Esta pesquisa foi desenvolvida no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Artes Visuais, na Área de Concentração Teoria, Ensino e Aprendizagem da Arte, na Linha de Pesquisa Fundamentos do Ensino e Aprendizagem da Arte, da Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo. Objetivou investigar aspectos que decorrem das inter-relações entre Artes Visuais, cultura visual e formação docente, que compreendem a prática educativa e a prática artística. A partir destes pontos de tensões, aponta-se a imagem da moda em confluência com o ensino de arte na prática do estágio curricular supervisionado, podendo sugerir e impulsionar formas de ensino e aprendizagem autônomas e colaborativas na formação do artista/professor/pesquisador em Artes Visuais. Aborda-se uma reflexão teórica voltada para a cultura visual, bem como para as derivações sobre arte relacional e processo criativo. Desta forma a pesquisa pautou-se sobre alguns aspectos reflexivos da artografia, bem como sobre da arte relacional, entendendo um conjunto de práticas artísticas que tomam como ponto de partida (teórico e prático) as relações humanas e seu contexto social. / This research was developed in the Graduation Program in Visual Arts of the Arts and Communication School of the University of Sao Paulo, concentration area of Art Theory, Teaching and Learning, and research interest The Fundamentals of Art Teaching and Learning. It aimed to investigate the aspects that elapse from the interrelations among Visual Arts, Visual Culture and Faculty Formation, which comprehend the educational and artistic practice. From these tension points, it aims the fashion image in confluence with the art teaching in the practice of the supervised internship, being able to suggest and instigate collaborative and autonomous ways of teaching and learning in the formation of the artist/teacher/researcher in the Visual Arts. It approaches a theoretical reflection about the visual culture, as well as the derivations of the relational art and the creative process. Thus, this research was based on some reflexive aspects of the artography and the relational art, comprehending a group of artistic practices that take as initial point (theoretical and practical) the human relations and their social context.

In art and education, theorists dispute the concept of visuality, or how meaning occurs from what we see. This study examines two opposed and acrimoniously entrenched theoretical perspectives adopted internationally: visual culture and aesthetics. In visual culture, visual experience, including perception is mediated by background cultural discourses. On this approach, subjectivity is explained as conventional, the role of the senses in making meaning is strongly diminished or rejected and from this, accounting for visuality precludes indeterminate and intuitive aspects. Differently, aesthetic perspectives approach visual meaning as obtaining through direct perceptual and felt aspects of aesthetic experience. Here, subjectivity remains discrete from language and the role of cultural discourse in making meaning diminishes or is excluded. Each description is important to the explanation of visuality in art and education, but problematic. To start, the study outlines the central explanatory commitments of both visual culture and aesthetics. The study identifies problems in each with their explanations of subjectivity or self. Both positions maintain from earlier explanations of cognition that separate theoretically and practically the senses, cognitive processes, and context. The study looks at approaches to mind and representation in accounts of visuality and provides some background from the cognitive sciences to understand the problem further. Contemporary explanation from science and philosophy is revising the separation. However, some approaches from science are reductive of mind and both aesthetics and visual culture theorists are understandably reluctant to adopt scientistic or behaviourist approaches for the explanation of visual arts practices. The aim of the study is to provide a non-reductive realist account of visuality in visual arts and education. To accomplish this aim, the study employs philosopher John R. Searle's explanation of consciousness because it explores subjectivity as qualitative, unified, and intrinsically social in experience. By doing this, the study addresses a gap in the theoretical understanding of the two dominant approaches to visuality. The key to relations between subjectivity and the world in reasoning is the capacity for mental representation. From this capacity and the rational agency of a self, practical reasoning is central to the creation, understanding, and appreciation of art and imagery. This account of consciousness, its aspects, and how it works includes description of the Background, as capacities enabling the uptake and structuring of sociocultural influence in mind. Crucially, the study shows how the capacity for reasoned action can be represented without dualism or reduction to the explanatory constraints of behavioural or physical sciences, an important commitment in the arts and education. In this explanation, the study identifies epistemic constraints on the representation of mental states, including unconscious states, in accounting for practices as reasoned activities. Centrally, the study looks at how, from the capacities of consciousness and the self's freedom of will, visuality is unified as qualitative, cognitive, and social. In exploring Searle's explanation of consciousness, some account of current work on cognition extends discussion of a reconciliation of visuality on these terms.

