Ways of Seeing

John Berger's book "Ways of Seeing' is described by OCA Tutor peterhj as one of the most influential art books of the 20th Century.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet and a (possibly) flagrant breach of intellectual property rights it is now possible to view the BBC TV series

Each episode is broken up into four parts. Here are the links to the parts that make up episode 2 - The Female Nude

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u72AIab-Gdc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHsV7ljusCs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1yvciNEuAs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZNB-SfC7w

Would it helpful if the OCA provided more links to arts content on the web, and if so what do you want to see?

(I imagine it might be possible for us to originate some content ourselves)

Gareth

And here is the episode on Oil Painting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiNqoyfeQDQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJnYQ-TXFqY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXWUuQUCHF8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUyI_LdXRnI

Try to find the first episode, it is the one linked to Walter Benjamin

Here it is

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnfB-pUm3eI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peONDtyn8bM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vHrRvsXBkM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XShzabEv8bM

Great thanks Peter - I'd forgotten the first 15 seconds of the episode!

It's that shirt that gets the biggest laugh from my students, but they don't laugh long.

Gareth and Peter:

I hate to be sceptical, but . . .

A passage from Ways of Seeing by John Berger (the book, Penguin, reprinted 2003), p. 47.

"If a woman makes a good joke this is an example of how she treats the joker in herself and accordingly of how she would like to be treated by others. Only a man can make a good joke for its own sake.



One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. 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."

My questions are:

Why should we believe him?

Are these proven facts or his own opinions? (There are no references).

Are these not rather broad generalizations, without supporting evidence?

Mary

P.S. I watched the "Nude" and "Oil Painting" segments of the video.

I can only suggest that you read as much feminist theory as you can then decide where you stand.  Two things to bear in mind

the book/programme was produced in the early 70's

cultural theory, like any theory to be truthful, does not consist of proven facts but the best fit given the state of knowledge at the time; and a proven fact is only any good as far as they go, look at Newton!

More importantly the book is a polemic so look at the first two sentences of the section, "According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different from that of a man.  A man's presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies" (p. 45. my emphasis)

You might consider that the last thirty years of "questioning" has over turned those conventions or, as I do, that the dominant ideology has managed to accommodate much of the feminist critique whilst still preserving the pre-existing power relationships between the genders leaving women as de Beauvoire's "Second Sex"

Hi folio

I don't think you have to apologise for being sceptical - in fact I don't think you are being sceptical, you're being critical.

Where I think Berger was on dodgy ground back in 1974 and seems well adrift now is that while there is much evidence in the oil paintings he features to support his views, this is not necessarily the case in contemporary life or even necessarily in contemporary oil painting (thinking of work such as that by Lucien Freud here).

What I do think is unquestionably a good thing is that in the past it would have been very difficult for someone outside of a traditional educational institution to see Berger's films. With the web increasingly access to these resources is being democratised. The downside is that there is so much stuff on the web that one has to sift through tons of content to find the genuinely thought provoking. What I want the OCA to increasingly do for its students is to provide a 'web reading/viewing list' associated with each course.

Gareth

I thought it might be instructive for OCA students to see the reading list for the Critical Studies module of the Fine Art BA programme that I teach on.  This is only the first year reading list (in two parts) and there is another for the second year.  Obviously the students are not expected to read all of each book, though many do. The Bibliography is issued with the module descriptor and the reading list incorporates all the 'additional' reading mentioned in the handouts as well as books that I might refer to from time to time in the lectures and seminars. The module is compulsory for all Fine Art, Design and Foundation Degree students and is delivered in on 90min session per week.  The reading lists are marginally different for the Design and FD students but not significantly.

OK so you can only attach one document per post LOL

Here's the Reading List

Thanks peter they look good, I have printed off both lists.

TT -- maybe I'm being both sceptical and critical, and unless I've got it wrong, both you and Peter appear to be conceding that John Berger was "on dodgy ground".  The videos "read" better than the book, but his style of argument doesn't appeal to me or convince me -- too many assertions, not enough facts. But he's certainly thought-provoking and I for one wouldn't have known of the video's existence without the link.

Reading through your's and Peter's responses, and reading again bits of the Berger book, some instinct propelled me to the bookshelf for A Room of One's Own. I opened it at random and started reading the first paragraph my eyes rested on. This is the exact truth. It's a long paragraph so I've attached it here rather than typing it in. It was written in 1928 and I think it has stood the test of time pretty well.

