroidery,
magic lantern shows or performance art give us new leverage to
understand cultural contexts other than those which have dominated
historical narratives? How might examining the critiques of visual
cultures of masculinity mounted by such scholars as gay and lesbian
art historian and theorist Whitney Davis, gender theorist Harry Brod
or modernist art historian Thomas Crow, or how might revisiting the
work of Klaus Theweleit allow us to question received notions of
masculinity and power in history?[2] Betts mentions another such area
of historical inquiry: material artifacts and private imagery which
could potentially enable further analysis of the colonial experience.
These scholars' work demonstrates that it is essential that we engage
not only a broader range of historical objects and sources but also
the categories of race and gender so often passively or actively
thematized in visual content.

In one way or another, all of these essays point to questions about
the training of current and future generations of historians in the
visual field. For example, Betts writes of the perils of the "just
add images and stir" approach. Indeed, the notion that images are
primarily mimetic must be questioned from the outset of any inquiry
into visual evidence, and we must even remain skeptical of
photographs, as Crew's essay shows. A serious investigation of visual
experience must rest on the notion that any image always conveys
multiple levels of meaning. Such an investigation might therefore
engage a particular work or object through its semiotics, allegorical
significance and visual traditions while situating it in its
historical context.[3]

By its near absence, these essays also beg the question of one of the
central institutions for scholars of the visual: the museum. The
forms of knowledge transmission enabled by exhibition culture are
currently undergoing rigorous study and critique. Scholars such as
Svetlana Alpers, Tony Bennett and Douglas Crimp have theorized the
museum as not merely an institution of enlightenment, but as a
producer of knowledge and of ways of seeing.[4] Recent scholars have
made crucial interventions into the structures of historically
situated power--colonial, gendered or classed--which have been
displayed and buttressed by the museum experience, exhibitions' modes
of display and the narratives they create.[5] Still other scholars
have questioned impulses to discredit museums just at the moment that
these hallowed halls have begun to open up their collections to
permit a questioning of their earlier historical narratives which
were based in dominating powers (e.g. masculine or colonial) and to
include aesthetic objects other than those made or pilfered by white
men. Rather than attempting to do away with museums, some theorists
of museum studies have proposed that we think about the ways in which
the form of focused visual thinking engendered by museum sight might
be brought to bear in critical engagement with a broad array of
visual objects and historical experiences.

In conclusion, I would like to commend H-German for hosting this
forum which touches on the very formation of historical inquiries. I
would also point out that, in so doing, the editors are continuing
important German intellectual traditions. As Betts states, nineteenth-
century Germany provided fertile ground for a flowering in the new
field of cultural history. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in
Germany are also seen by art historians as key moments of origin for
art history as a discipline. Johann J. Winckelmann is credited with
first using the terms "art" and "history" together in written text in
the mid seventeen hundreds.[6] Aloïs Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin and Aby
Warburg--all influenced by G.W.F. Hegel--are often cited as having
founded art history as an academic discipline in the later nineteenth
century and the start of the twentieth.[7] I can only hope that the
cross-pollenization evinced in these early art historians' writings
and furthered by the more recent English-language reception of this
scholarship will serve as an example of the benefits of continued
dialogue and collaboration among scholars from a range of fields in
our own time. And this range of fields is important, for it allows us
to bring a wide variety of strengths and viewpoints to discussions of
the visual.

To respond to a question posed in this forum's editorial
introduction, we should consider visual culture as a historical field
of inquiry in its own right, but there is no need to see it in
isolation from other aspects of historiography or as cut off from
disciplines such as art history, which has been engaging the
historical and the visual for well over a century; neither should it
be seen as removed from film or media studies, which, although
younger disciplines, have broken new ground in the theorizing of
visual experience, time-based perception and visual imagination.
Betts kindly expresses regret at a lost chance for dialogue offered
by art historians in the 1970s. Let us be sure that, this time, we
take this chance for multi-disciplinary collaboration.

