James Elkins

What does it mean to be visually literate? Does it mean different things in the arts and the sciences? In the West, in Asia, or in developing nations? If we all need to become "visually literate," what does that mean in practical terms? The essays gathered here examine a host of issues surrounding "the visual," exploring national and regional ideas of visuality and charting out new territories of visual literacy that lie far beyond art history, such as law and chemistry. With an afterword by Christopher Crouch, this groundbreaking collection brings together the work of major art and visual studies scholars and critics to explore what impact the new concept of "visual literacy" will have on the traditional field of art history. Contributors: Matthias Bruhn, Vera Dünkel, Jonathan Crary, Christopher Crouch, Peter Dallow, James Elkins, Henrik Enquist, W.J.T. Mitchell, Richard K. Sherwin, Susan Shifrin, Jon Simons, Barbara Maria Stafford, William Washabaugh.

I hope this book will inspire every reader to stop and consider things that are...so clearly meaningless that they never seemed worth a second thought.... Grass, the night sky, a postage stamp, a crack in the sidewalk, a shoulder. Ordinary objects of everyday life. But when we look at them--really look at them--what do we see? In the tradition of John Berger's bestselling Ways of Seeing,James Elkins'sHow to Use Your Eyesinvites us to look at--and maybe to see for first time--the world around us, with breathtaking results. Here are the common artifacts of life, often misunderstood and largely ignored, brought into striking focus. A butterfly's wing pattern encodes its identity. A cloudless sky yields a precise sequence of colors at sunset. A bridge reveals the relationship of a population with its landscape. With the discerning eye of a painter and the zeal of a detective, Elkins also explores complicated things like mandalas,the periodic table, or a hieroglyph, remaking the world into a treasure box of observations--eccentric, ordinary, marvelous. How to Use Your Eyesis a thrilling read evocative of the work of Diane Ackerman and Stephen Jay Gould. It will transform your view of nature and the mind.

As visual art becomes more international, ways of writing about art become more uniform. This essay proposes that two disciplines concerned with contemporary visual art, art criticism and art theory, are on the verge of being effectively homogeneous around the world. They share concepts, artists, artworks, institutions, and bibliographic references. For comparison, I consider two other fields that may also be increasingly uniform: studio art instruction and the novel. The last, in particular, is the subject of a large literature; critics and historians debate whether contemporary global novels are becoming more self-similar if not more predictable. The literature on the novel allows me to conclude that it is likely writing on art is following the same tendency.

James Elkins has shaped the discussion about how we—as artists, as art historians, or as outsiders—view art. He has not only revolutionized our thinking about the purpose of teaching art, but has also blazed trails in creating a means of communication between scientists, artists, and humanities scholars. In Six Stories from the End of Representation , Elkins weaves stories about recent images from painting, photography, physics, astrophysics, and microscopy. These images, regardless of origin, all fail as representations: they are blurry, dark, pixellated, or otherwise unclear. In these opaque images, Elkins finds an opportunity to create stories that speak simultaneously to artists and to scientists, and to open both those fields to those of us who have little purchase in either. Regarding each image through the lens of the discipline that produced it, Elkins simultaneously affirms the unique structure of each way of viewing the world and brings those views together into a vibrant conversation

