Art in the Field - Ethnographic Information in Visual Culture Studies

Nermin Saybaşılı's writings are informed by Visual Culture studies that approach textuality/visuality critically. The articles have some common assumptions: First, the image or object is unnatural. Image or visuality is a "technology" that is learned and taught, imposed and cultivated, and produced as a cultural structure. Second, any study of visual culture requires an examination of sociality, both the sociality in which the visual field is produced and the visual production of the social field. Thirdly, we have another way other than historicizing or classifying the work of art as an “aesthetic work”: the possibility of reading it as the knowledge object of a kind of ethnographic fieldwork. Thus, it is possible for us to both learn from the work of art and test what we know thanks to it.

The title “Art in the Field” not only points out that artists reinterpret their work like an anthropologist, but also emphasizes that art historians and cultural theorists open their own “fields” to other “fields” and should open them up. It points out that the "field of art" extends to a much wider area than the fixed spaces such as galleries, museums, movie theaters and similar places where art is produced and exhibited. Saybaşılı's writings prove that in today's world, our visual experience has transcended a formally established and regulated vision regime, and that neither the artist nor our own eyes and gaze no longer obey.

(From the Promotional Bulletin)

Prepared for Publication by: Semih Sökmen

Dough Type: 2nd Dough

First Print Year: 2017

Number of Printings: 1st Edition

Size: 13x20

Number of Pages: 232

Media Type: Paperback