ART HISTORIAN K. MALCOLM RICHARDS TO INTRODUCE INNOVATIVE WEB SITE AT THE CENTER FOR VISUAL CULTURE

Art historian and artist K. Malcolm Richards Ph.D. ’95 will introduce an innovative Web site that explores the medium’s potential to stimulate original thought on Wednesday, March 24, at the Center for Visual Culture’s weekly colloquium. Richards will offer a guided tour of "The Art Historian’s Studio: A Virtual Allegory of the Past 7 Years of My Intellectual Life," an expansive, ambitious Web project that constitutes the inaugural issue of The Journal of Visual Culture, The Center’s experimental online publication. The Visual Culture Colloquium Series takes place in Thomas 224 on Wednesdays from 12:30 to 1:45 p.m. Refreshments are served.

The project began more than two years ago, when then-Center Director Steven Z. Levine asked Richards to develop a project that "would be published under the rubric of the Journal of Visual Culture, but wouldn’t be a journal in the traditional sense," Richards says. At the time, Richards was working on the 19th-century French painter Gustave Courbet’s famous The Artist’s Studio: A Real Allegory of the Past Seven Years of My Artistic Life. "I realized that it had been seven years since I graduated from Bryn Mawr with my Ph.D., and the subject became the last seven years of my intellectual life."

Like Courbet’s painting, Richards’ Web project presents fragmentary, sometimes elusive representations of the thinkers and artists whose work engages him, as well as themes that have persisted in his work through the seven years treated by the project. Working with a Web designer, Richards found the project an unusual opportunity to synthesize critical and creative work.

This detail of Alice Oh’s "September eleven… anemia" (2002) is among the contemporary works featured in Richards’ project.

"I’ve used quotations from thinkers who are important to me, and I’ve tried to break apart my own writing, picking out fragments where the influence of these thinkers is most apparent," says Richards. "My goal was to create a textual collage that has its own rhythm, that brings out the tensions among these thinkers and their relationship to one another. "I also asked several of my artistic colleagues whose work resonates with some of the themes of my scholarly work to participate," says Richards, who teaches at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

The resulting 91-page site is anything but the usual Web experience.

"I wanted to encourage the reader to think critically about the World Wide Web and the effect it has had on the way we read," Richards says. "Reading on the Internet is driven by speed — it’s all about how quickly you can get to the information you want. I wanted to counter that, to present material that would challenge the reader to slow down."

"At the same time, I wanted to exploit the Web’s unique possibilities for nonlinear presentation," Richards adds. "A book has a certain built-in linearity, but the Web can present a structure that allows the reader to move between texts and images in any order. The ability to hold a variety of texts in suspension offers opportunities to see connections and tensions among them that might remain hidden in a traditional text."

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