engleski

Visual Studies in Southeast Europe: Developing the Discipline Through Network

Visual studies hosts theoretical orientations that already recognize interculturality as, on one hand, a fashionable origin that is legitimizing the principal correctness of visual studies and, on the other hand, as the inexhaustible source of challenging themes that are still not used up. Here, naturally, I refer to the concept of visual culture by Nicholas Mirzoeff and, partially, to the principle of studying visuality as an extremely democratically open field, with James Elkins. Both authors have gained world fame by liberating image science from a dominant western gaze, just as at some time past Laura Mulvey liberated the strategies of gaze from what she claimed to be the sexist colonial male gaze. Though, in the good tradition of postcolonial studies, we might have transferred the subject matter of our research from north to south and from west to east, this still doesn’t mean that our analytical methods have been adequately “deconstructed”. There is no sign of equality between, for example, awakened interest in Arab visual culture and some new specific methods for studying the image. If you are interested in something you haven’t been interested in before, it doesn’t imply that you are ready to approach your new object of interest in a significantly different manner. Equally so, the new art history is not “new” because it no more places interest in Caravaggio and Michelangelo as mere style paradigms, but because it doesn’t consider the style issues of those two authors to be crucial to the art history. To phrase it in ”revolutionary” lingo, we cannot become modern by (merely) rejecting the old, but rather by applying a new mode of looking upon the old.

visual studies ; postcolonisalism ; scopic regime ; art history ; ideology

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