Ways of Seeing: Episode 1
This program aims to question some of the assumptions usually made about the tradition of European painting. He considers that way we see these paintings in a 21st-century perspective as we see these painting as nobody saw them before.
By discovering why we see painting with this perspective, we shall also discover something about ourselves and the situation in which we are living.
- A large part of seeing depends upon habit and convention.
- All of the paintings of the tradition (1400-1900) used the convention of perspective, which is unique to European art
- Perspective centres everything on the eye of the beholder. Perspective makes the eye the centre of the visible world, but the human eye can only be in one place at a time.
- With the invention of the camera, everything changed. We could see things which were not there in front of us. It not only changed what we see, but also how we see. It even changed paintings painted long before it was invented.
- Thanks to photography, we can now see paintings in the context of your own life. Before, a paintings uniqueness was part of the place where it is exhibit such as paintings inside Renaissance churches. Everything around them confirms and consolidates its meaning.
- Images now come to you, you do not come to them. It is the image of the painting which travels now. An images meaning or a large part of it has now become transmittable.
- However, you may say, original paintings are still unique due to their physical authenticity.
- The camera has made traditional paintings possible meanings and destroyed its unique original meaning.
- The uninterrupted silence and the stillness of a painting can be very striking. Because their meaning has no longer attached to them but has become transmittable, paintings lend themselves to easy manipulation by movement and sound.
- In paintings, there is no unfolding of time. Everything is presented simultaneously, unlike a film.
- Music and rhythm changed the significance of picture.
- When paintings are reproduced they become a form of information which is being transmitted and so there they have to hold their own against all the other information that is jostling around them to appear on the same page/screen.
- The meaning of an image can be changed according to what you see beside it or what comes after it.
- Reproductions of works of art can be used by anybody for their own purposes. Images can be used like words, we can talk with them. They are used to describe or recreate an experience.
- Nowadays, until children are educated out and forced to accept mystifications, they look at images and interpret them very directly. They connect any image directly with their own experience.
- Berger aims to explore the relationship the experience of art has directly to other experiences in life, and to use the means of reproduction as though they offered a language, as though pictures were like words rather than holy relics.
Brian McCabe
Miniclicks in Brighton Jim Stephenson
Luxembourg Rut Bees
New England House, New England Street
Ways of Seeing: Episode 2
- Men dream of women and women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at. Women constantly meet glances that act as mirrors, reminding them of how they look or how they should look. Behind every glance is a judgement.
- A woman is always accompanied. Even when they are alone, they have an 'image' of themselves. From a young age, woman are taught and persuaded to continually survey herself. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, particularly how she appears to men is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.
- In Kenneth Clark's book In the Nude, he says that being naked is simply being without clothes. The nude, according to him is a form of art. Berger has a different interpretation of this. He believes being naked is to be ones self, to be nude is to be seen naked by other and yet not recognised for oneself. A nude has to be seen as an object in order to considered one.
- The story begins with Adam and Eve in the Genesis chapter of the Bible. There are two things are striking about this story: One being that both Adam and Eve become aware of being naked because as a result of eating the apple from the tree in the Garden of Eden, each sees the other differently. Nakedness is created in the mind of the beholder. The other point being the fact that the woman is blamed and is punished by being made subservient to the man. Thus, in relation to the woman, the man becomes the agent of God.
- The nude implies an awareness of being seen by the spectator. They are not naked as they are, they are naked as you see them.
- The mirror became a symbol of the vanity of men, 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 call the image vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness to you have depicted for your own pleasure, repeating the biblical example of blaming the woman.
- There's a great difference between being seen as oneself naked or seeing another in that way with a body put on display. To be naked is to be without disguise, to be on display is to have a person hair and skin turned into a disguise, a disguise which cannot be discarded. Their nakedness in oil paintings becomes as formal as their clothes.
- In another tradition, nakedness is a celebration of active sexual love between two people. The woman as active as the man. However, in oil paintings even when the male lover is present, their gaze is still obeyed towards the spectator of that being from a male gaze. The only one to break this gaze is Cupid.
- Furthermore, women had to be shown languid, exhibiting minimum energy. They are there to feed an appetite and not their own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7wi8jd7aC4
Ways of Seeing: Episode 3We look, we buy, it is ours. It is ours to consume, to sell again, perhaps to give away. More often, it is ours to keep. We look, we buy and we collect valuable objects. But the most valuable object of all has become the oil painting.
- Oil paintings often depict things, things which, in reality, are buyable. To paint a thing and put it on a canvas, is not unlike buying it and putting it in your house. The objects within the painting often appear as tangible as those outside it.
- If you buy a painting, you buy also the looks of the thing it represents. Paintings often show treasures, but they have become treasure themselves. Art galleries are like palaces, but also like banks. When they shut for the night, they are guarded lest the image of things which are desirable. The value of paintings has become mysterious. Where, we ask ourselves, does this value come from?
- Those who use new methods of reproduction and communication, those who write books or make television programmes about art, tend to cling to the old approach. Art remains something sacred. A love of art seems, automatically, to be offered as a sublime human experience.
- If the experience of art is sublime, it looks as if it can be sublimely independent of a lot of other values. So perhaps we should be somewhat wary of the love of art. You cannot explain anything in history or art history by the love of art.
- A patron cannot be surrounded by music or poems in the same way as they are by their pictures. From about 1500 to 1900, the visual arts of Europe were dominated by the oil painting, the easel picture. This kind of painting had never been used anywhere else in the world before. The tradition of oil painting was made up of hundred of thousands of unremarkable works hung all over the walls of galleries and private houses, rather in the same way as the Reserve Collection is still hung in the National Gallery.
- The European oil painting, unlike the art of other periods, placed a unique emphasis on the tangibility, the solidity, the texture, the weight, the graspability of what was depicted. What was real was what you could put your hands on.
- Works of art in other cultures and periods celebrated wealth and power. Gods, princes and dynasties were worshipped. But these works were static, ritualistic, hierarchic, symbolic. They celebrated a social or divine order. Whereas, the European oil painting served a different kind of wealth. It glorified not a static order of things, but the ability to buy and furnish and to own.
- A certain kind of oil painting celebrated merchandise in a way that had never happened before in the history of art. Merchandise became the actual principle subject of these works. Eating is a pleasure, but these paintings which depicted foods could not be eaten. They are a demonstration of the artist's virtuosity and the owner's wealth.
Livestock, Objects and Houses
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