Introduction:
"Men dream of women. Women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors reminding them of how they look, or how they should look. Behind every glance is a judgement. Sometimes the glance they meet is their own, reflected back back from a mirror."
A woman is taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.... For how she appears to others, particularly how she appears to men is of crucial importance because it is normally thought of as the success of her life
In the nudes of European painting you can see how women were seen. Women dominated nude painting.
Kenneth Clark stated that being naked is simply being without clothes, whereas nude is a form of art. Berger contends differently that "to be naked is to be ones self. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised to be ones self." A nude has to be seen as an object to be a nude.
Adam and Eve story is telling - woman is blamed for being naked and is made subservient. European art emphasises nakedness not as the subjects are but as you see them. Susannah and the Elders is an example - Susannah sees herself as a sight, as a sight for men. The artist paints a nude then, by virtue of providing the woman with a mirror, suggests that the woman is to blame as she is vainly looking at herself. The mirror became a symbol of the vanity of the woman. Morally condemning the woman whose nakedness artists have painted for their own pleasure.
The Judgement of Paris is another mythological painting where the man makes a choice is a sort of beauty contest. Paris awards the apple to the woman he finds most beautiful.
20-30 only of nude women's painting are of the woman as herself - a Rubens, George de la Tour. Remainder are for the pleasure of the male owner. The women are condemned to never being naked. They compete for a prize: to be owned by men. Nell Gwynn painting shows her in submission.
Notably, in other non-European traditions, nudity is not supine; nakedness is portrayed as love between two people, the woman as active as the man.
The gaze from many of the subjects is out of the picture to the spectator. Responding to the man she knows is looking at her: the spectator owner. Paintings of male lovers existed but were private, not to be seen.
Women are to be seen languid: "to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own."
Some comments from the group of females that Berger discusses with:
Women wear uniform for many purposes - nudity is a sort of uniform: I am ready for sexual pleasure.
See good and bad government fresco - woman is relaxed, representing peace. Able to combine pleasure with thought and dreaming despite wearing loose comfortable, easy garment.
Other quotes: "Men act, women appear".
Critique
Berger's theory is seductively simple. At one level it seems almost uncontentious now as much of contemporary visual culture openly objectifies and debases women, as described in the post Gendering the Gaze. Berger lays bare the implied sexism in the art of the nude from Renaissance onwards, and we have seen this has not changed, perhaps even less subtle than in previous generations. Berger's treatise is the more effective for being straightforward with direct and lucid use of language.
The problems arise when one stops to think about what one does with the conclusion. It is then that Berger's work is seen as polemical rather than analytical. The approach is prescriptive rather than descriptive (Howells and Negreiros, 2012). The ideological approach says much about Berger, but does it say much about the works of art he uses in his argument. Is a theory of the way of seeing actually telling us much about the work itself? Berger presents the portrayal of nude women in some of the works he highlights as 'feeding the appetite' of scopophilic male viewers but that seems too sweeping a generalisation; not all viewers will see it that way (even if it was intended); art works are not simply a product of society, any more than they are simply a product of an artist. The whole is rather more than the sum of the parts; we must see the artist in isolation (as with the Edvard Munch example previously) but also the artist as part of a wider society. Overlaying this is the way visual culture is perceived by an audience. These factors interplay in subtle ways, meaning that the icons of visual culture will mean different things to different people at different times.
Let that not, though, diminish Berger's achievement in highlighting what is a very clear gender bias in European art.
Critique
Berger's theory is seductively simple. At one level it seems almost uncontentious now as much of contemporary visual culture openly objectifies and debases women, as described in the post Gendering the Gaze. Berger lays bare the implied sexism in the art of the nude from Renaissance onwards, and we have seen this has not changed, perhaps even less subtle than in previous generations. Berger's treatise is the more effective for being straightforward with direct and lucid use of language.
The problems arise when one stops to think about what one does with the conclusion. It is then that Berger's work is seen as polemical rather than analytical. The approach is prescriptive rather than descriptive (Howells and Negreiros, 2012). The ideological approach says much about Berger, but does it say much about the works of art he uses in his argument. Is a theory of the way of seeing actually telling us much about the work itself? Berger presents the portrayal of nude women in some of the works he highlights as 'feeding the appetite' of scopophilic male viewers but that seems too sweeping a generalisation; not all viewers will see it that way (even if it was intended); art works are not simply a product of society, any more than they are simply a product of an artist. The whole is rather more than the sum of the parts; we must see the artist in isolation (as with the Edvard Munch example previously) but also the artist as part of a wider society. Overlaying this is the way visual culture is perceived by an audience. These factors interplay in subtle ways, meaning that the icons of visual culture will mean different things to different people at different times.
Let that not, though, diminish Berger's achievement in highlighting what is a very clear gender bias in European art.
Reference:
Howell and Negreiros (2012) Visual Culture Polity Press Cambridge
Howell and Negreiros (2012) Visual Culture Polity Press Cambridge
No comments:
Post a Comment