Marquard Smith

The Curriculum, the Museum, and the Mind

Decolonizing

Visual Culture Studies presents 13 engaging and detailed interviews with some of the most influential intellectuals working today on the objects, subjects, media and environments of visual culture. Exploring historical and theoretical questions of vision, the visual and visuality, this collection reveals the provocative insights of these thinkers as they have contributed in exhilarating ways to disturbing the parameters of more traditional areas of study across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In so doing they have key roles in establishing Visual Culture Studies as a significant field of inquiry. Each interview draws out the interests and commitments of the interviewee to critically interrogate the past, present and future possibilities of Visual Culture Studies and visual culture itself. The discussions concentrate on three broad areas of deliberation: The intellectual and institutional status of Visual Culture Studies. The histories, genealogies and archaeologies of visual culture and its study. The diverse ways in which the experiences of vision, and the visual, can be articulated and mobilized to political, aesthetic and ethical ends. This book demonstrates the intellectual significance of Visual Culture Studies, and the ongoing importance of the study of the visual. Marquard Smith is Reader in Visual and Material Culture at Kingston University, London, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Visual Culture.

Interviews with Key Thinkers

Visual Culture Studies

Joanne Morra

Visual Culture: Spaces of visual culture

Visual Culture: What is visual culture studies?

Visual Culture Studies presents 13 engaging and detailed interviews with some of the most influential intellectuals working today on the objects, subjects, media, and environments of visual culture. Exploring historical and theoretical questions of vision, the visual, and visuality, this collection reveals the provocative insights of these thinkers, as they have contributed in exhilarating ways to disturbing the parameters of more traditional areas of study across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In so doing they have key roles in establishing visual culture studies as a significant field of inquiry. Each interview draws out the interests and commitments of the interviewee to critically interrogate the past, present, and future possibilities of visual culture studies and visual culture itself.

Since the 19th century, dolls have served as toys but also as objects of obsession, love, and lust. That century witnessed the emergence of the term "heterosexual" and of modern concepts of fetishism, perversity, and animism. Their convergence, and the demands of a growing consumer society resulted in a proliferation of waxworks, shop-window dummies, and customized love dolls, which also began to appear in art. Oskar Kokoschka commissioned a life-sized doll of his former lover Alma Mahler; Hans Bellmer crafted poupées; and Marcel Duchamp fabricated a nude figure in his environmental tableau Etant donnés. The Erotic Doll is the first book to explore men's complex relationships with such inanimate forms from historical, theoretical, and phenomenological perspectives. Challenging our commonsense grasp of the relations between persons and things, Marquard Smith examines these erotically charged human figures by interweaving art history, visual culture, gender, and sexuality studies with the medical humanities, offering startling insights into heterosexual masculinity and its discontents.

A Modern Fetish

The Erotic Doll

Visual Culture: Experiences in visual culture

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Michael Ann Holly

Obsession, Archive, Encounter

What is Research in the Visual Arts?

Where does the body end? Exploring the material and metaphorical borderline between flesh and its accompanying technologies.

From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future

The Prosthetic Impulse

Marquard Smith

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