Chapter Thirty Visual Culture/Visual Studies

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make in the description of the Stars and Stripes are legitimate as long as they do not distort his arguments about Flag. A practitioner of visual studies, however, might, place different emphasis. He or she might direct the analytical spotlight, usually reserved for the painting, onto the objects that make up its context. Specifically, a visual studies approach could take Orton's insights about Flag's undesirability and query the Stars and Stripes On similar lines. What after all, what does a flag mean? To whom does it belong? Does it appertain to the individual (like Flag, read in a certain manner, does to jasper johns) or to the collective (as again does Flag, read in relation to its historical context)? Consider the simple phrase, which could be voiced by many a patriotic citizen: "It's my flag." In an obvious sense, a flag signifies a nation, and a nation consists of an entity greater than any individual. We might say that the nation exists only to the extent that its citizens are willing to recognize it as the embodiment of a special supra-individual identity despite its familiarity, quite an abstract notion-that unites a people. For someone to say, "It's my flag," then, is actually a rather odd utterance, for it declares singular proprietary interest in a piece of cloth that can only represent a collectivity. The Stars and Stripes is neither singular nor collective, but both singular and collective. It performs, in a masterful ideological stroke, the suspension of that basic contradiction as a truth-a patriotic truth of such compelling force that a significant number of soldiers (including Sergeant jasper, in a subsequent battle) have willingly died for it. We are now on a stage where the flag, more than simply serving as art's backdrop, becomes an upstage figure active in the formation of ideology -a role for it explored within a French context both by Roland Barthes in Mythologies and by Raoul Girardet in Pierre Nora's monumental Realms of Memory (both publications, replete with essays that discern complexity in mundane visual artifacts, stand as useful precursors to, or participants in, the work of visual studies). The flag then is as much an undecidable as is Flag. Yet this brief foray into the analysis of what had been the art-historical context for Flag and is now a text of visual studies has, in a sense, forced me to let go of the object. I have not been presenting an argument about a single flag, a specific scrap of cloth with a particular date of origin and a history of use and misuse that may register-spots, tears, and 50 forth-across its surface. I have been discussing flags as a class of things, that great collection of items manufactured and sold over the years at the improper ratio of 2:3 or 3 :5. Without the individual object at hand, the analyst can hardly execute the careful and detailed visual analysis (beautifully exemplified by Orton's scrutiny of the minute material idiosyncrasies of Flag) that the discipline of art history can rightly claim as one ·of its proudest achievements. Art history is loath to abandon that commitment to the single object: even Orton, in order to dwell with precision on Flag, must play down that fact this singular painting was also a part of a large group of canvases that johns painted of flags. Must visual studies forsake the use of this particular tool for the analysis of particularities? (Accusations that visual studies may involve a "de-skilling" of its students may amount to this-although the indictment begs the question of how well traditional programs in art history have actually been in imparting this skill.) Not necessarily. Visual studies can recuperate it by choosing instances where a single specimen from a class of things can be examined in its individual history as a means of illustrating a more generalized social use of that class: the flag salvaged by Sergeant Jasper in i776, for example, had it survived. Or it may exercise the same degree of visual precision in analyzing characteristics shared by multiply produced items-the composition of a specific frame of a film, say-rather than the idiosyncrasies that distinguish the individual artifact- the visual scratches and aural pops on a given print of that film. Sentimental attachment to a given mode of analysis, in any case, should hardly be allowed to dictate the range of
artifacts we select for study. If a certain manner of scholarly looking requires singularity and singularity remains an attribute more closely linked with objects of art than with mass-produced commodities, then to insist on the type of close visual analysis that focuses on individuating particularities would be to leave the discipline fundamentally blind to the social and aesthetic history and function of singularity itself. In an age when tension between unique items and reproducible types plays an integral part in many of our most important ideological struggles, that is no minor 1055. Far from a settling of the question of what to analyze and what to analyze it with, visual studies-in recognition of new and newly rediscovered constellations of visual objects in use-proposes that we leave ourselves open to improvisation and surprise. REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Barthes, Roland. '972. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang. Baudrillard, Jean. 1988.Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Edited and translated by Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford University Press. The BLOCK Reader in Visual Culture. 1996. London: Routledge. Bryson, Norman, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Maxey, eds. '994. Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. "Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion." In Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex. " London: Routledge . Elkins, James. 1999. The Domain of/mages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Foucault, Michel. '977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. 2d ed. Indianapolis: Hackett. Jenks, Chris, ed. 1995. Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Lacan, Jacques. 1978. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho· analysis. Edited by Jacques·Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed. 1998. The Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge. Mitchell, W. J. T. '994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nelson, Robert S., ed. 2000. Visuafity before and beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw. New York: Cambridge University Press. Nora, Pierre, director. 1996-98. Realms of Memory : The Construction of the French Past. English version edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman; translated by Arthur Goldhammer. 3 vols. New York: Columbia University Press. October. 1996. "Visual Culture Questionnaire" (and related articles by Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss). Octobern· Orton, Fred. 1994. FiguringJasperJohns. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Walker, John A., and Sarah Chaplin. 1997. Visual Culture: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
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Chapter Thirty Visual Culture/Visual Studies

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