The Rest of The Story ~ Ways of Seeing
In the book Ways of Seeing by John Berger I was introduced to a different way of looking at art through the seven individual essays, both written and pictorial. The book explores the way we see, the way humans have seen and the way in which seeing has been manipulated through art and the media.
Basically the book is saying that in our European based culture women are objects, men are subjects. Men survey, women are surveyed. Since women are always on display in our society, they adjust their behavior in order to please and fit in with our male dominated society. Berger writes about the relationship between art and the presumed observer/audience. In the beginning he talks about how the modern invention of the camera changed the way we view art. In fact he alludes to the fact that the camera has destroyed the true way of seeing.
I kept looking for chapters that showed anything but the nude female and it took until the later part of chapter six to find any. I’m not quite sure why the book was mainly comprised of naked females but it seems like the men who wrote the essay were very fond of them. Like the ads of today, the female subjects of the oil paintings were objectified and reduced to mere commodities that could be bought and sold at random. Even in Chapter 7 when the topic was all about publicity images, how we advertise items and what they are actually selling, they had to throw in images of naked women and women with suggestive poses.
An AhHa moment for me was in Chapter four pages 76-81. I looked at the portraits and wondered what their life must have been like and what kind of people they must have been. In Chapter One when the author talks about the two portraits, Governors and the Governesses of an Alms House, he says “As in so many other pictures by Hals, the penetrating characterizations almost seduce us into believing that we know the personality traits ad even the habits of the men and women portrayed” (page 14). Throughout the book I kept thinking about that statement.
This reading is relevant to our course only in the sense that it addresses the fact that any design we create with illustration and images could, and would, be taken in many different ways. Other than that I think the book was directed more to a fine art student.
