January 24

We started with some very general discussion that explored the class's perception of Japan. Everyone contributed some comments about what kinds of things they associated with Japanese culture. I noticed that most people mentioned something connected to Japan's art or aesthetics. This may have something to do with the topic of the class--you wouldn't be taking it unless you were interested in Japanese art. At the same time, however, it's quite true that Europeans and North Americans have come to know about Japan through its art, and this for some very specific reasons that we will explore over the course of the semester.

We also started our discussion with the two articles, "What is Visual Culture" and "Images and Marks," in an effort to think about some of the course's basic premises.

In "What is Visual Culture," Malcolm Barnard presents a few definitions for the term "visual culture," in increasing degree of specificity:

What is visual?

1. Everything that can be seen (this would have to include nature, not just human productions)
2. Everything that humans produce or create (this would have to include involuntarily produced things, like bodily fluids)
3. Things with functional or communicative intent such as typefaces, advertisements)
4. Things with aesthetic intent ('beautiful' things created for their own sake, i.e. 'art')

What is culture?

Not nature (or)
The productions of elites/people in power (or)
The productions of popular culture, including subcultures

In this course, we'll be looking at examples of objects that fit into various places in these two spectrums.

Some things that came up in the course of the discussion were:

London underground typeface:
Transport for London
This typeface is called "New Johnston," and you can look at it here at Indentifont, where it's called "the most influential typeface of the early twentieth century."

Keith Haring (in reference to grafitti): This isn't the world's greatest image, but it's what I was thinking of when the topic came up, here.

We just started the discussion of Julian Bell's "Images and Marks," discussing the early biblical injunction against human-made images, and the view that such images were an affront to God.