This manuscript tells the stories of the Latin/o and general music industries in the United States from 1898 to 2000. It argues that performers transformed the local identities of aural industries based in place and melody into global industries of visual identities designed for space and celebrity. Both the Latin/o and general music industries shifted back and forth along a local-sound-to-global-sight spectrum more than once, from sounds of music rooted in specific places to sights of musicians uprooted across universal spaces between 1898 and 2000. This claim is supported by a textual analysis of archival materials, such as trade press articles, audio recordings, still photographs and motion pictures. While the general music industry's identity changed, the Latin/o industry's identity stayed the same, and vice-versa. Specifically, when the general industry identified with transnational performers and images between 1926 and 1963, the Latin/o industry retained its identification with the sounds of music rooted in specific places. From 1964 to 1979, as the Latin/o industry moved from one end of the spectrum to the other, only to return to its initial position, it was the general industry that maintained its identification with the midpoint of the spectrum. During the 1980s, the general industry zigzagged from the midpoint to the global-visual end and back again, while the Latin/o industry remained at the local-sonic end of the spectrum. In the 1990s, the Latin/o industry's local and sonic identity continued, and the general industry moved from the midpoint to the global-visual end of the spectrum with the Latin boom. The general industry's identity changed during each interval except 1964-1979, the only period in which the Latin/o industry's identity fluctuated. From Aural Places to Visual Spaces: the Latin/o and General Music Industries should be of interest to anyone invested in the relations between creativity and commerce, substance and style, or geography and genre.

Vernacular Posthumanism: Visual Culture and Material Imagination uses a theory of image vernaculars in order to explore the ways in which contemporary visual culture both reflects on and constructs 21st century cultural attitudes toward the human and the nonhuman. This project argues that visual culture manifests a vernacular posthumanism that expresses a fundamental contradiction: the desire to transcend the human while at the same time reasserting the importance of the flesh and the materiality of lived experience. This contradiction is based in a biodeterminist desire, one that fantasizes about reducing all actants, both human and nonhuman, to functions of code. Within this framework, actants become fundamentally exchangeable, able to be combined, manipulated, and understood as variations of digital code. Visual culture – and its expression of vernacular posthumanism – thus functions as a reflection on contemporary conceptualizations of the human, a rehearsal of the posthuman, and a staging ground for encounters between the human and the nonhuman. Each chapter of this project begins in the field of film studies and then moves out toward a broader analysis of visual culture and nonhumanist theory. This project relies on the theories and methodologies of phenomenology, materialism, posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, film and media studies, and visual culture studies. Visual objects analyzed include: the films of Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, and Krzysztof Kieślowski; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997); the film 300 (2006); the TV series Planet Earth (2006); DNA portraits, the art of Damien Hirst; Body Worlds; human migration maps; and remote surgical machinery.

In the cultural upheaval of the 1920s, Canadians became particularly invested in looking at and debating women’s images in public. This dissertation looks at how English-Canadians debated, accepted, and challenged modernity through public images of women. In analysing the debates over cultural rituals of looking it seeks to show how the discussions about images reveal the power of vision in ordering and understanding modernity as well as social and cultural changes. Through five case studies on the flapper, the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation, two beauty contests, an art exhibition including nudes, and the relationship between film and automobiles this study reveals how important images of the body were to the cultural developments and debates on the post-World War One modern world. By the 1920s urban visual culture was dominated by various images of women and an analysis of those images and the debates around them reveal underlying tensions related to gender, class, age, social order, and race. Anxieties over changes in these areas were absorbed into the broader concerns over the pleasures and perils associated with being modern. This dissertation looks at Canadian visual culture in terms of what it can reveal about modernity and the problems, perils, and pleasures associated with it.

