Revision sheet: Visual Culture Test Notes

📋 Course Outline

1. Pose and Portrait Photography
2. Family Photography and Familyness
3. Disinterestedness and Viewer Participation
4. Jauss and Aesthetic Experience
5. Culturalism and Post-Colonialism
6. Hybridity, Mimicry and Third Space
7. San Rock Art and Spirituality
8. Street Art and Urban Intervention
9. Vhils and José Parlá

📖 1. Pose and Portrait Photography

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Pose : The bodily process through which people orient themselves toward the camera and transform themselves in advance into an image.

📝 Essential Points

★ Must-know

📌 Barthes distinguishes the motionless, objectified photographic image from the light, divided and dispersed self, arguing that “myself” never completely overlaps with “my image.”

• According to Barthes, formal portrait photography presents four simultaneous versions of a person:
  • the person they think they are
  • the person they want others to think they are
  • the person the photographer thinks they are
  • and the person the photographer uses to exhibit artistic skill

Further detail

📌 A photograph of a person cannot contain the self as a fully visible object because the four versions presented in formal portraiture can never completely overlap.

💡 Memory Hook

Body becomes image

📖 2. Family Photography and Familyness

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Familyness : The relationship produced through the active bodily and photographic enactment of a desired family unit.

📝 Essential Points

★ Must-know

🔄 Process — Family members pose and interact for the camera to visualize, maintain and memorialize their relationships as a shared unit.

Further detail

📌 Family cannot be understood as a fixed entity based only on blood kinship because families may extend beyond kinship and be dispersed across the world.

• Family photography commonly selects ideal, harmonious and simplified moments of success and joy while excluding non-conformers, estrangements and distress.

💡 Memory Hook

Photos produce family

📖 3. Disinterestedness and Viewer Participation

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Disinterestedness : An aesthetic response that contemplates an artwork for its own sake, apart from practical interests, the artist’s background and external purposes.

📝 Essential Points

★ Must-know

📌 Traditional disinterestedness separates aesthetic experience from technical, cognitive, moral, religious and everyday practical experience.

📌 Viewer participation challenges disinterestedness by requiring viewers to connect an artwork’s meaning with events applicable to their general existence and to imagine possible meanings.

Further detail

📌 The theory of disinterestedness requires the artwork to be separated from its everyday environment so that it can be regarded freely without distraction.

• Immanuel Kant lived from 1724 to 1804 and described aesthetic contemplation as considering the object apart from all interest.

💡 Memory Hook

From distance to participation

📖 4. Jauss and Aesthetic Experience

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Poiesis : The productive function of aesthetic experience, focused on making and potentially involving the viewer as a co-creator.
• Aesthesis : The interpretive function of aesthetic experience through which perception is renewed or changed.
• Catharsis : Changes the viewer’s beliefs and liberates the viewer’s mind, potentially enabling acceptance of a norm of action.

📝 Essential Points

★ Must-know

• Robert Jauss identifies poiesis, aesthesis and catharsis as three basic categories of the aesthetic tradition.

Further detail

🔄 Process — Poiesis, aesthesis and catharsis are interconnected functions that can follow one another rather than separate experiences.

💡 Memory Hook

Poiesis–aesthesis–catharsis

📖 5. Culturalism and Post-Colonialism

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Culturalism : Emphasizes subjective lived experience and focuses on the making of and response to culture.
• Post-colonialism : Critically examines cultures and societies shaped by colonization, including cultural hybridization and the construction of the other.
• Othering : The process by which colonial discourse produces its subjects as others.

📝 Essential Points

📌 Post-postmodern artists engage with othering subjects to produce cultural hybrids that can empower marginalized people, deconstruct boundaries and reclaim or reimagine cultural space.

💡 Memory Hook

Culture is constructed

📖 6. Hybridity, Mimicry and Third Space

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Hybridity : The emergence of a new identity from the entwinement of elements associated with colonizer and colonized cultures.
• Third space : Bhabha’s third space is an in-between, interrogative site of hybridity, translation and negotiation where new cultural meanings emerge and established categories are questioned.
• Mimicry : In post-colonial theory, mimicry is the exaggerated copying of dominant ideas, language, manners and culture in a way that differs from simple imitation.
• Mimesis : A historically changing practice that can involve emulation, mimicry, dissimulation, doubling, theatricality, realism, identification, correspondence, depiction, verisimilitude and resemblance.

