Project.
Archival Sources
1 Lawrence Alloway Papers. 1935–2003 (2003.M.46). Special Collections of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles California. http://archives2.getty.edu:8082/xtf/view?docId=ead/2003.M.46/2003.M.46.xml;chunk.id=controlaccess_1;brand=default.
2 Leo Steinberg Research Papers. 1945–1996 (930046). Special Collections of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California.
3 Leo Steinberg Research Papers. c. 1941–2011. 2012 and 2013 Additions (ADDS) to the Collection (63 boxes, T 1–T 63). Special Collections of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California.
Notes
1 1 The Leo Steinberg Research Papers are located in the Special Collections of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. There is a Finding Aid for the first part of the collection, while the second part (the so‐called ADDS) remains unprocessed at the time of this writing. I want to highlight the folder containing sundry notes devoted to the “Flatbed Picture Plane” and located in the Subject/Topics Files A‐H (ADDS Box T 30). In addition to Rauschenberg, Steinberg points to other flatbed picture plane examples by Daniel Spoerri, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol. While Steinberg was never a big Warhol fan, he nonetheless saw him as part of the flatbed camp. However, one detects a note of disappointment on the part of the great Leonardo scholar. “Warhol too. His 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962… & his Mona Lisa 1963 consisting of 30 bad B/W reproductions…”
2 2 Krauss’s writerly rhetoric reads as follows in the original context: “More than half a century later, a similar opposition between vertical and horizontal fields would be elaborated by Leo Steinberg, similar in that here too, pictorial representation with its alliance with the space around us and thus with something Steinberg abbreviated as ‘nature,’ was contrasted with a field of written signs, or what he analogized to printers’ forms, or flatbeds in which lines of type cast in lead are set, their necessary horizontality forecasting the reader’s orientation to the printed page” (Bois and Krauss 1997, 94; for more context, see Krauss’s entire piece, 93–103).
3 3 As one of my first forays into visual culture in the late 1990s, I engaged in a project entitled “Visual Culture in the Dorm Room” with the help of my student assistant Danny Klainbaum, while teaching at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. We documented the posters and photos on the walls of campus dorm residents in Wren Hall and I interpreted their meaning and significance along the long front of visual culture, whether the posters were of the reggae legend Bob Marley, of prints of impressionist painters, or of pop music idols of the nineties.
4 4 See ADDS Box T 28 in the Steinberg Research Papers for his list of “Leologisms.” The very term is, of course, a “meta‐neologism” designed to categorize the words invented and used by Steinberg (on a first‐name basis). Steinberg believed that the Leologism “postmodernism” (introduced in the “Flatbed Picture Plane” section of “Other Criteria”) was the most important of these inventions; and he joked that it should be included as an epitaph on his tombstone. Steinberg also refers to Douglas Crimp, who credits him with “one of the first applications of the term postmodernism” (Crimp 1995, 47) in an art critical context.
5 5 While it may sound flippant, I would like to consider a pop musical reference and to take it seriously when interpreting Steinberg’s comment that Rauschenberg’s combines “let the world in.” One recalls the Fifth Dimension’s smash hit medley, in 1969, of “Aquarius” combined with “Let the Sunshine In” (originally the last verse of a track entitled “The Flesh Failures”). This Grammy Award‐winning record collaged together two elements from the Broadway hit and counterculture musical Hair (1967). This scenario raises the possibility that this soulful and catchy tune was the unconscious source of Steinberg’s phrasing when he composed “Other Criteria” and when he engaged with Rauschenberg’s work between 1968 and 1972.
Chapter 3 An Interview
with W. J. T. Mitchell
The editors of this volume posed a series of questions to W. J. T. Mitchell asking him to reflect on the past, present, and future stakes of visual studies. The questions (marked with the opener “Q”) and Mitchell’s responses (marked with the opener “A”) were composed in late 2018 and early 2019.
Q: The genesis of visual culture studies was historically and conceptually grounded in postmodern theory and aesthetics. At a time when many scholars are marking the end of postmodernism as a set of historical conditions and practices, can you speak to the continued urgency of visual culture studies as an aesthetic, social, and political project? Which concepts or principles of the field have you found most consistently useful or valuable over time?
A: I put very little stock in locating the foundations of visual culture, historical or conceptual, in descriptors like postmodernism, modernism, or other period concepts. The foundations of visual culture are much deeper, arising, as Nicholas Mirzoeff shows, with Carlyle in the nineteenth century; or they go back, via Foucault, to Bentham’s panopticon, or to the baroque period’s “frenzy of the visible” in painting and court spectacle, or to those mythic moments when thousand‐eyed Argus sees all the world, or God looks upon his creation and finds it good.
So I am down with Bruno Latour, who was right to say that we have never been modern and therefore we cannot have been postmodern. I want to resist these labels, because they tend to short‐circuit thinking about the visual and our understanding of it, producing a reductive “branding” of thought rather than a powerful theoretical reduction. In particular, “post‐” has never struck me as an especially useful prefix for designating any period or movement, whether the postmodern, the post‐human, the postcolonial, the post‐theoretical—or Post Toasties, for that matter. The “post‐” element is a placeholder that registers a sense of belatedness and loss; it is the kind of thing we say when we don’t have anything particularly incisive or descriptive to say about a time. That is why I have preferred a much more precise and descriptive term for our time: I describe it as the era of “biocybernetics,” a convergence of the sciences of life and computation epitomized by the icons of the double helix of DNA and the schematic model of the Turing machine or binary computer. Biocybernetics names our period, its technical possibilities and dangers, in the same kind of terms and with the same precision that Walter Benjamin employs when he invokes the mechanical or technical reproduction epitomized by the assembly line, photography, and cinema, along with mass culture, as the formative modes of production in his time, the 1920s and 1930s. The avatar of this mode of reproduction was the robot; for us, it is the cyborg (Mitchell 2005).
Of course, there would be other ways of describing the period of the 1990s, when visual culture came into existence as an academic field, uneasily located between film studies and art history. One could call it the era of neoliberalism, deregulated economies, and globalization. Biocybernetics privileges the technological. Perhaps the only place where the term “postmodernism” had any grip was October’s notorious “Visual Culture Questionnaire” of 1996, which did visual studies the favor of denouncing it as a dangerous deviation from art history. But that hardly seems foundational.
Q: As you suggest, visual culture in the present moment is inseparable from the many digital technologies and platforms