This study examined the intentions of a group of individuals who created the sitcom Aliens in America broadcast on the CW Network in 2007-2008 and the ways in which three separate groups (bloggers, TV critics and local television viewers) perceived the show. In doing so I attempted to uncover the pedagogical implications of these intentions and perceptions for visual culture studies. I used a qualitative approach to conduct this study. I gathered interviews the creators of the show gave to media outlets in 2007 and 2008. I also gathered data from three other distinct groups for this study. First, I conducted focus group interviews with 13 individuals who watched and discussed their perceptions of Aliens in America. Second, I surveyed the perceptions of bloggers through a narrative analysis of postings published on the CW network website in 2007-2008. Thirdly, I sampled reviews of the show by TV critics to learn about their perceptions of the show. This study uncovered three key findings. First, the existence of a gap or disconnect between the ways in which the show was intended by its creators and how it was perceived by selected audiences. The second major finding was the unexpected level of engagement with the show exhibited by bloggers and focus group participants and their deep connection with some of the characters. The third finding involved the use of audio cues in some episodes of the series and its possible influence on viewers to react in a certain way to specific situations. These findings have specific implications for visual culture studies. First, the show presents an immense potential for use with seasoned educators during workshops. Second, these findings indicate that the use of audio cues in TV shows is problematic for younger audiences and requires more media literacy to take place in the art education classroom. Third, teacher education programs could use the show to train pre-service teachers and help them relate to the type of television programming their students are engaging with on a daily basis.

The boundaries of art education are growing and encompassing new artistic practices and contemporary discourses. Many art educators are advocating for the inclusion of popular visual culture into the school curriculums. This study investigates what might be learned from the effects of adding a unit of instruction on popular visual culture, in the form of comic book art, into a beginning level high school art curriculum. / text

This dissertation brings critical visual culture studies to bear on mediatized representations of borders and migration in U.S. and Mexican contexts. In particular, this study examines how the human price of the North American Free Trade Agreement is represented and/or disappeared in popular visual culture. I deploy an eclectic methodological framework whose elements emerge from the confluence of Border Studies, Visual Cultural Studies and theorizations of neoliberalism in order to study how television, print media and narrative and documentary film serve as sites for both the visual constitution and critical contestation of neoliberal agendas. For example, I view objects of visual culture such as the Border Wars television program, Backpacker magazine and films Sin dejar huella and AbUSed: The Postville Raid as powerful and privileged sites for the analysis of political discourses.

This thesis is a case study of the relationship between a nineteenth-century French landscape painter, Théodore Rousseau, and his patrons and public. My aim is to reconstruct the context in which Rousseau's work was created, thereby inferring what the artist intended for his painting and how his collectors and public approached the style of his work. The thesis examines the nature of the dynamic between Rousseau and his consumers and the extent to which the artist's style may, or may not, be affected by the taste of his audience. In Part I, I examine Rousseau's involvement with the members of his circle including those who supported him during his years of absence from the Salon, the critic, Théophile Thoré, the industrialist, Frédéric Hartmannn and the civil servant, Alfred Sensier. This provides a framework for discussion of a number of ideas which preoccupied both the artist and his patrons including the level of finish in his work, the importance of pantheism, responses to commercial deforestation and the continuing resonances of ancient Greek culture. In Part II, I look at the problem of Rousseau's response to the expansion of the public sphere for art in the nineteenth-century. I approach this by locating Rousseau within the institutional structures of the art world which acted as intermediary between the painter and a wider public. These include the public exhibition, the rôle of the reproduction in the dissemination of his imagery, the importance of one-man public auctions and the position of the dealer as an outlet for the sale of his work. In reconstructing the dynamic between Rousseau and his patrons and public, I have relied above all on primary sources. These have included the often unpublished correspondence of the artist and his collectors, contemporary Salon criticism and sale catalogues, auctioneers' records and the stock-books of the Durand-Ruel firm of dealers, as well as a close formal analysis of Rousseau's paintings themselves.

This thesis investigates the role of politically-motivated visual culture relative to the social and cultural transformations taking place at the University of Virginia between 1968-1974, culminating in the “May Days” student strike of 1970. This study seeks to recognize the ways through which these visual materials reflected, as well as influenced student response and identity relative to the contemporary social issues of the time, such as the advancement of Civil Rights, the de-acceleration of the Vietnam War and the military draft, and the arrival of co-education at the University of Virginia. This thesis seeks to expand traditional boundaries of the field of art education and its relevance both within, as well as outside of the educational classroom, and demonstrate the significance of visual culture in relation to social conditions and context. / text