Art: History: Visual: Culture

'Art: History: Visual: Culture' reflects on the relations of art history and visual culture with essays by leading scholars on eighth-century China, Byzantium, and Renaissance Italy, alongside new interpretations of modernity, anthropology, and post-coloniality in essays considering nineteeth-century Canada, twentieth-century Europe, contemporary South Africa.

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, offering an analytical approach, and 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’, considering the importance of art history’s necessary engagements with art forms beyond and outside the visual and the entanglements with the body and space.

First published as a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Art History, 27:4. September 2004.

Introductory essay: 'Art History Visual Culture' by Deborah Cherry, pp. 479-93

• http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.11...