Status Updates From Ways of Seeing

Hmm. I’ll need to revisit the essay on oil painting I think. My initial reaction is to find it a bit aggressively charged against the medium over so-called (or perhaps real) bourgeois pretension but I am willingly to have my mind changed.

“From the tradition a kind of stereotype of "the great artist" has emerged. This great artist is a man whose life-time is consumed by struggle: partly against material circumstances, partly against incomprehension, partly against himself.”

“The formal portrait, as distinct from the self-portrait or the informal portrait of the painter’s friend never resolved this problem. But as the tradition continued, the painting of the sitter’s face became more and more generalized. His features became the mask which went with the costume. Today the final stage of this development can be seen in the puppet tv appearance of the average politician.” Uh, no.

“… a way of seeing the world, which was ultimately determined by new attitudes property and exchange, found its visual expression in the oil painting, and could not have found it in any other visual art form. Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.”

Hmm. Maybe.

“But the essential way of seeing women, the essential use to which their images are put, has not changed. Women are depicted in a quite different way from men - not because the feminine is different from the masculine - but because the ’ideal" spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him.”

“Here and in the European tradition generally, the convention of not painting the hair on a woman’s body helps towards the same end. Hair is associated with sexual power, with passion. The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly of such passion. Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.”

“In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and be is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear to be the result of his being there, it is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity. But he, by definition, is a stranger - with his clothes still on.”

Ah now I come to task with Berger. In his second essay, he repeats the story of the Fall. He gestures to the punishment of Eve, likening it to woman’s subservience to man.

What of Adam’s punishment? Is their punishment not done together? Eve is not blamed solely, as he claims in bold text, to claim otherwise is to be ignorant of the most basic understanding of the biblical story.

We have shifted to a new essay - I presume one on femininity in art because there was no title in my copy - so I withhold judgment until it is completed.

“One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear … 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.”