In its Summer 1996 issue (no. 77), the journal October published the results of a four-part “Questionnaire on Visual Culture” that the editors had sent to a range of scholars, artists, and critics the previous winter. Outwardly hostile to the then-emerging field of visual culture, the survey’s editors made no secret of their disdain for the type of work being done in the name of visual studies, which they suggested “is helping in its own modest, academic way, to produce subjects for the next stage of globalized capital” (October 77 (1996): 25). The October questionnaire was a defining moment in the history of visual culture studies. For Margaret Dikovitskaya, it is the defining moment. In her book, Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn, Dikovitskaya takes as her project to provide “a new perspective on the interdisciplinary nature of visual studies through its interrogation of how art history and cultural studies intersect as they are practiced and taught in academic communities in the United States” (2).

Visual Culture is an odd book. Comprised of an introduction, two chapters, and a long appendix consisting of the author’s interviews with seventeen notable scholars in the field, the text takes the October questionnaire as both starting and end point. “In order to understand the interplay between art history, cultural studies, and visual studies,” Dikovitskaya writes, “it is crucial to examine a range of theoretical standpoints” (3). Yet her book falls short of these goals. Relying on informal interviews with a handful of the individuals who responded to the October survey as well as with “faculty members from a number of American Universities” (3), her sample is insular and limited in its scope. Readers of October are a small and self-selected group of theoretically sophisticated, left-leaning intellectuals. Dikovitskaya misses this crucial point, and her analysis suffers for the oversight. For example, early in the introduction, she seems surprised that the author(s) of the questionnaire rely “on a Marxist metanarrative [that] avoids analysis of his or her own status and assumptions in the current context—whether of capitalism or of ‘art’” (18). A bit of context may have situated the questionnaire more fully within its own politics. Founded in 1976 by Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, the journal takes its name from the 1927 Sergei Eisenstein film October: Ten Days that Shook the World, a modernist masterpiece of agitprop commemorating the ten-year anniversary of the 1917 Soviet October Revolution; thus, it is not surprising that a Marxist metanarrative is one of the dominant tones of the journal and an ideological standpoint for much of its readership of fellow travelers.

The October questionnaire provides an excellent starting point for exploring the role of cultural criticism in the age of global capital. Unfortunately, Dikovitskaya’s book does not build upon this critique but merely reacts to it. Nevertheless, her study does provide some interesting information on the early history of visual culture within the academy. Her first chapter, “Theoretical Frameworks,” offers a useful genealogy of the field and its objects. Quoting liberally from the interviews included in the appendix, she takes great effort to define her terms from a variety of angles and viewpoints. The second chapter, entitled “Institutions and Pedagogy,” focuses on early undergraduate courses and graduate programs in visual culture at the University of Chicago, University of Rochester, State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the University of California at Irvine.¹ The second half of the book consists entirely of interviews without any formal analysis. Dikovitskaya justifies her organizational choices by linking them back to the ancient Greeks. “Historically,” she writes, “the use of conversation—the basis of the interview—as a systematic tool for the creation of knowledge can be traced to Thucydides and Socrates. Today’s social research emphasizes local context and the linguistic construction of a perspectival reality where knowledge is validated through practice. In this framework, the interview is considered a construction site of knowledge” (3).

I think most would agree with Dikovitskaya that, “Approaching research questions from different angles and bringing together a range of views has the potential to generate explanations that capture the complexity of theories and debates rather than other research procedures” (3). Unfortunately, much of her analysis relies on juxtaposition rather than interrogation, and most of her questions are myopically focused on the relationship between art history and visual culture despite the repeated insistence by many of her interviewees that visual culture scholarship reaches far beyond the disciplinary limits of art history. In her discussion with Thomas Conley, for example, he cites anthropology, in particular visual anthropology, architecture and architectural theory, geography, and cartography as compelling examples of “places where the area of study of visual culture is being created through the accommodations of various colleagues from different departments and institutions who are starting to collaborate with one another, so that a new kind of inquiry is being brought to life along the interstices of the old official disciplines.” Dikovitskaya replies, “I was not aware of what was happening in geography and visual anthropology. That is very interesting” (127). Yet she never explores these threads. Likewise, W. J. T. Mitchell explains in his interview with the author that he circulates the October questionnaire to his classes “so the students gain an awareness of visual culture as an academic formulation with a certain history over the last ten years.” But he warns, “I don’t want them to be naïve in the sense of not knowing that there are many people working on visual culture from different angles: via cultural studies and anthropology, gender studies, critical race theory—there are many different fields involved” (251). Again, Dikovitskay does not bring these fields into critical focus in her study. Nevertheless, despite its narrow definition of visual culture, the book provides a useful origin narrative for those interested in the history of the field, which in the years since Dikovitskaya began researching her project has grown at a rapid pace.

