archive.johnshlee

Ways of Seeing - reading group 2023-November

In chapter 1, Berger criticizes the mystification of art works by the market value. The 'original', as a byproduct of reproduction, becomes mystified as though holy relic by the market value. And the seclusive elite ivory tower academics, are afraid to break the convention.

The contradiction of perspective is that it erased the reciprocity of the visible. In reality, the one who sees is also seen, therefore making the viewer more of an active agent aware of how they are being seen in a kind of a historical awareness, rather than the world serving them. But the discovery of perspective made the viewer the center of the visible, in which the world is being delivered to the eye of the viewer.
And this contradiction(loss of reciprocity and only one way communication) became more apparent through the movie camera. The movie camera literally delivered all angles of perspectives to the viewer. Now the viewer can simply sit and wait for the world to be delivered to them, unless they are the camera holder and the creator.

Paintings/images used to be directly associated with an architecture or place. Now they are divorced, also largely due to reproduction of images. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? What does it actually do to us psychologically and physiologically? Does it make us detached from the material world? Does it make us more passive?

Recent Museum Statistics
7.7 million visitors to Louvre in 2022
3.2 million visitors to MET in 2023
625 thousand visitors to Rijksmuseum in 2021
In Germany, it is estimated that around 30 percent of the population visit museums on a regular basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_museums
National Museum of Korea 6.5% out of Korea, 35% out of Seoul
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art 3.5% out of Korea and 18.5% out of Seoul in 2022
Tate Modern 5.7% out of UK, 43% out of London
Guangdong Museum 0.2% out of China, 2.6% out of Guangdong
Topography of Terror 57% of Berlin, 2.5% of Germany
M+ 27% of Hongkong
National Gallery of Art 42% out of Washington D.C., 1% of USA

Did reproduction truly free the masses? Are we simply still in the middle of this liberating and revolutionary process for the masses to gain more subjectivity through the availability of reproduction? Is social media the kind of reciprocal media that Berger might have wished that followed the technological development of image reproduction?

Is art without authority actually good? What does an art without authority even mean? What the difference between authenticity and authority? Is strong authentication a prerequisite for authorization? Can one be authentic without authority? What is authority? It's to have others listen to you. There is a difference between authority and dictatorship.

Narcissism

Women's image of themselves derive from other people, mainly men. But for men, the image of themselves derive from the world, because they act in it. Men have a sense of their own identity, and this identity is the product of the very interaction with the world, which women lack. They store a sense of worth through this interaction.

The compulsion to go out and interact with the world. "What is going on?" To understand what's going on. To engage with the world.

It seems to me that the very idea of subjectivity and individuality is what's at stake here and that's also what women want. Not only women, but non-white male. We should not confuse this subjectivity with white male. It's not like subjectivity is the invention of white male that only white male own and have access to. It's a constant that is open to anyone who interact with the world. Subjectivity is something bigger than white male. It's simply that white male happened to discover it first.

Gaze:
Subject vs Object. Who gets to be considered a subject? Are animals and plants subjects? Do they have their own consciousness and inner life? Does simply having own consciousness make one a subject?
Sartre: Sometimes we exist for other people. By looking at others, you register others as object in YOUR world. And the same thing happens when others look at you. You become an object in THEIR world.
Berger & Mulvey: male gaze. Nude is for the benefit of male gaze. Mulvey said in film, everything is geared toward male viewer. Anime does this all the time.
Bell Hooks: She was saying Mulvey is correct, but she's only confined to talking about white women. The relation and dynamic of Black men and white women are complex. Black men, though get objectified as dangerous savages, they still get to have male gaze. And white women get to appear sexy to black men, which is a kind of power. But black women have almost no representation. Hooks opposes male gaze, as in actively fighting against it, not even standing in defiance like white women? As a child, she was told not to stare, not even at a cop.
Fanon & Said: post-colonial gaze. Colonizer's gaze and colonized gaze. Just as cops see gaze of black people as threat, if a colonized looks at the colonizer, it comes off as threat because the colonizer becomes aware that they're being objectified. Also, when the slave is able to gaze at you and see that they're on par with you just as another human being, they might rise up and fight. For the colonized, being gazed at and gazing at has a real downsizing consequences.
The category of Oriental is a bizarre objectification, because it generalizes the entire east from Europe. This gaze is problematic not only because it generalizes, but because it's essentially just a gaze by proxy. It's not a real personal gaze. The Orientalist authors didn't actually look, but rather only looked upon whole regions of culture and judged that they were inferior without actually understanding their culture.
There is a thing called Paris Syndrome, where a Japanese person traveled to Paris and witnessed the reality of it and their illusions are shattered.
Foucault: medical gaze. Modern day medical professionals brought about change in the gaze toward a patient. Doctors see patients as a problem to be solved. They don't look at you as a whole, not as a subject, but rather only through the parts that are the problems, like things to be fixed, puzzle to be solved.
Foucault also had an argument about general gaze. Panoptican is a device invented by Jeremy Bentham. He created a theoretical prison in a cylindrical structure of cells, which face the central guard tower. There is a bright light that blinds all the cells, so prisoner cannot know whether they're being watched or not. Though it's not possible for the guard to watch everyone, the prisoners can't know if they're being watched or not. Foucault said, we created our own panoptican, because we're choosing not to do the action, because what if someone, a neighbor is watching? We're regulating ourselves?

