Images Out of Time: Visual and Material Culture in a Digital Age

FAIN: AA-284562-22

University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA 90089-0012)
Megan Luke (Project Director: May 2021 to July 2023)
Vanessa Ruth Schwartz (Project Director: July 2023 to July 2023)
David Albertson (Project Director: July 2023 to July 2024)
Vanessa Ruth Schwartz (Project Director: July 2024 to present)

A three-year project creating an undergraduate curriculum in visual studies.

"Images Out of Time" is a new humanities curriculum developed in partnership with the Visual Studies Research Institute and Thematic Option Program in General Education at USC. This three-year project brings together faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates to study visual and material culture in periods of rapid cultural change and social upheaval. Monuments to unjust pasts; icons manifesting gods; ancient ruins in modern structures; old images restored by new technology: these images challenge linear historical narratives. Understanding how they pass through time helps us find our place between past and future. Our project enhances the humanities at USC through undergraduate courses and internships, object-based learning site visits, graduate training and mentorship, and public programming. Activities will intersect art history, religion, literature, history, and anthropology, and bridge divisions of premodern and modern, as well as European, Atlantic, and Pacific spheres.

Associated Products

Images Out of Time: How Art Makes History (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Images Out of Time: How Art Makes History
Author: Megan Luke
Abstract: Course Description: “The old light of dead or distant stars was emitted long ago and it reaches us only in the present. Many historical events, like astronomical bodies, also occur long before they appear.” — George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962) This course considers how material artefacts travel through time, reshaping our perception and social practices along the way. We will study what happens when images and objects are suddenly at odds with the moment of their appearance, whether they outlived their initial function or lost contact with their original cultural contexts. Monuments to unjust pasts; icons manifesting fallen gods; ancient ruins in modern structures; replicas and forgeries; old images restored by new technologies: these images force a paradox into view. On the one hand, they endure within continuous histories, linear narratives that trace how they were made, used, viewed, and collected (or destroyed). On the other hand, images can also remain stubborn signs of vanished worlds, out of step with the present into which they have survived. Images in the wrong place at the wrong time have justified the civilizing mission of empire and acts of iconoclasm. Today, they inspire debates about dismantling monuments, repatriating stolen works of art, and the preservation of cultural heritage destroyed by war or exploitation. When “images out of time” suddenly upset our faith in the march of history, they challenge us to measure our distance from the past, to understand ourselves, and to imagine collective futures. Topics for our discussions will include: strategies for organizing the past into meaningful stories; the definition of art; the history of iconoclasm; the future of museums in an era of decolonization; the importance of copies and facsimiles for preserving and disseminating cultural heritage.
Year: 2022
Audience: Undergraduate

Icons (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Icons
Author: Vanessa Schwartz
Abstract: Course Description: Marilyn Monroe, the Eiffel Tower, John Wayne, Mickey Mouse. Few would dispute the notion that the mass visual media have transformed these people, places, and things into “icons.” Although these phenomena exist apart from their representation, their cultural significance and importance is attached to their status as pictorial representations that are widely disseminated. The term “icon” initially invoked an object worthy of religious devotion; that original meaning now denotes an uncritical and popular devotion. This course poses the question “What becomes a legend most?” That question, made famous by the Blackglama fur ads, conflated “becoming” in the sense of being visually pleasing with “becoming” a legend, a modern process fueled by image-making. We will examine basic ways of thinking about visual symbols by learning about semiotics, symbolic and cultural anthropology, and what art historians have called iconology. This course will trace the interplay between specific icons and the visual culture that made them iconic. Particular emphasis will be placed on technologies of representation such as photography and film and the vital role they have played in the culture of modern icons. This class tests these theories with a mandatory field trip to Disneyland.
Year: 2023
Audience: Undergraduate

