Mieke Bal

Visual essentialism and the object of visual culture

The double question whether visual culture studies is a discipline or an interdisciplinary movement, and which methods are most suited to practice in this field, can only be addressed by way of the object. This article probes the difficulty of defining or delimiting the object of study without the reassuring and widespread visual essentialism that, in the end, can only be tautological.

Telling, showing, showing off: a walking tour

Outlines how New York City sets an image, using nature as a sign. Its very layout demonstrates the importance of a balanced intercourse between background and figure, between plan and details, between chaos and organization. Central Park, the domesticated preserve of nature-within-culture; Exhibits; Floor plans; Demonstrations; Conclusions.

Working with Concepts

Interdisciplinarity in the humanities should seek its heuristic and methodological basis in concepts rather than in methods. Concepts are the tools of intersubjectivity: They facilitate discussion on the basis of a common language. But concepts are not fixed. They travel – between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods and between geographically dispersed academic communities. Between disciplines, their meaning, reach and operational value differ. These processes of differing need to be assessed before, during and after each ‘trip’. All of these forms of travel render concepts flexible. It is this changeability that becomes part of their usefulness for a new methodology that is neither stultifying and rigid nor arbitrary or ‘sloppy’. This paper aims to explore the value of such unsettled concepts for interdisciplinary work in the Humanities.

The point of narratology

By the accidents of life, I started out in the literary profession as a narratologist, having French as my foreign language and structuralism as my training. By another accident, I started in Israel. As one of the young, unknown invitees of the Synopsis 2 Conference where an unusual number of established stars were mixed with a good number of beginners like myself, with the most fortunate result, I optimistically brought a formalist, quite technical paper written in French to a conference where most people tended to speak English and some to suspect formalism. My feeling awkwardly out of place was to be combatted by actively participating in the debates, and that this was possible, that within half a day I felt excited and encouraged while having completely revised my views of narratology, was due to the exceptional intellectual and humane qualities of this conference. I have been to a large number of conferences since, but just as childhood bliss is irretrievably lost in later life, so did I never feel the same deep satisfaction again. What was so special about this conference that it deserves memorialization? First of all, it was intellectually open and yet focused enough: a wide variety of topics and attitudes toward narratology and its assumptions made for lively and serious debates. In retrospect, the conference really gave an overview of narratology as a field, neither taking it for granted nor rejecting it a priori. It also marked a turning-point in the discipline. Looking at what the field is today, it seems hard to tell if the conference was at the vanguard or the core of the development; if it announced what was going to happen or demonstrated what was

The Commitment to Look

This article touches on and questions the object of visual studies, word and image relations, historicity, art under visual studies and politics. Exploring in particular the place of politics in visual studies, it outlines some of the ways in which visual studies as a field of inquiry all too often plays lip-service to politics, as it does to history and, more pressingly, as it does to ethics. Resisting an uncritical demand that ethics be introduced and come to occupy central stage in visual studies, the article goes on to interrogate the complex and nuanced ways in which an ethics of vision might still, and necessarily, come to the fore. Attentive to the dangers of such a foregrounding, it nonetheless proposes how such an ethics of vision offers a blueprint for the commitment that lies at the heart of visual studies and thereby can enable the field to make a difference.

Editorial Acts of Translation

journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com] Copyright

Signs in Painting

Part of a symposium on art history and its theories. The writer discusses art history and its theories from the perspective of a professional theorist who is regularly attacked for his work on art. He examines the reasons for the discrepancy between the considerable impact of theories in the pedagogical practice of art history and the absence of such an impact in the institution. He argues that the discrepancy has to do with a confusion between paradigm and discipline and that resistance to theory is a paradigmatic position disguised as disciplinary allegiance. He points out that as a theorist, primarily semiotic, he does belong to, or participates in, the paradigm to which many art historians also belong, a paradigm that adherents to the alternative paradigm, which has a firm hold on art history as an institution, do not recognize as valid.

Memory Acts: Performing Subjectivity

Three kinds of acts are set up together in this: performance, performativity, and memory. Performance – playing a role, dancing, singing, or executing a piece of music – is unthinkable without memory. How can you play a part, a role, without memorizing the part or score, and rehearsing the gestures, mimic, and diction that fit the role, that make it available for understanding? Even improvisation requires memorization of the structure that sustains it. Performativity, on the other hand, is the unique occurrence of an act in the here and now. In speech-act theory, it is the moment when known words detach themselves from their sleep in dictionaries and from people’s linguistic competence to be launched as weapons or seductions, exercising their weight, striking force, and seduction in the present only, between singular subjects. Here, memory would only stand in the way of the success of the performing, to be swatted away like a fly. Both terms have gained great currency in cultural studies. The need to keep distinguishing between them seems obvious.

Losing It: Politics of the Other (Medium)

Finnish cinematographer Eija-Liisa Ahtila makes video installations of a particularly griping intensity, staging a contact zone for encounters with otherness. They also deploy other media, such as literature, and other genres, such as documentary, along with other states of being, such as murder, maidenhood, and madness. This multiple otherness, I argue here, is crucial for the understanding of the way this artist uses a medium that is ostensibly visual to make environments that are political through encompassing engagements with otherness as other media. In the reception of her work, this heterogeneity is largely ignored in favour of interpretations of the installations anchored in a single medium – video installation – and a political individualism. This is most clear in the reception of The House, Ahtila’s best-known work. This is consistently interpreted as a representation of schizophrenia. That such negligence of a sophisticated heterogeneity has political consequences becomes obvious once we see that the ‘madness’ of the character in that piece is the symptom of her alterity, and is staged through a discrepancy between image and sound – the schizophrenia of the medium. In this essay I briefly revisit three of Ahtila’s best-known pieces in relation to an ‘other’ discourse: literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. In each, both the other media and the otherness of people take very different forms. In each case, though, the alterities of medium and subject matter coincide to reinforce the point that is basic to all of Ahtila’s work: the encounter with otherness on a non-exclusionary basis, as, also, an encounter with the otherness without ourselves. In the last section I also bring in two works by other artists, to make a case for a political potential inherent in the art form of video installation.

Response: Ariel Dorfman's quest for responsibility

Mieke Bal comments on Ariel Dorfmans play Picassos Closet. The thrust of Picassos Closet is to ethically unsettle the audience via the “out-of the closet” revelations about Picassos cowardice against and complicity with the Nazi regime. The multiplication of story lines, of identities, and of actors underlines different ethical stances, staged, exposed, but not judged. This does not reflect a refusal to commit or a free-floating indifference, but a direct rejection of moralistic judgment and its resulting moral superiority. Instead, and along with the refusal of facile identification, this multiplication, when added to the singular case, seeks to use affect as a medium rather than and a means to manipulate emotions. Picassos Closet resituates the political in art in the self-conscious artifice of the theatrical.