Summer 2005 - Cork: Visual Practices across the University at Lewis Glucksman Gallery
CIRCA 112 review Cork: Visual Practices across the University at Lewis Glucksman Gallery  | | Human kidney biopsy, exhibiting signs of membranous glomerulopathy; haematoxylin and eosin stain; from Visual Practices across the University ; courtesy James Elkins | What counts as a picture? What matters in an image? Who studies images? Can scientific images be as rich as art images? These are just some of the questions that this exhibition seeks to answer. However ,'exhibition' here needs to be qualified. This is in effect a 'thesis' show. It is the curator, art historian and academic James Elkins' thesis, which he has elaborated most recently in Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (2003). In addition, the coincidence of this exhibition with a two-day conference on Visual Literacy should not be dismissed. This featured some very prominent academics, namely Barbara Stafford, W.J.T. Mitchell and Jonathan Crary, in what is an emergent field. So it might seem at first sight that the mode of address of this exhibition is something like a seminar paper. The coupling 'visual culture' is used in both relaxed and restrictive interpretations. The speed with which it has been adopted as an umbrella term for a whole series of interdisciplinary activities, areas, methods, domains, is only matched by the generous flexibility of its reach and colonizing vision. So it is worth rehearsing what the general terms of the debate are in what is becoming the fastest-growing academic industry this side of the humanities. For example, Mitchell argues, "...it's useful at the outset to distinguish between visual studies and visual culture as, respectively, the field of study and the object or target of study. Visual studies is the study of visual culture." However, as with all emerging fields, there is no real consensus on what it is that constitutes the object or indeed the field, and this is what makes the debate stimulating and useful. For the purposes of this exhibition, Elkins' contribution and argument is worth rehearsing here. In its interest in exploring visuality, he argues, visual studies challenges the manner in which knowledge production in universities since the Enlightenment has been disjointed and dispersed. He calls visual studies, "the study of visual practices across all boundaries," and it is precisely productive as it "does not know its subjects but finds them through its preoccupations." Elkins also points to the emerging field being stifled by a narrowness of scope in using the stock canonical texts and authors and rarely venturing beyond non-western objects and phenomena. It must include scientists in the expansion and widening of this scope. His argument is that visual studies needs to take science seriously as science as, he says "probable truth, of use in understanding vision and visuality, rather than as social construction." This is elaborated in the exhibition. Elkins has produced a survey (his favoured mode) of the "visual practices across the university" to demonstrate and enact this move. Seeking out a diverse range of University College Cork's departments', programmes', researchers' use of visual images in their work, Elkins has collected and displayed them in the premier art gallery of the city. These include images from Geology, Geography, Zoology, Physics, Dentistry, Law, Linguistics, Speech Therapy, Economics, Art History, Performance Studies, amongst others. The admittance criterion was that the visual material was not used in formal communications or PR but through the actual work and research produced and activities of the department. Comprising of printouts, screengrabs, photographs, video, documents occasionally framed / mounted but mostly presented in the 'rawest' of forms, some literally tacked onto the wall, their possible aestheticisation is offset. The no-budget aesthetic is matched by accompanying texts which offer a context and explain in some cases what it is the viewer is actually looking at, the technologies employed, etc.  | | Marc van Dongenfrom: part of a graphical solution to Lewis Carroll's famous 'Zebra Problem'; from Visual Practices across the University ; courtesy James Elkins | If Elkins wants us to read these images then inevitably we are re-directed to the explanatory texts that in some instances literally surround and enclose these images. However, more than that, he wants us to - rather than appropriate them in some aestheticising gesture (the "isn't that pretty" response) - in effect, move into the discursive space or explanatory frame of their original contexts and think about how images work or are read from whence they came. This is not altogether an easy task. The salutary aspects of this ambition are to denaturalize the habitual visualities and sensory experiences of gallery visits, but not in some Duchampian vanguardism, instead more to alert viewers to the ordinariness of these so-called visual practices from these respective fields. For instance, the use of images that do not submit to some tradition of perspectivalism - e.g. data maps of deep space that read right to left represent space but when read up and down represent velocity - is troubling and a conundrum to your average viewer. The fact that most of the images on display are not the result or end-product of the processes of investigation but a point along the way, which is no more significant than numerical data, demonstrates these images' instrumental or use value which is very different to the way art historians look at images. Indeed, Elkins has a tendency to play the provocateur, adopting the mantle of the skeptics' skeptic. His placement of what might pass for the ordinary fare of the gallery is cordoned off in what he terms the "art ghetto," as if in mock disavowal. This in substance amounts to images of Odysseus on a journal cover (Economics), John Heartfield's graphic and book design (Art History), and the documentation of performance art (Drama and Performance). However, the inclusion of the 'memory jogger' multimedia technologies from the Saville Enquiry into Bloody Sunday next to dental prosthetics and scans of geological substrates runs the risk of a kind formalism that reduces and essentialises, if not in some medium-specific way, to a kind of technical activity (which is probably the point). What saves this from becoming so is the reconstructive and contextual power of the text to offer the viewer the kind of interpretative frame required to read the image 'correctly'. This exhibition amounts to an extended 'show and tell' session which is light on the analytical and occasionally courts precisely the 'wow' factor which it seeks to supercede. It may seem an improper question, but what does it mean to ask these questions in the age of 'shock and awe' media? Just as the virtual reconstruction of Glenfada Park, Derry, in the Bloody Sunday multimedia piece begins to resemble what is now the mise en scène for 'shoot'em up' games - for example, the urban environments of Fallujah or Sadr City - we are reminded of what the late Susan Sontag referred to as "an ethics of seeing." Martin McCabe is a lecturer in the School of Media, DIT
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