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This is an excerpt from the book Visual Worlds, co-authored by James Elkins and Erna Fioren>ni The book is available on Amazon Please send comments, ques>ons, and sugges>ons to jelkins@saic.edu The Gaze The theory of the gaze remains the principal conceptualization of seeing and being seen, spectatorship, and visual identity in the fine arts It has been developed as an indigenously visual way of thinking about visual art, one that responds to the acts of seeing that constitute every work, and is attentive to the political, gendered, and social dimensions of visuality In this chapter we focus on six themes: • the word “gaze” itself (section 4.1) • the precursors of the current theory (section 4.2) • Lacan’s theory (psychoanalytic discourse) (section 4.3) • contemporary gender and identity theory (section 4.4) • positional or spatial discourse that does not use psychoanalysis (section 4.5) • other ways to describe gazes (section 4.6) Leading Concepts theory of the gaze scopophilia Sichtbarkeit (visibility) das Ding (thing) the in-between (Zwischen) en-soi and pour-soi chiasmatic seeing male gaze screen plane of projection anamorphosis to-be-looked-at-ness looker meta-subject meta-sign painter-beholder We advance two arguments: first, that the theory of the gaze is actually multiple, and depends on a wide variety of texts and readings; and second, art objects readily escape the theory simply by showing structural complexity theory of the gaze a reference to several models of the relationship between a subject who gazes and the object that is gazed upon See male gaze 4.1 The Word “Gaze” Consider two Dutch paintings: Emanuel de Witte’s (1617–1692) Interior (Figure 4.1), and Vermeer’s (1632–1675) Woman Asleep at a Table (Figure 4.2) from the same period In de Witte’s painting a woman is watched, perhaps, by a man in a canopy bed (You can see his head, resting on his hand.) We know he is a man because his coat, shirt, and sword are on the chair What words should we use to describe how we look at this scene, or how the man looks at the woman? Is “gaze” right, or is the man staring, watching, peering, or simply looking? | elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 33 33 11/19/19 05:36 PM 34 | THE GAZE Figure 4.1 Emanuel de Witte, Interior 1665–1770 Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam The art historian Margaret Olin points out that “there is usually something negative about the gaze as used in art theory”: It is rather like the word “stare” in everyday usage After all, parents instruct their children to stop staring, but not to stop gazing A typical strategy of art theory is to unmask gazing as something like staring, the publicly sanctioned actions of a peeping Tom male gaze a model of the gaze in which an active male subject dominates a passive female object; the model has been generalized and extended to other relationships See theory of the gaze scopophilia deriving pleasure from seeing; sometimes used to refer to the predominantly male gaze in Hollywood cinema elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 34 In saying this, Olin counterbalances the received notion of the “male gaze,” which was originally described by the film theorist Laura Mulvey as “a charged kind of looking: an intense, perhaps unpleasant act.” Olin points to various efforts to widen the scope of the gaze so that, for example, representations of women are not understood mainly as objects of male viewer’s gazes She proposes dialogic models, which would make the seer and the seen more equal Another way to make theories of the gaze more flexible is to consider acts of looking other than the male gaze and its responses In this painting the woman doesn’t look at the man any more than she looks at us, even though she could see in our direction if she looked into the tilted mirror over her head The picture seems very scopophilic: in love with seeing and being seen The long perspective corridor gives a 11/19/19 05:36 PM 4.1 The Word “Gaze” view of another woman, and the man, from his vantage in the bed, can also see out the windows that we can just glimpse There is more happening here than a man gazing at a woman De Witte’s painting can thus be seen as a nuanced depiction of a number of intersecting acts of seeing Given de Witte’s care with perspective, it is not unambiguously the case that the man is meant to be looking at the woman He could be intended to be looking behind her, into the room; and he could be asleep In that case the woman might be thought of as the one who sees, instead of the one seen: she could keep an eye on the man, look out the window, and even see us in the mirror Vermeer’s Woman Asleep at a Table also shows how gazes might also be allegorical or imaginary The wine glass and an overturned carafe (the faded brown translucent vessel in the foreground) suggest that the woman in the painting may be drunk, or perhaps she’s just dozing Either way, the painting of the cupid on the wall behind her (Figure 4.3; only his leg is visible, but viewers would have recognized the theme) and the man’s coat next to the | 35 Figure 4.2 Vermeer, Woman Asleep at a Table 1656–1657 Metropolitan Museum, New York Figure 4.3 Vermeer, Woman Asleep at a Table, detail of the painting within the painting elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 35 11/19/19 05:36 PM 36 | THE GA ZE door introduce the possibility of a love story (For a seventeenth-century viewer, the luxurious carpet and still life would also have suggested sensuous pleasures, with moralizing undertones.) X-rays reveal that in the original version of Vermeer’s picture there was a man standing beyond the doorway A dog stood where the chair is now, apparently watching the woman In that state, the painting could well have been a love story: the man might have been leaving, or just coming back, and about to discover the woman napping Knowing about those figures makes the painting more difficult to interpret as a straightforward example of a painting