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Theoretical Remarks on Combined Creative and Scholarly PhD Degrees in the Visual ArtsJames Elkins (bio)The PhD in visual arts is inescapable: it is on the horizon. In just a few years, there will be a number of such programs in the United States, and if the trend mirrors the expansion of MFAs after the mid-1960s, then in a few decades the PhD will be the consensus "terminal" degree for artists. Given that, it is pressing to consider how the degree might be theorized. In Australia and the United Kingdom, where the degrees already exist, their growth has been dictated in large measure by the existing educational structures and by the inevitable quest for funding. (In the United Kingdom, university departments get a disproportionate increase in their funding if they offer doctorate programs, and the same pattern occurs in state schools in America.) As a result, existing programs simply grow by exonomic necessity or opportunity, and so far they have not been well theorized apart from models already in use elsewhere in the university. Private universities and art schools in the United States are therefore well positioned to rethink the conceptual foundations of combined studio and scholarly PhDs, because they are largely freed of the temptation of increased funding and the obligation to fit the new programs into existing structures. In this essay, I propose eight configurations that such degrees might take. I close with three general observations about the future of such programs.Three pieces of background are necessary as introduction. First, the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, where I teach, is currently running an four-year undergraduate major in visual studies. Soon we will be expanding it into an MA and, in a few years, a PhD. At the BA level our program already has a large studio component. For that reason we have been looking at programs that offer comparable combinations of creative and scholarly work at the PhD level. Our own program, we hope, will be a place [End Page 22] where the possibilities of other programs can be kept open and continuously questioned.Second, this essay was originally a reader's report for a creative-arts PhD thesis called "Beyond the Surface: The Contemporary Experience of the Italian Renaissance," written by Jo-Anne Duggan for the University of Technology, Sydney. In fall 2003 Duggan was a candidate for the "DCA," Doctorate of Creative Arts." She is a photographer, and her special interest is photographing inside museums; her thesis explores the history and theory of that practice. The report I wrote for her was the basis of this essay, because I found that her thesis is a mixture of what I think are the eight principal possibilities for combining PhD-level scholarship and creative work.Third, this essay is the outgrowth of several colloquia that have been held at the College Art Association and at the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design/National Association of Schools of Art and Design (AICAD/NASAD) conferences (organizations of art school administrators). These ad hoc forums have been, so far, the only places where the new programs have been debated. I hope this essay can contribute to a more detailed discussion.Here are the eight configurations. The first five are (or will be) common, and the last two are rare but preferable.1. The thesis is art history, intended to inform the art practice. The most obvious relation between scholarship and creative work is that the former informs the latter. The artist positions her scholarship so that it supports her art practice. Within this possibility, perhaps the most common option would be to write an art historical thesis, covering the history of practices that lead up to the writer's own practice. Among the advantages would be that, in theory, the candidate would be able to go on to teach in a department of art history. In terms of her practice, the idea would be that historical knowledge strengthens art practice: a debatable point, if only because so many artists have done so well by ignoring or distorting the relevant history. In Canberra in summer 2003, I met a recent PhD whose thesis was on...

In a wide-ranging argument moving from Sumerian demons to Lucian Freud, from Syriac prayer books to John Carpenter's film The Thing, this book explores the ways the body has been represented through time. A response to the vertiginous increase in writings on bodily representations, it attempts to form a single coherent account of the possible forms of representation of the body. This work brings together concerns, images, and concepts from a wide range of perspectives: art history and criticism, the history and philosophy of medicine, the history of race, phenomenological and post-phenomenological thought, studies of feminism and pornography, and the new interest in visual studies. Yet it is less a philosopher's look at history or a historian's foray into philosophy than a practical and critical look at the current constellation of art practices. Above all, it is intended to be of immediate use in the conceptualization and production of visual art and its history.

How do psychoanalytic, semiotic, deconstructive, and other interpretations represent works of art? What can they see, and what must they miss? In _Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts_, Elkins suggests that the philosophic problems posed by these questions are essentially insuperable because philosophy makes demands of visual artifacts that they can answer only by becoming mirror images of philosophic discourse. Elkins argues that writing is what art historians produce, and, whether such writing is a transparent vehicle for the transmission of facts or an embattled forum for the rehearsal of institutional relations and constructions of history, it is an expressive medium, with the capacity for emotion and reflection. Therefore, it needs to be taken seriously for its own sake: it is the testament of art history and of individual historians, and it is only weakened and slighted by versions of history that imagine it either as uncontrolled dissemination or objective discovery and reporting. Elkins's investigation is not a prescription for opening art history to new influences or for focusing it on particular problems. It is a plea for circumspection in the entire endeavor of trying to force images into words, and in the curious vocation of writing the history of art

Alchemy has always had its ferocious defenders, and a small minority of artists remain interested in alchemical meanings and substances. In this essay I will suggest two reasons why alchemy is marginal to current visual art, and two more reasons why alchemical thinking remains absolutely central. Briefly: alchemy is irrelevant because (1) it is has been a minority interest from early modernism to the present, and therefore (2) it is outside the principal conversations about modernism and postmodernism; but alchemy is central because (3) it provides the best language to explain the fascination of oil paint, and (4) it is one of the best models for understanding the contemporary aversion to full logical or rational sense

