Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World

How to See the World is an introduction to the new academic discipline of the study of visual culture. Visual artefacts in the form of fine and decorative arts have been studied in universities for about a century, of course, and before that in salons and art academies. What makes 'visual culture' as a field a new departure is its focus on mass and popular imagery, which now has an unimaginable range and volume in the age of digital media. How to See the World takes us through some of the perspectives this new analysis can take. 'How to See Yourself' takes us fairly speedily from classical portraiture to modern artists such as Cindy Sherman and the ubiquitous selfie. The emphasis here is on how the self is radically unstable, and a matter of performance rather than essence, in tension with traditional social categories. ''How We think about Seeing' is an update on brain science and what it tells us about perception and processing of visual information; we see with our bodies, not simply the retina. Further chapters look at the story of mapping for military purposes from the nineteenth century to the contemporary drone; early film and its conjunction with industrialisation and the train; the rise of the modern megacity; the changing climate; and mass political protest. All of these areas of life have generated, exploited and explored the expressive and interpretive capacities of visual culture. To orient oneself in the modern world, we need to develop skills in reading images from street art to museum-housed installations to instagram snaps and video clips circulated as memes. To be active participants in our own culture, we need to be adept at using these visual codes ourselves.

I had some problems with this book, not least in finding some definition for the discipline itself. It seems to draw on many other fields: the ideas on the performative self, for example, are familiar from feminism and gender studies; the psychology of perception is central to Gombrich's Art and Illusion; and the survey of the giant city draws heavily on authors like Mike Davis.  Mirzoeff acknowledges a debt to the work of John Berger, itself drawing on Walter Benjamin. Sometimes the book felt like familiar ingredients given a slightly new twist rather than an exciting new departure. Visual culture is so vast that it surely takes in just about anything, from a school whiteboard to a weekend watercolour. Unsurprisingly, the book as a whole felt like a disparate gathering of thoughts on subjects the author is interested in (and on which he is clearly very well informed). It's not always easy to find a thread running through a chapter; rather, one item seems to auto-suggest another. 'Divided Cities', for example, uses this suggestive heading to hurtle us through Berlin, the American South, South African apartheid and Israel-Palestine in a few pages, without time to look in any detail at any of these scenarios. In these stretches, it reads as a sequence of riffs rather than an over-arching composition.


Despite these reservations - perhaps I was looking for a more traditional thesis-style book - I must admit found this a riveting read. Mirzoeff has an immediately engaging style, unencumbered by theoretical jargon. Every page offers some fascinating nugget of information, such as the surprising but convincing link between Impressionism and early industrial smog. He conveys a passionate curiosity and is an example of an academic for whom the wall between academic observation and practical action is, like other walls mentioned here, one to be dismantled. He is clearly fascinated and inspired by social protest movements, from the Arab Spring to Occupy, and sees in the visual traces such actions produce a hope for the representation of popular interests in a world in which the 99% are generally excluded by corporate media. Visual Culture is for Mirzoeff something we should do, not simply study. Only through imagining the effects of climate change can we hope to address it; and this imagining necessarily takes the form of the actual making of images. The record of mass protest in Egypt stands as an example of visual artefacts which the regime cannot erase. The commitment to action in the book makes it a refreshing change from the traditional world of formal art criticism, often  confined to a reflective discourse within the space of the museum. If the structure of the book doesn't fit the usual academic conventions, perhaps that is part of the point. 'Once we have learned how to see the world,' he concludes, 'we have taken only one of the required steps. the point is to change it.'