Over the last two decades visual culture studies successfully has expanded the range of visual media, forms, and spaces open for critical study by interrogating the formal and social distinctions between “ high” and “low” and emphasizing the historical and cultural particularities of vision and visuality. In the almost twenty years since it emerged as an official academic field of inquiry, visual culture has become fully institutionalized. There are now at least fifteen graduate programs in the field and numerous undergraduate offerings both nationally and internationally. In the past three years the Mellon Foundation has funded a number of initiatives on the subject including: a Humanities Corridor linking Syracuse University, Cornell University, and the University of Rochester; an initiative to bridge the Sciences and Humanities at Duke University; a Center for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society; and a Scholarly Communications Planning grant to establish a Visual Culture Network to promote collaborative work among artists, scholars, and critics to investigate the interface between visual culture studies and new media. The American Studies Association and the College Art Association both have active Visual Culture Caucuses, and every year countless publications and conference sessions with “Visual Culture” in their titles appear.

The institutional success of visual culture’s once transgressive approach to interdisciplinary work raises interesting questions about the relationships between culture and politics as well as between the academy and the marketplace. What happens when the academic margins become the center? Can one still assume renegade status with a Mellon grant? How central is outsider identity to the practice of visual culture studies? While an explicit politics is still key to much work being done in the field, perhaps it is time to retire the language of center and margins and acknowledge the more dialogical models of scholarship taking place both within and outside the academy. Over the past twenty years there has been a blurring of methodological boundaries and modes of analysis across the humanities and social sciences: art historians do ethnographies, historians look at visual texts, literary critics analyze television shows. This is both the strength and weakness of visual culture studies. It is everywhere and everything.

The porousness of its boundaries and its often explicit politics, however, make work in visual culture studies susceptible to charges of academic dilettantism and specious scholarship. To counter this, scholars of visual culture must continue to be rigorous in their approaches and applications. While the term runs the risk of becoming vacuous, its flexibility provides scholars with a variety of methodological positions to do important generative research and continue to push at the boundaries of academic discourse and artistic traditions. When it is done well, visual culture studies, because of its emphasis on the production, consumption, and circulation of images and their meanings, continues to provide a site for interesting and even groundbreaking work. For example, in October 2006, the Visual Culture Group at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, hosted a three-day conference that, according to its promotional material, took “the transsubstantiating challenge of the ‘trans’ in Transdisciplinarity, Transgender, Transethnic, Transart, and Transracial not just as its theme but also as its point of departure.” Projecting past the threshold of defining visual culture studies, the conference successfully enacted it through a series of formal papers, demonstrations, exhibitions, performances, roundtable discussions, pre-circulated papers, seminars, electronic postings, and physical installations. Likewise, the Mellon-funded Visual Culture Network proposes to rethink collaborative work both inside and outside of the academy to challenge established notions of academic and artistic practices. Moreover, there continue to be many excellent, more traditional single-authored texts published under the rubric of visual culture from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds including art history, anthropology, media studies, gender studies, critical geography, and ethnic studies, to name just a few.

Today visual culture studies includes a diverse group of scholars whose work on the production, consumption, and circulation of visual objects and technologies is profoundly reshaping the traditional disciplines as well as notions of interdisciplinarity. Dikovitskaya’s text provides a helpful origin narrative but there is now a need to move forward. Scholars and practitioners of visual culture must continue to question established discourses and networks to produce rigorous and engaged scholarship and cultural works that engage in a broader dialogue with the disciplines, the academy itself, and the larger world.