"Ways of Seeing"

[fiefoe]

So glad to finally read John Berger's classic work. Now I have some new perspectives on old paintings.

• The reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental than that of spoken dialogue. And often dialogue is an attempt to verbalize this - an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, 'you see things', and an attempt to discover how 'he sees things'.
• Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent... Later still the specific vision of the image-maker was also recognized as part of the record. An image became a record of how X had seen V. This was the result of an increasing consciousness of individuality, accompanying an increasing awareness of history.
• History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past.
• In the end, the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes, and such a justification can no longer make sense in modern terms. And so, inevitably, it mystifies.
• In this confrontation the Regents and Regentesses stare at Hals, a destitute old painter who has lost his reputation and lives off public charity; he examines them through the eyes of a pauper who must nevertheless try to be objective, i.e., must try to surmount the way he sees as a pauper. This is the drama of these paintings. A drama of an ' unforgettable contrast '. <> Mystification has little to do with the vocabulary used. Mystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident. Hals was the first portraitist to paint the new characters and expressions created by capitalism. He did in pictorial terms what Balzac did two centuries later in literature.
• According to the convention of perspective there is no visual reciprocity. There is no need for God to situate himself in relation to others: he is himself the situation. The inherent contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
• Every drawing or painting that used perspective proposed to the spectator that he was the unique centre of the world. The camera - and more particularly the movie camera - demonstrated that there was no centre.
• Originally paintings were an integral part of the building for which they were designed. Sometimes in an early Renaissance church or chapel one has the feeling that the images on the wall are records of the building's interior life, that together they make up the building's memory
• Because of the camera, the painting now travels to the spectator rather than the spectator to the painting. In its travels, its meaning is diversified.
• But in either case the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction. It is no longer what its image shows that strikes one as unique; its first meaning is no longer to be found in what it says, but in what it is.
• Yet the spiritual value of an object, as distinct from a message or an example, can only be explained in terms of magic or religion. And since in modern society neither of these is a living force, the art object, the 'work of art', is enveloped in an atmosphere of entirely bogus religiosity. Works of art are discussed and presented as though they were holy relics: relics which are first and foremost evidence of their own survival.
• This is because a film unfolds in time and a painting does not. <> In a film the way one image follows another, their succession, constructs an argument which becomes irreversible... the simultaneity of the whole painting is there to reverse or qualify his conclusion. The painting maintains its own authority.
• reproductions are still used to bolster the illusion that nothing has changed, that art, with its unique undiminished authority, justifies most other forms of authority, that art makes inequality seem noble and hierarchies seem thrilling. For example, the whole concept of the National Cultural Heritage exploits the authority of art to glorify the present social system and its priorities.
• in the original the silence and stillness permeate the actual material, the paint, in which one follows the traces of the painter's immediate gestures. This has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one's own act of looking at it. In this special sense all paintings are contemporary. Hence the immediacy of their testimony. Their historical moment is literally there before our eyes.
• The issue is... between a total approach to art which attempts to relate it to every aspect of experience and the esoteric approach of a few specialized experts who are the clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline. (In decline, not before the proletariat, but before the new power of the corporation and the state.) The real question is: to whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong?
• For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us.
• If the new language of images were used differently, it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power. Within it we could begin to define our experiences more precisely in areas where words are inadequate. (Seeing comes before words.) Not only personal experience, but also the essential historical experience of our relation to the past: that is to say the experience of seeking to give meaning to our lives, of trying to understand the history of which we can become the active agents.

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• A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to b capable of what he is not. But the pretence is always towards a power which he exercises on others. <> By contrast, a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her... Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura.
• The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.
• Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated.
• 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.
• But in them all there remains the implication that the subject (a woman) is aware of being seen by a spectator.
  She is not naked as she is.
  She is naked as the spectator sees her.
• You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure. <> The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.
• What is true is that the nude is always conventionalized - and the authority for its conventions derives from a certain tradition of art... To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself.
• Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.
• Almost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal - either literally or metaphorically - because the sexual protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it.
• a hundred of these exceptions. In each case the painter's personal vision of the particular women he is painting is so strong that it makes no allowance for the spectator. The painter's vision binds the woman to him so that they become as inseparable as couples in stone.
• at the moment of nakedness first perceived, an element of banality enters: an element that exists only because we need it.
• Apart from the necessity of transcending the single instant and of admitting subjectivity, there is, as we have seen, one further element which is essential for any great sexual image of the naked. This is the element of banality which must be undisguised but not chilling. It is this which distinguishes between voyeur and lover. Here such banality is to be found in Rubens's compulsive painting of the fat softness of Hélène Fourment's flesh
• On the one hand the individualism of the artist, the thinker, the patron, the owner: on the other hand, the person who is the object of their activities - the woman - treated as a thing or an abstraction.

