What Is Visual Studies at Buffalo?
Vision is our only sense that pretends to comprehensiveness and completeness. We believe that all that is, ranging from the infinitely small to the infinitely large can at some level and with the right tools, be seen by everyone. Yet, our ordinary language makes lie of this ideal of universal visibility, for we regularly say things like, “Different people see things differently.” The Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo is dedicated the social and cultural operations of seeing differently. Indeed, UB’s Visual Studies stakes its claim as the multidisciplinary exploration of the invisible in the context of the visible—all the structuring ideologies, habits of mind, projections and fantasies that always haunt our seeing. Some of us engage painting, sculpture, film, photography, performance and a host of new digital technologies to explore the boundary between what can be seen and what can be thought. Others of us pursue the same investigation in academic prose. But what unites us all is a belief that seeing is always a product of particular social and political structures whose power often depends on their not being seen. To surface those structures is to change them and so we understand our work as a kind of activist academics.
Long a progressive bastion, the University at Buffalo emerged in the Sixties as the academic home of some of the leading figures in the avant-garde, from Michel Foucault and Leslie Fiedler to Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. That forward looking attitude continues today in our dedication to queer and gender studies, to the exploration of science and new technologies, to theoretical and methodological insights born of new media, the history of science, critical theory, feminist and queer studies, and global cultural studies.
Located in the upper west of New York State, Buffalo stands at the crossroads between Canada and the US, the East and the Midwest. Long a technological and industrial powerhouse (Buffalo was the world’s first electrified city), its great wealth supported what is arguably the finest small museum in the world, The Albright Knox Art Gallery, as well as architectural masterworks by H. H. Richardson, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Eero Saarinen. Frederick Law Olmstead landscaped much of the city. Today, Buffalo is reinventing itself as haven of the arts, and its many arts non-profits ensure one of the most lively cultural scenes in the nation, boasting nine museums, a symphony, opera, multiple theaters and theater festivals, and fourteen universities—not to mention Niagara Falls.