Explainers: Visual/material culture

Visual/material culture, or awareness of visual/material culture, is one of the top five highest-ranked focuses of art classes in Melody Milbrandt’s “Visual Art Curricula, Art Teacher Goals, and Instructional Time: Findings from an International Survey” (2015), and was one of the three most emphasized approaches in Joy G. Bertling and Tara C. Moore’s “The U.S. K–12 Art Education Curricular Landscape: A Nationwide Survey” (2021). 

Speaking from personal experience, visual culture, semiotics, and the sublime have been challenging subjects, which is why I wanted to read Nicholas Mirzoeff’s An Introduction to Visual Culture. It has been a good read, with Mirzoeff providing engaging touchpoints for readers to enter into the discussion, amid the dense language and theory of the field. 

I classify An Introduction to Visual Culture as a foundational work, but because it has been a fairly dense reading experience, and because Mirzoeff has offered several interesting frameworks in the first twenty pages of the book, I thought to post about a small section of this book in the explainers tag. 

In his introduction, Mirzoeff discusses Martin J. Powers’ idea of “a fractal network.” Mirzoeff goes on to advocate for people to “[recast] visual culture as fractal, rather than linear” (1999, p. 25). Despite its connection to chaos theory and mathematics, Mirzoeff’s fractal framework has been one of the more accessible ideas so far. Comparing visual culture to the Mandelbrot set, he explains that visualizing visual culture as a fractal, which produces new patterns the closer you look, reflects the fact that visual culture is made of plural realities, not just the white, Western one that has been the only reality that is represented in some academic setting. 

Expect a full post on An Introduction to Visual Culture in the foundational works tag soon, but in the meantime, enjoy this video of someone zooming in on the Mandelbrot set for sixteen minutes. 

Bertling, Joy G., and Tara C. Moore. “The U.S. K–12 Art Education Curricular Landscape: A Nationwide Survey.” Studies in Art Education, vol. 62, no. 1, Jan. 2021, pp. 23–46. 

Milbrandt, Melody K., et al. “Visual Art Curricula, Art Teacher Goals, and Instructional Time: Findings from an International Survey.” International Journal of Education through Art, vol. 11, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 137–56. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1386/eta.11.1.137_1.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture, 1999, pp. 24-25.