I picked up Ways of Seeing, a very short book, because I saw a passage from it on the male gaze that I found very interesting. I learned it is based on a BBC 4-part series, and that the book is not just about seeing as a sense, but is really a book about art. I definitely missed out on a big part of the book by reading it on my kindle, where the art was copied in a very crude way. I will definitely need to watch the BBC series to get the full effect at some point.
The quote from Berger that made me want to read the book was the following:
A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....
One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
I thought this passage was interesting in its reflection on both women's depiction in art and women's reality. In the art, this sentiment is shown in works where women are contorted in inhuman ways to bare their bodies, usually frontal nudity in European art, to the viewer. Their expression is not the authentic expression of how the woman in the painting would react to the scene around her, but is modified to satisfy the male viewer's pleasure, the male gaze.
Berger notes that in other artistic traditions from Persia, India, Africa, and the pre-Columbian Americas, when a woman is naked in a work of art, the theme is usually sexual attraction or fertility, and often, the art depicts the act of sexual love, with the woman as active as the man. But in European art, the nude is very frequently a totally passive woman, naked only so she can be looked at by the viewer. He writes that "to be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display."
There is also a chapter on publicity and art in advertising that takes an anti-capitalist turn that surprises me. Berger isn't exactly proposing new solutions to the problems inherent in the industrial revolution or capitalism, but he makes interesting criticisms. He writes about how publicity is used to make us dissatisfied with our present way of life within the greater society. It encourages us, when faced with what others have and what we don't have, to become dissatisfied not with the world, but with ourselves. I think this is an incredibly prescient observation from the 1970s that has only gained more relevance today as we are shown more ads than ever through our smartphones and are less happier than ever before.
On "glamour," Berger writes that it is a modern invention that did not exist "in the heyday of oil paintings." He writes that grace, elegance, and authority are all similar, but lack the enviability of glamour. Whereas some qualities like beauty, talent, and event wealth may belong to a person, glamour is in the eye of the beholder, dependent on others wanting to be like someone. Berger gets into some much deeper social commentary:
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion. the pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its cases, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, amongst other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent day-dreams.
Whosh John, that was out of left field! But I think he gets at something interesting in the contradiction between a society that guarantees us the pursuit of happiness but not any specific level of material enjoyment. If we live in a stratified, unequal society, many people who work hard and do everything right will end up lucky and many people who don't work and do lots of things wrong will end up lucky and be in the ranks of the rich and powerful. That injustice inspires massive quantities of advertising, that serve to make us less happy by making us hopeful that new purchases will be the answer to our problems even though most of us will never get off the treadmill of working for a wage, paying it all back in housing, food, and other costs, and working to make it up again. This was a surprisingly good book.
No comments:
Post a Comment