Art: History: Visual: Culture

'Art: History: Visual: Culture' is a peer-reviewed collection that intervenes in what have been heated debates about the state and future directions of the disciplines of art history and visual studies. The introduction provides a detailed history of the two disciplines in the past thirty years, setting out the intersections between them, and the consequent impact of these relations for both fields of study. Rather than the more usual summary of existing literatures, it provides an analytical approach, interrogating the discursive frameworks of both fields. It critiques the latter’s concerns with ‘visual essentialism’, origins and definitions, deconstructing the terms ‘visual’ and ‘culture’, and considering the importance of art history’s necessary engagements with art forms beyond and outside the visual. The introduction considers the connections between both art history and visual studies with the nature of visuality, their entanglements with the bodily, space and emplacement, their investments in studies of looking and the gaze, and with the inter-relations between the senses. Central to the new approach posed by the collection, the introductory essay investigates how visual studies, more usually the preserve of the modern and contemporary, can throw new light on earlier periods and cultures, such as eighth-century China, Byzantium, and Renaissance Italy, while offering new interpretations of modernity through the attention of what comes into visuality, and an engagement with theories of race, ethnicity and post-coloniality. The intellectual enterprise of the volume as a whole was not narrowly focused on the more familiar confrontation between disciplines, but on innovatively broadening the field of study as a whole through cross-cultural comparison; the collection departed significantly from the usual western focus. The introduction addressed the key themes across this cultural and historical diversity, which were identified to the authors by the editor, and the essays were edited to comply with this remit.

Deborah Cherry: Current Research

I am Associate Director of TrAIN, the research centre for the practice and study of transnational art, identity and nation. I am also a co-director of Critical Curating, a research network and project established between Central Saint Martins, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the University of Sussex which is investigating the nature of curating both contemporary art and historical art and design, and the place of curating in research.

My research interests are at present focused on a study of contemporary art and the senses, relations between the senses, the prominence given to and turns away from the visual, and the implications of post-colonial, transnational and diaspora studies.

I am the editor of Art History, the Journal of the Association of Art Historians, a Membre Titulaire of the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art, and a panel member of panel 2 of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.