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

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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.

Reviews

it is a pleasure to follow the author on her historical and taxonomic crossing of the world of mixed form, from the Renaissance and post-Renaissance cabinet of curiosities till todays digital creations, over popular genres such as the broadsheet, the chapbook and the scrapbook all well documented and cleverly illustrated. The visual material of the book is refreshing and often very original, while the comments are always helpful as well as consistently structured in function of the underlying general question of the link with division of labor. * Jan Baetens, Leonardo *

Author Bio

Mary Anne Francis is Principal Lecturer in the School of Art at the University of Brighton, UK.