P.S. The full text of A Room of One's Own is at http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200791h.html and most of Virginal Woolf's other books as well.

Peter, about your reading lists: The very first one in the Bibliography -- Criticizing Photographs by Terry Barrett-- I just got it out from the library last week and it's absolutely first-rate. I love it and am going to buy it. The last two as well in that list, by Rudolf Arnheim -- I like him and have just got a book of essays from Amazon, To the Rescue of Art. Some of the others in between I've read or skimmed through, to more or less profit. It's interesting that some of them specify a chapter or an essay, not the whole book.

In Berger's defence I should say that he said we should treat anything he said with suspision. I suspect he was being deliberately provocative in the opening lines of the programme as he went on to emphasize the male hypocicy in the values associated with female nudes. Personally I take issue with this to an extent, although I can see some truth in it. 

Certainly when drawing a nude I quickly get into a state of mind where I am unaware of the subject matter. I might just as well be drawing a vase or something as I am only interested in the technical aspects of the drawing. Personally I see no reason the subject should always be nude but the (female) teachers tell me it has to be so.

That said my biggest fear is the model would be someone I know. I think this probably says a lot about my values.

The point I take from the programme is that the values embodied in paintings often contain contradictions that point to something more interesting going on beneath the surface. The specifics of what those contradictions are may be open to challenge though.

Berger was pointing to a post structuralist critique both of art and art history.  This has to be seen in his, in my opinion correct, late modernist or early post-modernist ,neo-Marxist critique of the dominant ideology of the West in general (this is as much a challenge to one and all to investigate the terms I have used as a defence of Berger)

Benjamin, Barthes, Althuser and Foucault plus feminist writers like Pollock and Nocklin are a good place to start!

Well, I'm not sure what I've started here, but here are some thoughts:

What ever one might think of his framework of analysis, there are insights to be gleaned from watching the videos. There may not be many facts Folio, but I think Berger does provide a highly accessible critical perspective on European oil painting - the section on the judgement of Paris for example (at the start of the second section of of the Nude programme)

Would it be good if OCA students spent less time drawing or behind a camera and more time reading Althuser I'm not sure Peter but one of the things I know you prompt your students to do and are alerting us to here is to think about what images are for and why one creates them. Which in my opinion is 'a good thing'.

I am not sure I am getting the Virgina Woolf reference.

OK TT and Peter, it looks as if I am going to have to do some work and justify myself. Give me a little time.

"Would it be good if OCA students spent less time drawing or behind a camera and more time reading Althusser" -  the problem, I think, is that  unlike a standard college course, there is no built in  element of critical studies or aesthetics and studying in isolation very little opportunity to discover from other students things you were unaware of or of discussing philosophical or aesthetic matters. To that extent I might well answer "yes" to your question, particularly those who have never come across him before.  His idea of interpellation is so important to an understanding of current thinking on image making.

Incidentally, Visual Culture: the reader. edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall published for the OU by Sage ISBN 0761962484 has very many key texts, including the Althusser, already edited for ready consumption and I cannot recommend it too highly.

I confess to rarely getting Woolf

Interesting. I had wondered about the OCA having a 40 point level one 'Visual Studies' course. This would enable people to put together the first year of a degree in a variety of combinations, such as:

To specialise in photography : Visual Studies + TAOP + CDA1

To specialise in Textiles: VS + Textiles 1 + History of Art 1   and so on

What do you reckon?

I would be tempted to make it mandatory for a BA(Hons). Though I can see no objection to a no hons route if I am pushed

I would be very interested in taking a course with a bit more theory in it. I will admit I do feel a bit lost sometimes in some of these conversations.. And a level 1 course would at the very least teach the basics, and provide the basis for further reading.

TT and Peter (though I fear I haven't answered TT's part of it yet):

To see if my first impression of John Berger was fair, I watched the first video of the series, and
watched again the second video, the one on the female nude. I also read the essay by
Walter Benjamin which Peter said Berger’s ideas were based on. (It took most of
the day, >9,000 words. Grrrr!) I’ll come back to the Benjamin essay later.

When John Berger states, “Men act. Women appear”, he is
making an assumption.* I can’t accept a statement like that without some sort
of evidence. To excuse him by saying we must remember this was the 1970s, no
way José! And it has nothing to do with feminism or any other ism. It’s a
matter of logic and true argument. Arguments based on false assumptions are a form of sophistry.