Metapictures of Time and Mind (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Metapictures of Time and Mind
Author: Megan Luke; W. J. T. Mitchell
Abstract: Course Description: This seminar is dedicated to “metapictures,” pictures about pictures, vision, and visual media. Our discussions will be organized around three major topics: 1) the iconology of time, with special attention to persisting shapes of time, notions of the epoch and epoché, the problem of contemporaneity, and pre/post history (also known as preposterous history); 2) the iconology of mind/world, emphasizing the relation between individual and collective psychology, especially in forms of madness; and 3) the iconology of the face, surface, and interface. Our fundamental focus will be on the mediation between art and philosophy, pictures and theories, metaphor and metaphysics.
Year: 2022
Audience: Graduate

Images Out of Time (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Images Out of Time
Author: Vanessa Schwartz; W. J. T. Mitchell
Abstract: Course Description: This graduate seminar is an in-depth examination of subjects and themes that have emerged from the VSRI’s ongoing “Images Out of Time” project, which considers how images travel through time, dropping in and out of linear histories and reshaping perception, institutions, and social practices along the way. We will study images and objects that are at odds with the moment of their appearance, whether they outlived their initial function or lost contact with their original cultural contexts. Monuments to unjust pasts; icons manifesting fallen gods; ancient ruins in modern structures; replicas and forgeries; old images restored by new technologies: these images force a paradox into view. While they endure within continuous histories, they also remain stubborn signs of vanished worlds, out of step with the present. Images in the wrong place at the wrong time have justified the civilizing mission of empire and acts of iconoclasm. They continue to structure debates about repatriating artifacts, dismantling monuments and museums, and preserving cultural heritage destroyed by war or exploitation. When “images out of time” suddenly upset our faith in the march of history, they challenge our ability to measure our distance from the past, to understand ourselves, and to imagine collective futures. Lectures and readings for the course intersect art history, religious studies, history, anthropology, literature, and film, and cuts across divisions separating premodern and modern, as well as European, Atlantic, and Pacific spheres.
Year: 2023
Audience: Graduate

Simulacral Time: Historical Ethics, Recuperation, and the Byzantine Past (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Simulacral Time: Historical Ethics, Recuperation, and the Byzantine Past
Abstract: Historians are often caught across several distinct temporalities that seek to reframe, contest, or re-assert the distance and alterity of the historical past. Historiographically, these approaches can manifest themselves as recuperations of the past that embrace anachronism or that argue for continuity and development over time, each of which services different ethics of historical writing. Furthermore, scholars might choose to simultaneously understand how the distant past has been deployed in the present, not simply to contour how past narratives have been shaped, but also to articulate our continued investments in the questions and propositions of distant worlds. In this seminar, Roland Betancourt considers how these various modes of writing have manifested themselves across his research on Byzantium and the Middle Ages, drawing unexpected connections across his work and demonstrating what art historical relations to time and temporality have to offer investigations into the distant past.
Author: ROLAND BETANCOURT
Date: 01/31/2023
Location: Zoom event

Jacques Cousteau: Seeing Underwater and the Making of an Icon of Environmentalism (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Jacques Cousteau: Seeing Underwater and the Making of an Icon of Environmentalism
Abstract: In conjunction with a screening, Professor James Cahill will present a paper titled On the Plurality of Worlds: Jacques Yves Cousteau and Louis Malles’ Le Monde du Silence. If cinematic media may be understood to have a Copernican potential, whereby they may be used as instruments of scientific discovery and displacement of anthropocentric perspectives, how does such a potential change how one conceives of the world or even constructs—or for the historian reconstructs—new ones? Drawing from archival research and contemporaneous film criticism and theory (André Bazin, Jean Thévenot, Henri Agel, Jean Epstein), philosophy (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), and anti-colonialist critique (Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon), this talk traces how filmmakers in metropolitan France began to address these questions through the re-emergence of a cinema of exploration in the late 1940s and 1950s. These films were produced at the very moment when the question of the world as conceived by the traditions of French humanism and its universalist aspirations were called into question by crises of wartime collaboration, the persistence of colonialism, and coca-colonization (the ascendant American economic and cultural hegemony). Such films participate in these discourses at a sensuous level, while also offering historians unexpected documents for writing a very different history of cinema. Focusing in particular on the production and reception of Jacques Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle’s Le Monde du Silence (The Silent World, 1956), the most popular and aesthetically ambitious production of this cycle of exploration films, Cahill reads this work for the plurality of worlds they simultaneously encountered, destroyed, archived, and reimagined through their cinematography and its lessons for cinema historiography.
Author: JAMES CAHILL; MARGARET COHEN
Date: 04/21/2023
Location: USC School of Cinematic Arts