made for the male gaze Even in its final state, the painting represents a daunting number of gazes The open doorway promises a visitor, but there is none The emptiness itself has presence, but it’s a painting, so we don’t keep looking back at the space thinking someone might appear—or we? And the chair that replaces the dog also has some claim on our attention: it blocks the way to the hallway, and like the woman it is also turned away from the entrance to the house It also reminds us that someone has left—someone who had been sitting there, perhaps Martha Hollander says that even though the dog is gone, the chair still refers to “animal life, as if suggesting an alternative consciousness to that of the young woman,” because it has gilded finials shaped like lions’ heads Those two lions look blankly out of the frame And there are other ghostly gazes as well: a theatrical mask in the corner of the painting of the cupid, its eyes closed, also facing out of the picture; and the mirror in the hallway, which is dark but would perhaps reflect our own faces Counting the cupid and the lions, that is eight gazes in a mixture of modes: real, inner, imaginary, erased, and allegorical 4.2 Nineteenth- and Early twentieth-Century Theories of the Gaze Sichtbarkeit [Germ.] degree of visibility; originally used to distinguish sight from other senses elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 36 The current theory of the gaze retains elements of several late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conceptualizations, and cannot be adequately understood without them The art historian Konrad Fiedler’s (1841–1895) concept of Sichtbarkeit (visibility) was formulated in 1887 in order to stress that vision and the other senses cannot be compared In that respect he is a crucial forerunner of the theory of the gaze, with its ambition to present an intrinsically visual theorization appropriate to film and other media While scientists might compare what they saw with the thing itself, artists, he argued, should limit themselves to visual impressions, and proceed by comparing one visual impression to another As Moshe Barasch has pointed out, a comparable idea can be found in the philosopher Edmund Husserl’s (1859–1938) Logical Investigations (1900–1901), which makes the famous claim that the abstract concepts by which we understand the world should be “bracketed” (German 11/19/19 05:36 PM 4.3 Psychoanalytic Discourse eingeklammert) while considering objects of our consciousness This interest in visual experience, and the turn away from objective verification, were preconditions for twentieth-century theories of the gaze A second crucial ingredient in the current theory of the gaze is German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) concept of human existence, which takes its place as part of his distinction between subject and object in lectures such as What is a Thing? (1935–1936) Just as the concept of the object should be replaced with the concept thing (das Ding)—conjuring a world in which all things appear to us in regard to their uses or meanings, and never simply in objective opposition to ourselves—so the idea of another person, separate from us, should be replaced by the idea of a relationship between two subjectivities Not only am I changed by my relationship to another person; I find my own identity neither in myself nor in the other but in the relationship itself, the in-between (Zwischen) The idea that there is neither self nor other, but a relationship that defines both, was decisive for Jean Paul Sartre He first formulated the theory of le regard (the gaze) in Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1943) Initially Sartre uses the example of a mannequin to make the point that when we see another person, we are immediately drawn to think of ourselves as we are seen When we realize what we are seeing is a mannequin, we return to a “prereflective” form of being; but as long as we are seeing another person, seeing is always being seen When we become an object for another, we are ourselves decentered We lose our inherent freedom—our unconscious being, which exists only in itself (en-soi)—and become a conscious being living for itself (pour-soi) In Sartre’s account, the gaze is hardly neutral: “The Other,” he writes, “is for me simultaneously the one who has stolen my being from me and the one who causes there to be a being which is my being.” The current theory of the gaze owes a great deal to Heidegger and Sartre 4.3 Psychoanalytic Discourse Jacques Lacan’s (1901–1981) description of the gaze is embedded in the seminars collected as Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, where it figures within the section later titled “Of the Gaze as Objet petit a,” and specifically in the single lecture on “The Line and Light.” The lecture, first given in January 1964 and published in English in 1977, begins with the Sartrean idea of the annihilation of the seeing subject in the act of seeing, and elaborates a theory of the crossed or chiasmatic nature of vision However, there is a fundamental difficulty in the way Lacan reasons At first, he says, it seemed as if vision could be adequately described as a triangle, with the “geometral point” at the viewer’s eye, and the object on the other side—as in many Renaissance treatises on linear perspective (Figure 4.4) elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 37 | 37 Ding Das Ding (Germ “the thing”) refers to what is in the world, all objects and things, which become true when we see their uses or meanings Zwischen [Germ.] a word used by Heidegger to name the mixture of identities that is the result of any relationship between two people, or between a visual subject and object en-soi in Sarte’s philosophy, the mode of being of something (such as a tree or an animal) that has an essence but no consciousness See pour-soi pour-soi in Sartre’s philosophy, the mode of being of something (especially a human) that is conscious of its own existence, and therefore also conscious of