What is the assumption that he’s making? Well, he’s making
this vast, sweeping assumption that women (half of the world’s population)  spend their time watching themselves being
looked at  (by men). Maybe this is the
way he thinks. But how can he possibly
know how women think? Personally, I have
no idea how other women think, I can speak only for myself.

This is where Virginia Woolf comes in. I don’t know why I
posted the passage, it really was instinct. I took the book down from the
shelf, opened it at random, and posted in this thread the first paragraph that came
to hand. Maybe I did it as a sort of antidote to Berger’s style. It turned out
to be a little essay in miniature, with a thesis, points for and against, supporting
evidence, and a conclusion – a model for essay-writing in general and a microcosm
of the whole book. Her point is that financial independence frees women from
the domination of men and allows them to develop any gift they might have. (This is of course on another planet from what Berger is talking about, even though they're both dealing with an issue of gender.)

Furthermore, the passage contains no assumptions.
Everything she says is something of which she has personal experience or
knowledge, and comes from inside her own head. She writes entirely from her own
point of view and makes clear that everything is her opinion. Who can argue
with that?

By contrast, John Berger implies that all these amazing
things he says are established fact, and he claims to understand the psychology
of the entire human race, male and
female. I can’t take that seriously.

This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered the Berger book. I
read it a few years ago and thought it had flaws that made it of dubious worth.
He often makes assertions that are really only his personal opinions.

Take these two paragraphs from Essay No. 1:

The National Gallery sells more reproductions of Leonardo’s
cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St
Anne and St John the Baptist than any other picture in their collection. A
few years ago it was known only to scholars. It became famous because an
American wanted to buy it for two and a half million pounds.

Now it hangs in a room by itself. The room is like a chapel.
The drawing is behind bullet-proof perspex. It has acquired a new kind of
impressiveness. Not because of what it shows – not because of the meaning of
its image. It has become impressive, mysterious, because of its market value.

He states it as a fact but in reality it’s his opinion. This
has long been one of my favorite Leonardo drawings (I have a book with a lovely
full-page reproduction of it) and I didn’t know a thing about the American or
the perspex. I 'm sure I'm not alone.

If he would make clear when he’s expressing an opinion it
would make a difference to me as a reader.

* assumption n. 1 the act or an instance of assuming. 2 a  the act or an instance of accepting without
proof. b a thing assumed in this way.

 assume v tr. 1 (usu. foll. by that +
clause) take or accept as being true, without proof, for the purpose of
argument or action.

 (The Concise Oxford Dictionary)

On Walter Benjamin's essay:

I spent most of the day reading this and have just a couple
of comments (only my opinions). He makes a number of interesting observations,
but I wonder if there’s an undercurrent of regret at the “tremendous shattering
of tradition”, the “liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage” because reproduction has made so many images no longer unique.

Other than that, I take issue with this paragraph:

“Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined
to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not
their being on view. The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls
of his cave was an instrument of magic.”

I don’t think one may assume that at all. As a painter
myself who does a fair amount of drawing from life, I have the deepest
admiration and respect, one artist to another, for the superb draughtsmanship of some
prehistoric drawings and the expressiveness of the gestures portrayed in them. In my
opinion these drawings very likely arose from the same sort of impulses that
drive me to draw an animal rather than take a photo. I’m attaching two
drawings. The first is a prehistoric drawing of a giraffe in Algeria,
the second is my attempt at drawing a crocodile at the zoo. I know myself how they stack up and there’s no need to rub it in here.

Benjamin is only saying what everyone else says, all the
textbooks. I don’t agree with them, but what do I know?

And the crocodile . . .

Mary - my first question is what do you consider to be a 'fact'?  In cultural theory it is easy to argue, particularly in these relativist days, that everything is just and opinion and that everyone's opinion has equal weight; some readings of Baudrillard etc. seen to suggest just that.  I don't really know what sort of evidence you want but the fact that in the history of art most artists have been men and most models have been women seems a pretty good start to me.  As to the date having no relavence...don't you think things change over time?  And it isn't onle Berger that thinks this way, look at writers like Griselda  Pollock, Laura Mulvey, Jackie Stacey to name but a few women writers on the subject of gendering the gaze.  One of the points about structuralist and post structuralist theory is that the way we think and act is at least in part a social construct and so in a patriarchal society that gender roles are constructed and may or may not have anything to do with anything other than power relationships within that society.