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• This analogy between possessing and the way of seeing which is incorporated in oil painting, is a factor usually ignored by art experts and historians... Levi-Strauss writes:  It is this avid and ambitious desire to take possession of the object for the benefit of the owner or even of the spectator which seems to me to constitute one of the outstandingly original features of the art of Western civilization.
• If we were simply saying that European art between 1500 and 1900 served the interests of the successive ruling classes... we should not be saying anything very new. What is being proposed is a little more precise; that a way of seeing the world, which was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange, found its visual expression in the oil painting,
• Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects... Oil painting conveyed a vision of total exteriority.
• But in no other culture is the difference between 'masterpiece' and average work so large as in the tradition of the oil painting. In this tradition the difference is not just a question of skill or imagination, but also of morale... And it is in this contradiction between art and market that the explanations must be sought for what amounts to the contrast, the antagonism existing between the exceptional work and the average.
• Holbein's painting of The Ambassadors (1533): Every square inch of the surface of this painting, whilst remaining purely visual, appeals to, importunes, the sense of touch.
• Oil painting celebrated a new kind of wealth - which was dynamic and which found its only sanction in the supreme buying power of money. Thus painting itself had to be able to demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy.
• the average religious painting of the tradition... cannot free itself of its original propensity to procure the tangible for the immediate pleasure of the owner.
• William Blake: he did everything he could to make his figures lose substance, to become transparent and indeterminate one from the other, to defy gravity, to be present but intangible, to glow without a definable surface,
• Yet the painted public portrait must insist upon a formal distance. It is this - and not technical inability on the part of the painter - which makes the average portrait of the tradition appear stiff and rigid. The artificiality is deep within its own terms of seeing, because the subject has to be seen simultaneously from close-to and from afar.
• The highest category in oil painting was the history or mythological picture... Except for certain exceptional works in which the painter's own personal lyricism was expressed, these mythological paintings strike us today as the most vacuous of all. They are like tired tableaux in wax that won't melt. Yet their prestige and their emptiness were directly connected...  Their purpose was not to transport their spectator-owners into new experience, but to embellish such experience as they already possessed.
• The so-called 'genre' picture - the picture of 'low life': Again, the faculty of oil paint to create the illusion of substantiality lent plausibility to a sentimental lie: namely that it was the honest and hard-working who prospered,


• The sky has no surface and is intangible; the sky cannot be turned into a thing or given a quantity. And landscape painting begins with the problem of painting sky and distance.
• The first pure landscapes - painted in Holland in the seventeenth century - answered no direct social need. (As a result Ruysdael starved and Hobbema had to give up.)... But each time the tradition of oil painting was significantly modified, the first initiative came from landscape painting.
• We are arguing that if one studies the culture of the European oil painting as a whole, and if one leaves aside its own claims for itself, its model is not so much a framed window open on to the world as a safe let into the wall, a safe in which the visible has been deposited.
• The relation between property and art in European culture appears natural to that culture
• This great artist is a man whose life-time is consumed by struggle: partly against material circumstances, partly against incomprehension, partly against himself... In no other culture has the artist been thought of in this way. Why then in this culture?... But the struggle was not only to live. Each time a painter realized that he was dissatisfied with the limited role of painting as a celebration of material property and of the status that accompanied it, he inevitably found himself struggling with the very language of his own art as understood by the tradition of his calling.
• self-portraits by Rembrandt: In the later painting he has turned the tradition against itself. He has wrested its language away from it. He is an old man. All has gone except a sense of the question of existence, of existence as a question.

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• Publicity images also belong to the moment in the sense that they must be continually renewed and made up-to-date. Yet they never speak of the present. Often they refer to the past and always they speak of the future.
• publicity as a system only makes a single proposal. <> It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more.
• Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.
• the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power... It is this which explains the absent, unfocused look of so many glamour images.
• She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
• Compare the images of publicity and paintings:
  The sea, offering a new life.
  The man as knight (horseman) become motorist.
• Oil painting, before it was anything else, was a celebration of private property. As an art-form it derived from the principle that you are what you have.
• In the language of oil painting these vague historical or poetic or moral references are always present. The fact that they are imprecise and ultimately meaningless is an advantage: they should not be understandable, they should merely be reminiscent of cultural lessons half-learnt. Publicity makes all history mythical, but to do so effectively it needs a visual language with historical dimensions.
• The power to spend money is the power to live. According to the legends of publicity, those who lack the power to spend money become literally faceless.
• Mrs Siddons as seen by Gainsborough is not glamorous, because she is not presented as enviable and therefore happy. She may be seen as wealthy, beautiful, talented, lucky. But her qualities are her own and have been recognized as such. What she is does not entirely depend upon others wanting to be like her. She is not purely the creature of others' envy - which is how, for example, Andy Warhol presents Marilyn Monroe.
• Publicity is essentially eventless. It extends just as far as nothing else is happening. For publicity all real events are exceptional and happen only to strangers... Everything publicity shows is there awaiting acquisition. The act of acquiring has taken the place of all other actions, the sense of having has obliterated all other senses.