📝 Essential Points

📌 Derrida argues that mimesis can produce influence, appropriation, change, repetition or a new interpretation of existing worlds.

💡 Memory Hook

Between cultures, new meanings

📖 7. San Rock Art and Spirituality

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Therianthropic figures : Combine human and animal forms, commonly showing human bodies with antelope heads and sometimes hooves, and have been interpreted as shamans partially transformed into animals.

📝 Essential Points

★ Must-know

📌 San rock-art panels should be interpreted as evolving wholes whose images contact, manifest and influence the spiritual realm rather than as isolated pictures made solely by individual shamans.

• Nasal bleeding in San rock art indicates a physiological reaction to trance and places figures and their companions in the domain of supernatural contact and experience.

🔄 Process — San trance dancers harness supernatural potency through dancing and songs accompanied rhythmically by clapping women, whose figures signify the activation of that potency.

Further detail

📌 San rock art maintains a balance between individual and society and between the material world and the spirit realm.

• Red lines accompanied by white dots in San rock-art panels most likely represent threads of light seen by shamans in trance and facilitating access to the spirit realm.

💡 Memory Hook

Image connects two realms

📖 8. Street Art and Urban Intervention

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Détournement : The hijacking, rerouting, displacement or misappropriation of received culture for other ends.

📝 Essential Points

★ Must-know

📌 Graffiti primarily refers to writing or scratching that leaves a mark, whereas street art is a broader practice rooted in imagery, messages and public engagement.

📌 Street art treats the city as a living historical palimpsest in which each new work responds to previous works and invites public discourse, commentary and further interventions.

🔄 Process — Street art transforms publicly unrecognized urban space into a territory of visual engagement by bringing institutional art arguments into the streets.

Further detail

• By 2000, many street artists understood their work as an art practice combining mixed methods and hybrid genres both on and off the street.

• Leaving a visual mark in public urban space is usually technically illegal and is often performed as nonviolent civil disobedience against property and commercial controls over visibility.

• Street-art practice commonly combines spray-can graphics, appropriated popular imagery, advertising, photographic and digital sources, stencil printing, direct wall painting, montage, collage, scale shifts and serial repetition.

💡 Memory Hook

The city becomes canvas

📖 9. Vhils and José Parlá

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Palimpsest : A manuscript or writing material on which later writing has been superimposed over effaced earlier writing.

📝 Essential Points

★ Must-know

📌 Vhils treats urban walls as material records that absorb social and historical change, using creative destruction to expose meanings beneath superficial layers.

• Vhils, also known as Alexandre Farto, uses a ground-breaking bas-relief carving technique to remove layers from walls and buildings.

• José Parlá creates wall murals and multilayered panels and canvases as visual memory devices using palimpsests, urban mark-making and material history.

Further detail

📌 Parlá morphs graffiti into calligraphy and directly confronts Abstract Expressionist action painting with the decay of streets and the life of city walls.

🔄 Process — Vhils uses carving, stencil painting, metal etching, pyrotechnic explosions and video-to-sculptural installations in his practice.

💡 Memory Hook

Excavate and layer the city

📊 Synthesis Tables

Aesthetic Response Models

Concept	Main focus	Effect on viewer
Disinterestedness	Artwork contemplated apart from practical interest	Independent aesthetic pleasure
Poiesis	Making and productive experience	Viewer may become co-creator
Aesthesis	Renewal and change of perception	Viewer encounters another worldview
Catharsis	Change in belief and liberation	Viewer may accept a norm of action

⚠️ Common Pitfalls & Confusions

1. Pose is not simply a natural position; it begins when the person becomes aware of the camera.
2. Family photography produces familyness rather than merely reflecting a pre-existing family.
3. Disinterestedness does not mean a lack of attention; it means attention separated from practical concerns.
4. Poiesis concerns production, whereas aesthesis concerns renewed perception.
5. Post-colonialism concerns more than the period after formal imperial rule ended.
6. Hybridity is not simply the preservation of two separate, unchanged cultures.
7. The blood is not merely a realistic injury unrelated to trance.