"vast, sweeping assumption that women (half of the world’s population) spend their time watching themselves being
looked at  (by men)"  I don't think that was very far from the point that the Gorilla/Guerrilla Girls were/are making (ref)

"This is of course on another planet from what Berger is talking about"; actually I would say Berger would suggest or at least would have done in 1974, that is is precisely economic relationships in society that is the key. (Base and Superstructure in classic Marxian terms)

"and comes from inside her own head" I have to say that is my problem with the Bloomsbury group, they seemed to live in a little world of their own which had little to do with the real world of real people...there's a war on so let's go down to the country and bake bread!

"I don’t think one may assume that at all" I don't think you will find many historians who would dissagree with Banjamin's assertion here.  The general consensus seems to be that cave paintings were ritual in some way and the art of 'primative' (I hate using that word in this context but what other is there?) societies is generally ritual as well, masks, votive offerings etc.  Your motivation must come as much from your society as from your inner self in that your inner self may urge you to be creative but it is your society that will indicate the direction of that creativity and the use that your creativity will be put to.

"Benjamin is only saying what everyone else says, all the
textbooks. I don’t agree with them, but what do I know?" So you are the only one in the regiment in step?  Your must therefore either be a genius or wrong

I would suggest that the dominant ideology of the West has developed a hegemonic strategy of trying to discredit the idea of scholarship and expertise to deflect criticism and retain power, don't fall into their trap; both Benjamin and Berger may have less intuition than Wolfe, but a great deal more scholarship.

OK I'm bowing out of the substantive discussion here. Both Mary and Peter have given me a great deal to think about and I'll follow up with emails. Thank you.

On a slightly different track is a set of questions about how the OCA should structure its portfolio of courses and how it should make resources available to students on the OCA site.

On the portfolio, I think that we should offer greater choice and at the same time offer greater support to help students select learning journeys which reflect their aims.

On resources, clearly the initial idea I had of just posting a set of links in a discussion forum is inadequate. What I think the OCA needs to do is find a way to relate material which is additional to the core course materials to particular parts of of specific courses.

Gareth

"On resources, clearly the initial idea I had of just posting a set of
links in a discussion forum is inadequate. What I think the OCA needs
to do is find a way to relate material which is additional to the core course materials to particular parts of of specific courses."  I think you are right here, how is another matter

I'm going to respond in small bits instead of a marathon like yesterday, when at 3 a.m. my head was crashing on the keyboard. I knew I should have left it till today -- what a mess, that's what I get for using Word's RTF format.

This bit is easy (the Concise Oxford again):

fact n. 1 a thing known to have occurred, to exist, or to be true. 2 a datum of experience . . . 3 an item of verified information; a piece of evidence. 4 truth, reality. 5 a thing assumed as the basis for argument or inference.

In cultural theory it is easy to argue, particularly in these
relativist days, that everything is just an opinion and that
everyone's opinion has equal weight

I don't subscribe to this theory. I've encountered it and I reject it.  I like rational argument based in fact.  Maybe it's my scientific background. it can't be helped.

For now I'll skip to Benjamin and get it off my mind.

I don't think you will find many historians who would dissagree with
Banjamin's assertion here.  The general consensus seems to be that cave
paintings were ritual in some way

I don't dispute that most historians think that way, I said so lower down. Benjamin does however acknowledge that it's an assumption. I'm saying something different, that I have a fellow-feeling with some of those prehistoric people. The impulse to draw is a very natural one and this fact seems to be forgotten by the historians. It's a human thing. We talk, we sing, we make marks, and sometimes we make images. Some people make better images than others. LIke the guy or the girl who drew the giraffe.

So you are the only one in the regiment in step?  Your must therefore either be a genius or wrong

I'm ok with being wrong about this. It's my opinion and I'm entitled to it. What harm does it do for me to be off in my little corner on the edge of the known universe with a different point of view?

By the way, the Art History level 1 course actively encourages students to think for themselves and to "challenge received opinion". Very much to my liking!

Another nibble:

"and comes from inside her own head" I have to say that is my problem
with the Bloomsbury group, they seemed to live in a little world of
their own which had little to do with the real world of real people

You may have a problem with the Bloomsbury group, but can you dispute what VW writes? Can you prove her wrong in that paragraph, for instance?

look at writers like Griselda  Pollock

This brings up what could be another interesting thread. How do we choose our writers? it's a subjective thing, I know that. I have read a little bit of GP and she's not my cup of tea. I can't remember exactly why but I think it was vagueness, a lack of specifics, and perhaps a shade too much jargon. Does that sound possible? If not I will gladly retract provided Paul supplies the button.