01-readings.docx

Ways of Seeing, John Berger Episode 1  

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Perspective makes the eye the centre of the visible world. But the human eye can only be in one place at a time. It takes its visible world with it as it walks. (1:37) As you look at them now on your screen, your wallpaper is round them. Your window is opposite them. Your carpet is below them. At this same moment, they are on many other screens, surrounded by different objects, different colours, different sounds. You are seeing them in the context of your own life. They are surrounded not by gilt frames, but by the familiarity of the room you are in, and the people around you. (3:59) I don’t want to suggest that there is nothing left to experience before original works of art except a certain sense of awe because they have survived, because they are genuine, because they are absurdly valuable. A lot more is possible. But only if art is stripped of the false mystery and the false religiosity which surrounds it. This religiosity, usually linked with cash value, but always invoked in the name of culture and civilisation, is in fact a substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproduceable. (9:58) Because paintings are silent and still, and because their meaning is no longer attached to them, but has become transmittable, paintings lend themselves to easy manipulation. They can be used to make arguments or points which may be different, very different, from their original meaning. And because paintings are essentially silent and still, the most obvious way of manipulating them is by using movement and sound. (13:10) When paintings are reproduced, they become a form of information, which is being continually transmitted, and so there they have to hold their own, against all the other information, which is jostling around them to appear on the same page or the same screen. (19:01) What so often inhibits such a spontaneous process is the false mystification which surrounds art. For instance, the art book depends upon reproductions. Yet, often, what the reproductions make accessible, a text begins to make inaccessible. What might become part of our language is jealously guarded and kept within the narrow preserves of the art expert. (22:04) Children, until they’re educated out of it and forced to accept mystifications, look at images and interpret them very directly. They connect any image, whether from a comic or from the National Gallery, directly with their own experience. (25:53)

Episode 2 

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In his book on the nude, Kenneth Clark says that being naked is simply being without clothes. The nude, according to him, is a form of art. I would put it differently. To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen by others and yet not recognised as oneself. A nude has to be seen as an object in order to be a nude. (3:57) Thus, the mirror became a symbol of the vanity of women. Yet, the male hypocrisy in this is blatant. You paint a naked woman because you enjoy looking at her. You put a mirror in her hand, and you call the painting vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you have painted for your own pleasure, thus, incidentally, repeating the biblical example by blaming the woman. (7:40)

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The absurdity of this male flattery, although it was not seen as absurd then, reached its peak in the public academic art of the 19th century. Prime ministers discussed under paintings like this. When one of them felt he had been outwitted, he looked up for consolation. (13:37)

Practices of Looking Chapter 1 

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To those of us who are blind or have low vision, seeing and visuality are no less important than they are to those of us who are sighted because the everyday world is so strongly organized around visual and spatial cues that take seeing for granted. (9) Like other practices, looking involves relationships of power. (9) Representation refers to the use of language and images to create meaning about the world around us. (12) Foucault: complex relationship between the drawing, the paintings, their words, and their referent (the pipe) (15) We construct the meaning of things through the process of representing them. (12) Magritte asks us to consider how labels and images produce meaning yet cannot fully invoke the experience of the object. (15) This combination of the subjective and the objective is a central tension in our regard of camera-generated images. (17) Barthes: the photograph, unlike a drawing, offers an unprecedented conjunction between what is here now (the image) and what was there then (the referent, or object, thing, or place); studium = truth function of the photograph; there is no singular truth to be identified outside the myths of ideologies of cultural expression; photographs always indicate a kind of mortality, evoking death in the moments in which they seem to stop time; punctum = affective element of those certain photographs that pierce one’s heart with feeling (17–18); The denotative meaning of the image refers to its literal, explicit meaning. […] Connotative meanings are informed by the cultural and historical contexts of the image and its viewers’ lived, felt knowledge of those circumstances—all that the image means to them personally and socially.; myth = hidden set of rules and conventions through which meanings, which are specific to certain groups, are made to seem universal and given for a whole society (20) The meaning of photographs can thus be seen as somewhat paradoxical in that they can be emotional objects through the punctum, or the emotionally piercing quality, yet they can also, through the effect of the studium, serve as banal traces of the real, documentary evidence of something that simply has happened. (18) Sekula: The photograph is imaged to have, depending on its context, a power that is primarily affective or a power that is primarily informative. Both powers reside in the mythical truth-value of the photograph. (18); both honorifically (for example, in the case of portraiture) and repressively (in the case of the use of photography for the cataloguing of citizens, police photographs, and the use of photographs to discern qualities such as pathology or deviance in human subjects) (24)

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The dividing line between what an image denotes and what it connotes can be ambiguous, and connotative meanings can change with changes in social context and over time. (20) One could say that ideology is the means by which certain values—such as individual freedom, progress, and the importance of home—are made to seem like natural, inevitable aspects of everyday life. […] The most important aspect of ideologies in the modernist period was that they appeared to be natural or given, rather than part of a system of belief that a culture produces in order to function in a particular way. (23) Saussure: language […] depends on [arbitrary, contextual] conventions and codes for its meanings (28) Pierce: meaning resides […] in the interpretation of the perception and subsequent action based on that perception (28); iconic, indexical, and symbolic (31) Semiotics Image icons are experienced as if universal, but their meanings are always historically and contextually produced. (39) There is an increased understanding that these concepts of the universal were actually restricted to specific privileged groups. (40) These codes build on one another, incorporating these historical legacies of image codes at the same time that they rework, play off, and recode them. (46) To interpret images is to examine the assumptions that we and others bring to them at different times and in different places and to decode the visual language that they “speak.” All images contain layers of meaning that include their formal aspects, their cultural and sociohistorical references, the ways they make reference to the images that precede and surround them, and the contexts in which they are displayed. (46)