Certain artworks appear to have multiple meanings that are also contradictory. In some instances they have attracted so much attention that they are effectively out of the reach of individual monographs. These artworks are monstrous.One reason paintings may become monstrous is that they make unexpected use of ambiguation. Modern and postmodern works of all sorts are understood to be potentially ambiguous ab ovo, but earlier--Renaissance and Baroque--works were constrained to declare relatively stable primary meanings. An older work may have many "layers" of meaning, but it is normally expected to declare its principal message or subject matter, together with its allegiance to one idea or theme. Contemporary historical interpretation expects those stable starting meanings, even as it relishes the exfoliating ambiguities that may come afterward. So when the interpretive apparatus of art history runs up against premodern paintings that intentionally work against unambiguous primary meanings, it can generate a potentially incoherent literature.Some of the most monstrous pictures are Leonardo's Last Supper, Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, Watteau's fête galante paintings, Botticelli's Primavera, and Giorgione's Tempesta. The interpretive trichotomy of "Subject," "Not-Subject," and "Anti-Subject" is employed to talk about the ambiguity and polysemy of these monstrous works.This interpretive trichotomy helps order unruly accounts of the most complex artworks. In so doing it illuminates not only some monstrous pictures but a general area of historical interpretation: how to speak of the meaning of a created work in a way that does justice to its complexity and internal tensions.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Theoretical Remarks on Combined Creative and Scholarly PhD Degrees in the Visual ArtsJames Elkins (bio)The PhD in visual arts is inescapable: it is on the horizon. In just a few years, there will be a number of such programs in the United States, and if the trend mirrors the expansion of MFAs after the mid-1960s, then in a few decades the PhD will be the consensus "terminal" degree for artists. Given that, it is pressing to consider how the degree might be theorized. In Australia and the United Kingdom, where the degrees already exist, their growth has been dictated in large measure by the existing educational structures and by the inevitable quest for funding. (In the United Kingdom, university departments get a disproportionate increase in their funding if they offer doctorate programs, and the same pattern occurs in state schools in America.) As a result, existing programs simply grow by exonomic necessity or opportunity, and so far they have not been well theorized apart from models already in use elsewhere in the university. Private universities and art schools in the United States are therefore well positioned to rethink the conceptual foundations of combined studio and scholarly PhDs, because they are largely freed of the temptation of increased funding and the obligation to fit the new programs into existing structures. In this essay, I propose eight configurations that such degrees might take. I close with three general observations about the future of such programs.Three pieces of background are necessary as introduction. First, the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, where I teach, is currently running an four-year undergraduate major in visual studies. Soon we will be expanding it into an MA and, in a few years, a PhD. At the BA level our program already has a large studio component. For that reason we have been looking at programs that offer comparable combinations of creative and scholarly work at the PhD level. Our own program, we hope, will be a place [End Page 22] where the possibilities of other programs can be kept open and continuously questioned.Second, this essay was originally a reader's report for a creative-arts PhD thesis called "Beyond the Surface: The Contemporary Experience of the Italian Renaissance," written by Jo-Anne Duggan for the University of Technology, Sydney. In fall 2003 Duggan was a candidate for the "DCA," Doctorate of Creative Arts." She is a photographer, and her special interest is photographing inside museums; her thesis explores the history and theory of that practice. The report I wrote for her was the basis of this essay, because I found that her thesis is a mixture of what I think are the eight principal possibilities for combining PhD-level scholarship and creative work.Third, this essay is the outgrowth of several colloquia that have been held at the College Art Association and at the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design/National Association of Schools of Art and Design (AICAD/NASAD) conferences (organizations of art school administrators). These ad hoc forums have been, so far, the only places where the new programs have been debated. I hope this essay can contribute to a more detailed discussion.Here are the eight configurations. The first five are (or will be) common, and the last two are rare but preferable.1. The thesis is art history, intended to inform the art practice. The most obvious relation between scholarship and creative work is that the former informs the latter. The artist positions her scholarship so that it supports her art practice. Within this possibility, perhaps the most common option would be to write an art historical thesis, covering the history of practices that lead up to the writer's own practice. Among the advantages would be that, in theory, the candidate would be able to go on to teach in a department of art history. In terms of her practice, the idea would be that historical knowledge strengthens art practice: a debatable point, if only because so many artists have done so well by ignoring or distorting the relevant history. In Canberra in summer 2003, I met a recent PhD whose thesis was on...