Mixed Forms of Visual Culture : From the Cabinet of Curiosities to Digital Diversity

"This book celebrates and seeks to understand the overlooked appearances of hybrid forms in visual culture; artefacts and practices that meld or interweave incongruous elements in innovative ways. And with an emphasis on the material aspects of such entities, the book adopts the term 'mixed form' for them. Focusing on key phenomena in the last half millennium such as the cabinet of curiosities, the broadside ballad and the chapbook as early forms of image-text, the scrapbook, assemblage, and, in digital times, so-called 'mixed reality,' the book argues that while the quality of inconsistency is traditionally dismissed, its expression nevertheless plays a vital role in social life. Crucially, Mixed Forms of Visual Culture relates its phenomena to the emergence of the division of labour under capitalism and addresses the shifting relationships between art and life, when singularity and uniformity are variously valued and dismissed in the two arenas, and at different points in history. Two of the book's chapters take the form of visual essays, with one comprising an anthology of found scrapbook pages and the other offering an analysis of artists' scrapbooks. The book is richly illustrated throughout."--Amazon Cover Halftitle page Title page Copyright page Contents Illustrations Preface Introduction: Mixtures of All Sorts Mixtures strange and rich ‘Mixed form’ defined Defining ‘form’ via Hegel The remit of ‘mixed form’ ‘Medium’ and visual media The join The writing on ‘mixed form’ The questions, and the frameworks for responses Some limitations A post-script on the visual essays 1 The Cabinet of Curiosities as Mixed Form: Depictions and Desire Words and things Three kinds of curiosity The origin of the cabinet in the Age of Discovery A history of mixed form: the cabinet of curiosities as origin Diversity of contents – and in curating Locating evidence Writing on the methods of display in the Wunderkammer Defining ‘order’ Locating the images The method for analysis The Dimpfels’ cabinet Ole Worm’s museum Basilius Besler’s Wunderkammer Settala in Milan The cabinets of Calzolari and Cospi Ferrante Imperato’s ‘Museo’ Athanasius Kircher’s museum Jacob de Wilde’s ‘collection room’ Overview Order overlooked: some explanations 2 Mixed Form in Working Life: The Rise of Manufacture Introduction The division of labour – key features The division of labour – as experienced Un-divided labour in communist society 3 Popular Mixed Forms in a Long Eighteenth Century: From the Broadside Ballad to the Chapbook The broadside The broadside ballad – as mixed form The chapbook Less diverse and more divided Less diverse and more divided: eighteenth-century cultural form and working life 4 Visual Essay: The Pastime Scrapbook 5 Mixed Form and Modernism in the Visual Arts: Assemblage and Assembly Lines Inimical: mixed form and modernism Mixed form – its key forms in other modernisms Collage, montage and assemblage Writing on assemblage7 The beginnings of (heterogeneous) assemblage in modernism Mixed form assemblage as a form of kinds: a summary Assemblage as the outcome of assembling Methods for arranging the components . . . and glue Mixed form assemblage and other modernisms Mixed forms of modernism – and modernity 6 Visual Essay: The Artist’s Scrapbook: A Material Analysis 7 Digital Culture as Wunderkammer The distribution of the digital Mixed reality’s materials – a note The scope of mixed reality’s ‘reality’ The sensory dimension of mixed reality’s reality The scope of digitality in mixed reality Mixed reality as digitality: the media The means of mixing digital and real The rules of media-combination The provisionality of mixed reality The screen and its ‘computer layer’ Digitization: ‘discretization’ Digitization: modularity The digital as Wunderkammer? Divided labour in the digital age Post-Fordism Post-Fordism as mixed form Digital culture and labour: relations Conclusion: A Synthesis of Sorts The shape – or form – of history Mixed forms in visual culture – as a field of study Mixed forms in visual culture – the formalist analysis: some trends Labour and mixed form Mixed form in culture and in labour: the relationship Beyond a synthesis The remainder References Index "Notions of consistency, unity and harmony have long been ideals in Western culture. These values persisted throughout the Renaissance and Neo-Classical period (the seventeenth century), even with the emergence of the cult of individualism. Today, as much as they continue to be prescriptions for art, they also inform judgements made about everything from behaviour to the output of production lines and require these things to be consistent. With the emergence of Western empires and industrialisation however, we conversely see a set of cultural practices emerge that are informed by a very different value; that of the traditionally dismissed heterogeneous. This book looks at key instances throughout visual culture where this structure has been used and coins the term 'mixed-form' for them. Addressing the other side of formal unity it looks at phenomenona like the miscellany, the collage and the anthology and archival structures such as the cabinet of curiosities and the scrapbook and compares them to their digital descendants such as the weblog and platforms such as Pinterest. By doing so, the book explores an under researched area of visual culture, that of the mixed form. Mixed Forms of Visual Culture also discusses the reasons for the appearance of the mixed form and traces it back to the Marxist understanding of the 'division of labour' in industrial society and to Marxist accounts of post-industrial production. The book's underlying theme is the value of critically reviewing received wisdom. Presenting a history of its key term that starts with the inception of commodity culture in the sixteenth century, the book proposes that, as working life becomes increasingly defined by qualities such as singularity and uniformity, the need for the opposite finds expression in cultural form."-- Provided by publisher