How, and why, does an image become an icon? And why—or does—this matter? (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: How, and why, does an image become an icon? And why—or does—this matter?
Abstract: Social and cultural theorist Susie Linfield will discuss a wide range of images, from the Spanish Civil War to the current wars in the Middle East and the anti-racism protests in the U.S. What, if any, is the relationship between iconic images and social-political movements? A professor of journalism at New York University where she helped build the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program, Susie Linfield writes about the intersection of culture and politics. She is the author of The Lion’s Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky (2019) and The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (2010), a finalist for the New York Critics Circle Award. Her essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, Dissent, The Atlantic, and New Republic.
Author: SUSIE LINFIELD
Date: 03/23/2023
Location: USC Dornsife College

Slavery in the Heart of Freedom: Race, Religion, and Politics through the Lens of BDSM (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Slavery in the Heart of Freedom: Race, Religion, and Politics through the Lens of BDSM
Abstract: The Enlightenment’s promises of freedom, equality before the law, and bodily autonomy have generated a sometimes-unconscious craving for the opposite. BDSM shines a light on the nostalgia for anachronistic and physically enforced hierarchy in modern romance, religion, and politics. This talk focuses on parallel but ethically divergent examples of this impulse in three products of the post-Enlightenment state—BDSM, Haitian Vodou, and Trumpism. J. Lorand Matory is the Lawrence Richardson Distinguished Professor of Cultural Anthropology and the Director of the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Project at Duke University. He is the author of Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, Stigma and Culture: Last-Place Anxiety in Black America, and The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make.
Author: J. LORAND MATORY
Date: 10/03/2022
Location: Zoom event

Transfixed by Prehistory: An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Transfixed by Prehistory: An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time
Abstract: Prehistory is an invention of the late nineteenth century. In that moment of technological progress and acceleration of production and circulation, three major Western narratives about time took shape. One after another, these new fields of inquiry delved into the obscure immensity of the past: first, to surmise the age of the Earth; second, to find the point of emergence of human beings; and third, to ponder the age of art. Maria Stavrinaki asks what a history of modernity and its art would look like if considered through these three interwoven inventions of the longue durée. Rather than an inevitable march of progress leading up to the Anthropocene, this is a history of stupor, defamiliarization, regressive acceleration, and incessant invention, since the “new” was also found in the deep sediments of the Earth. Composed of as much speed as slowness, as much change as deep time, as much confidence as skepticism and doubt, modernity is a complex phenomenon that needs to be rethought.
Author: MARIA STAVRINAKI
Date: 09/12/2022
Location: Zoom event

Aniconic Icons: Time and Gender in the Body of Angkor Wat (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Aniconic Icons: Time and Gender in the Body of Angkor Wat
Abstract: This talk approaches a holistic understanding Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple as an ‘aniconic icon,’ a complex architectural body which sublimates anthropomorphic form in an elaborate and exemplary manner. This reading derives from and probes the multiple temporalities at work in the temple’s architectural and sculptural forms, which local devotees have themselves long probed; and second, the gendered and generative tensions operating in the oxymoronic formulation of the ‘aniconic icon’ – that is between apparently opposing modes of representation as they give body to relations between the mundane and the cosmic, the historical and the theoretical.
Author: ASHLEY THOMPSON
Date: 11/28/2022
Location: Zoom event

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