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Theatre Journal 53.1 (2001) iv-viii



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Editor's Comment:
Theatre and Visual Culture

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This special issue of Theatre Journal focuses on questions of the visual within theatre and performance studies. It brings together theatre and performance scholars who are looking at visual objects and scholars from other fields who are drawing on theatre history in their accounts of visual representation. While the contributors of this issue carry distinct departmental affiliations--Art History, Theatre, Classics, African American Studies, Performance Studies, English--they share an interest in rethinking disciplinary boundaries through an attention to a broad range of visual objects and experience.

During the last decade, the concept of visual culture has been debated within the field of art history. In increasing numbers, scholars who once trained their attention solely on canonical genres and artistic forms such as painting, sculpture, and architecture have expanded their field of inquiry to include popular images such as advertising, fashion, and news photography. 1 In response, other art historians have sharply criticized visual culture as a "de-skilling" of the discipline. 2 In many ways, these debates concerning the relationship between visual culture and art history recall the debates between theatre studies and performance studies. In each case, a traditional field sought to preserve its own history, methodology, and archive in the face of proposed expansions and alternatives to it.

While the study of visual culture continues to be debated within art historical circles, it now encompasses a broader interdisciplinary framework and includes other area studies such as cinema, television, and media communications. John Berger's now classic 1972 Ways of Seeing introduced a critical vocabulary that helped set the foundation for the current study of visual culture. Berger not only asked us to look at the Western art historical canon in relation to everyday images such as advertising, but also persuasively argued that contemporary culture was increasingly moving away from a textual emphasis to a more visual one. Berger begins Ways of Seeing by emphasizing the priority of the image: "Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak." 3 Since Berger never mentions theatre in his book, it would seem to be a topic outside his scope. Following Berger's lead, recent critics and scholars have typically disregarded the contribution that theatre studies might make to the study of visual culture. Consider that in October's 1996 "Visual Culture Questionnaire," where the journal's editors asked nearly two dozen scholars from ten different academic fields to respond to a series of questions pertaining to visual culture, not one theatre or performance scholar was included in the roundtable. In fact, the editors, in defining the parameters of visual culture, write the following:

[Visual culture] is both a partial description of a social world mediated by commodity images and visual technologies, and an academic rubric for interdisciplinary convergences among art history, film theory, media analysis, and cultural studies. 4

Why the absence of theatre and performance studies within the discourse and debates about visual culture?

Perhaps we might look to a foundational text of theatre studies to address the absence of theatre studies within recent debates over visual culture. In his Poetics, Aristotle argues [End Page iv] against the visual, or what he calls "spectacle." Rather than relying on the visual to arouse pity and fear, Aristotle prefers the poet who is able to effect the spectator without resorting to such external means:

The effect of fear and pity may be created by spectacle; but it may also be created by the very structure of the events, and this method has priority and is the way of a better poet. For the plot should be so constructed that even without seeing the play, anyone who merely hears the events unfold will shudder and feel pity as a result of what is happening--which is precisely what one would experience in listening to the plot of Oedipus. To procure this effect by means of spectacle is less artistic in that it calls for external apparatus, while those who produce through spectacle something that is not terrifying...

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