GEN&SEX 50B Chapter Notes - Chapter 12: Olympia (Manet), Postminimalism, Guerrilla Girls
20 Jun 2018
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Section Twelve: Ways of Seeing
Representation and Art Practices
Reading A: Excerpt from Ways of Seeing
(John Berger)
- The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe
E.x. In the Middle Ages, when men believed in the physical existence of Hell, the sight of fire meant
something different from what it means today
- Vision is reciprocal
If you can see something then you can be seen from that something
- An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced
- Every image embodies a way of seeing
- Images were first made to create the appearance of something that was absent
Became evident that images could outlast what was represented and showed how something or someone
had once looked and how the subject had once been seen by people
- Increasing sense of individuality and increasing awareness of history changed imagery so that the specific vision of
the image maker (how X saw Y)
- The double losses of cultural mystification:
Works of art are made remote
The past offers fewer conclusions to complete in action
- We situate ourselves in the art that we see
Being prevented from seeing it, deprives us from history
Art of the past is mystified because privileged minority is trying to invent a history that can justify he past
role of the ruling classes and this justification doesn’t make sense in modern terms so it mystifies
- Perspective
Unique to European art
First established in the early Renaissance
Centers everything on the eye of the beholder
No visual reciprocity
Contradiction: structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who could only be in one place
at a time
- Man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you
Presence may be fabricated (pretends to be capable of what he isn’t)
- Woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself and defines what can and cannot be done to her
So intrinsic to her person that men think of it as a physical emanation
Taught and persuaded to survey herself continually
Has to survey what she is and everything she does because of how she appears to others and men
- Men survey women before he treats them
How a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated
So a woman has to demonstrate to others the way she wants to be treated
- Men act and women appear
- The surveyor of women in herself is male and the surveyed female
- European nude art form
Painters and spectator-owners were usually men
Manet represented a turning point- Olympia begins to question that role
The Venus of Urbino (Titian)
Olympia (Manet)
find more resources at oneclass.com
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Document Summary
Reading a: excerpt from ways of seeing (john berger) The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe. In the middle ages, when men believed in the physical existence of hell, the sight of fire meant something different from what it means today. If you can see something then you can be seen from that something. An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. Images were first made to create the appearance of something that was absent. Became evident that images could outlast what was represented and showed how something or someone had once looked and how the subject had once been seen by people. Increasing sense of individuality and increasing awareness of history changed imagery so that the specific vision of the image maker (how x saw y) The past offers fewer conclusions to complete in action. We situate ourselves in the art that we see.