Notes

[1]. See, for example, Joachim Büthe, et al, eds. _Der Arbeiter-
Fotograf: Dokumente und Beiträge zur Arbeiterfotografie, 1926-1932_
(Cologne: Prometh Verlag, 1977); and Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold.
_Foto-auge, oeil et photo, Photo-Eye_, 1929 (Tübingen: Ernst Wasmut,
1973). For examples of influential exhibitions, we might consider the
_Film und Foto_ exhibition of 1929 in Stuttgart; for more on this see
Ute Eskildsen and Jan-Christopher Horak, _Film und Foto der zwanziger
Jahre: Eine Betrachtung der Internationalen Werkbundausstellung "Film
und Foto" 1929_ (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1979). Another
exhibition, one of the first to focus on Pictorialist photography,
has come to form the basis of Berlin's Kunstbibliothek's excellent
photographic collection.

[2]. Harry Brod, "Masculinity as Masquerade," _The Masculine
Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation_, Andrew Perchuk and
Helaine Posner, eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 13-20;
Whitney Davis, from "Founding the Closet: Sexuality and the Creation
of Art History" (1992), _Art and Its Histories: A Reader_, Steve
Edwards, ed. (New Haven: Yale, 1999), pp. 178-186; and Thomas Crow,
"Observations on Style and History in French Painting of the Male
Nude, 1785-1794," _Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations_, ed.
Norma Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (Hanover: University
Press of New England, 1994), pp. 141-67. Klaus Theweleit, _Male
Fantasies. Women, Floods, Bodies, History_, vol. 1, Stephen Conway,
trans. and _Male Fantasies. Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White
Terror_, vol. 2,. Erica Carter and Chris Turner, trans. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 1989).

[3]. We might take as a case in point one of modernism's most
celebrated works: Picasso's _Demoiselles d'Avignon_. In his
discussion of this icon of modern art, Adrian Rifkin has pointed out
that we must completely rethink the viewing context for such a work
so steeped in problematic histories. "...[I]f a painting like
Picasso's _Demoiselles d'Avignon_ (1907) produces its meanings only
in the way in which it constructs a relation with colonized African
cultures (in its use of masks); through a fear of prostitution and
venereal disease as part of a dominant discourse on women (its
setting in a brothel); and the emergence of a provincial (Spanish)
artist in Parisian cultural life, then, in which museum should it be
put? Assuming an ideal world, in which such museums exist, should it
be in the museum of colonial oppression and liberation, the museum of
gender formation, or the museum of social climbing? [Adrian Rifkin,
"Art's Histories," _The New Art History_, ed. A.L. Rees and Frances
Borzello (London: Camden Press, 1986) 159]. See also Patricia
Leighten, "Colonialism, _l'art nègre_, and Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon," _Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon_, ed. Christopher
Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 77-103;
Leighten, _Reordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897-1914_
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Anna Chave, "New
Encounters with _Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Gender, Race, and the
Origins of Cubism," _Race-ing Art History_, ed. Kymberly Pinder (New
York, Routledge), pp. 261-287.

[4]. Svetlana Alpers, "The Museum as a Way of Seeing," _Exhibiting
Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display_, ed. Ivan Karp
and Steven Lavine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1991), pp. 25-32.
There is an extensive recent bibliography in the blossoming discourse
of Museum Studies. Essential works include: Tony Bennett, _The Birth
of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics_ (New York: Routledge,
1995); Douglas Crimp, _On the Museum's Ruins_ (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1993); Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Ferguson and Sandy Nairne, eds.,
_Thinking about Exhibitions_ (New York; Routledge, 1996); Sharon
MacDonald, ed., _The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture_
(New York: Routledge, 1998).

[5]. In "Differencing, Feminism and the Canon," Griselda Pollock
tells of her discovery in the early 1970s of several significant
works by women artists in the National Gallery in London; they were
kept in the basement and, it seemed, never shown (essay reprinted in
Edwards, ed., pp. 161-166). See also Ellen Fernandez-Sacco,
"Museums," _The Companion to Gender Studies_ (London: Blackwell,
2005), pp. 484-495.

[6]. The text is Johann Joachim Winckelmann, _The History of Ancient
Art_, first published in German in 1764. See Vernon Hyde Minor,
"Winkelmann and Art History," in _Art History's History_ (Englewood
Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1994), pp. 89-93.

[7]. Jason Gaiger, "The Aesthetics of Kant and Hegel," _A Companion
to Art Theory_, Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde, eds. (London:
Blackwell, 2002) 136. Michael Podro, _The Critical Historians of Art_
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

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