What about the gaze of God? The gaze of the world? The gaze of History? So you can do the thing that you won't feel shame.

At the end of the day, it's about gaining and reclaiming your own consciousness. And in order to do that, the subjugated must learn and take from the subjugator, instead of ignoring and subduing their entire culture. You have to remove the illusion, but that doesn't mean to dismiss some of the good in it.

MEETING

Aura, and religiosity. We want someone to be seeing us. The beast has gotten bigger.

Where does the Aura come from? Does it come from Authority? God?

Both Pop art and Conceptual art tried to challenge the notion of the original.

Invention of technology deconstructs the one-point perspective generated by Renaissance.

Adorno was warning to Benjamin not be too optimistic about technology liberating the masses.

It's the social context in which the technology is used, not the technology itself.

Surfaces and aura. Granularity. Flattening things lends to the possibility of politically being exploited? Does flattening things mystify it?

Mass media, who is really consuming the art, the working class people, do they have any access to painting or excluded from it entirely?

Dada. There is a tradition in critical visual culture. Berger also did employed the technique of collages.

How institutions with cultural capital borrow accumulated aura from past "great" artists and the new artists who show in these spaces also gain the aura from all those.

What is the aura for you? What is the way of seeing? Is aura the way we see things?

The aura, property, aura emanating from property.

Genius, God figure, male as also the authority to create female bodies, this is changing. What new images are being created today then?

In Chapter 3, Berger addresses private property relation in oil paintings. Not only oil paintings themselves are objects, but they also depict other objects as things to be owned by the owner of the painting.

There are a few exceptions like Rubens, Rambrandt, Vermeer, Constable, Turner, Monet and so on, but we should not confuse the rest of third-rate oil paintings with these exceptions.

It makes sense that Van Eyck's painting style, which depicts objects, especially valuable objects, was in demand in Flanders like Bruges, which was a bustling trade centre, and the rich merchants there, who included many foreigners, were a good source of commissions for the artist.

Berger mentions that seen from the outside perspective of the Western culture like an anthropologist, Western culture since 15th century is a culture of private property, which is attributed to the discovery of perspective and rise of individualism during the Renaissance. That seems undeniable. But it's also probably true that the rise of individualism during Renaissance eventually developed into democracy.
But how come, though early capitalism existed in China as well, that Chinese culture never established the same kind of relation to private property at large?

When nobles were the exceptional few who could own such private property, the oil paintings were an "affirmation" of their own status, whereas as the concentration of wealth spread more to the bourgeoisie, the focus of oil painting became more about the "buying power" of money, which alludes to envy. But could it be that the rise of individualism also gave rise to the bourgeoisie, which never occurred to the same height in other cultures? Should we look at the relation to private property only as a vulgar and bad thing? Doesn't it represent a mobility of power?

The whole point Berger raises is the mystification and illusory aspect of private property.

The contradiction and hypocrisy between the metaphysical morale and vanity in oil painting. Isn't the morale also an aspect stemming from mythology?
What is the correct or just relation between mythology and history? Is history without any element of mythology good? Is mythology in history always bad?

Chapter 4 talks about publicity and glamour, envy, day-dreaming and illusory fantasy it evokes.

Berger's "way of seeing" is that of Marx's critique of property relations.

What other ways than Marxist critique of property relations are possible?

"The more monotonous the present, the more the imagination must seize upon the future. The passivity of the present is then replaced by the activity of an imaginary future, pictured conjured up by publicity." This system of capitalism today is the same system of a capitalist owning a factory and a bar for the workers, except it's now amplified and complex, but the mechanism is the same. It is the mechanism of the passive present met by an empty future. Passive reality met by an active fantasy. How can then, workers break out of this cycle? And what would that alternative system's mechanism look like? Would it be then an active reality met by a passive fantasy? An active present met by a graspable future?

How has the images of oil painting tradition continued to today's screen obsessed society?

MEETING

Renaissance, political power of the church. What does it say about the art? Embrace.

Why does something come back if paintings and art are relfection o fhte values of today?

Is conceptual art the new outlier of the society?

regression towards the mean

forgery in oil painting, period of 10 years, half life of forgery, whatever trends existed at that time,

material relation to the topic of art

in ancient china, they tried to depict objects as real as oil painting. but china was using watercolor?

black and red, only two colors used in Chinese tradition of painting. Taoism is also a big influence in the philosophy and style of painting.