lacking the en-soi See en-soi chiasmatic seeing in the theory of the gaze as discussed by Lacan, a way of thinking about seeing that includes the gaze of the subject looking at an object as well as the (sometimes theoretical) gaze of the object regarding the subject See also optic chiasm 11/19/19 05:36 PM 38 | THE GA ZE The object, or the world, or the person who is seen Figure 4.4 Perspective schema compatible with Renaissance texts plane of projection a two-dimensional plane in which projected rays from a three-dimensional object intersect If you look through a window, and trace what you see, the window is the plane of projection screen in the theory of the gaze, an interface between a seeing subject and an object being seen; appears as a line in a chiasmatic diagram The image, or the plane of projection Lines of sight (flowing to or from the eye, or static) The eye (yours; the subject itself) In Figure 4.4, the middle vertical line is the image or plane of projection, usually understood as the perspective drawing or painting produced by the viewer (Beginner’s exercises in linear perspective, from the Renaissance to the present, often picture this as a grid or a glass pane, on which the object is traced.) For Lacan, the gaze proceeds from the subject (the person who is looking), but it also comes to the subject from the object at which she looks Lacan describes this by using a story of a sardine can floating in the ocean, which glints in the sun and seems to be “looking at me at the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated.” Lacan then proposes a second triangle, reversed and superimposed on the first In this chiasmatic diagram, the subject—Lacan—is transformed into a “picture” when it is looked at by a “point of light” (see Figure 4.5) As Kaja Silverman and other theorists of the gaze have emphasized, the diagram also depicts the mutual gazes of two people, each implicated in the other’s subjectivity Lacan calls the vertical line in the middle of this new diagram the screen It looks structurally similar to the image or plane of projection in the Renaissance-style schema The paragraphs surrounding the Point of light Screen Subject Figure 4.5 A chiasmatic model of vision elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 38 11/19/19 05:36 PM 4.3 Psychoanalytic Discourse introduction of the screen are the most difficult in “The Line and Light,” partly because the screen is neither Renaissance perspectival geometry nor Cartesian geometry, according to which the observer has a subjective point in space and is confronted with a wide objective world; nor does it correlate with metaphysical dualism, according to which the very objects of the world affect perception; or in any straightforward way with Sartrean reciprocal seeing | 39 anamorphosis an image that appears distorted unless viewed from a particular point or with a suitable device, such as a mirror or lens TEXT BOX 4.1 Lacan and Holbein’s French Ambassadors Lacan’s only example of visual art in the section “Of the Gaze as Objet petit a” is Hans Holbein’s French Ambassadors (1553) The painting has an odd-looking streak in the lower foreground, which turns out to be an anamorphic (perspectivally distorted) skull You have to move away from the “geometral point” in front of the painting and stand close to the wall in the museum, or put your face close to the page, to see it When you see the skull, the rest of the painting becomes a smear An informed viewer may understand the world depicted in the picture—which is an elaborate assemblage of political, mathematical, and geographical signs, decoded by historians of art and science such as Jennifer Nelson—but such a viewer will not see the essence Only by standing off to one side, and peering along the wall or page, can the viewer see the skull in an undistorted form At that moment the skull becomes a memento mori, a reminder of transience and death In Lacan’s idea of the gaze, the world and our sense of others in it is contingent on a partial erasure of our sense of ourselves, and vice versa However, things are even more complex than Lacan, or his many commentators, have yet noted in Holbein’s painting In the far upper left, the curtains part to reveal a view of the Crucifixion A steely Christ is there in grisaille, with the INRI sign above It was presumably part of Holbein’s intention to say that eternity and salvation lie behind the veil of earthly pleasures (symbolized by the astronomical, musical, and geographical instruments) But when life is elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 39 seen sub specie aeternitatis (from the perspective of the eternal), in Spinoza’s phrase, everything earthly vanishes—paradoxically, and apparently unintentionally, including the Crucifixion 11/19/19 05:36 PM 40 | THE GAZE TEXT BOX 4.2 Subjects of the Theory of the Gaze As Craig Saper says, psychoanalytically informed film theorists in the 1970s “wanted to explain how Hollywood films hid the sociopolitical context of production,” making films seem as if they were made by anyone, for anyone Moreover, this film theory tried “to understand how the filmmaker's (and by extension the culture's) view of the world became confused with, or displaced by, the spectator's view; that is, they asked, how does ‘their view’ become ‘your view’ without provoking any protests?” The question, in other words, was: Who sees what while watching a movie and why does the film open up the world in front of the spectator “as if seen through a window?” This critique of ideology with its feminist context differed from Lacan’s own examples, which ranged from bryozoans to television (film theory, by contrast, has generally kept to visual art) This fundamental disjunction between Lacan’s project and the aesthetic choices and purposes of film and media theory is characteristic of the theory of the gaze Symptomatic for the discussion is Mats Carlsson’s critique of contemporary Lacanian film theory: he takes Richard Stanley’s violent film Dust Devil (1992) as an example of “Lacan’s ruthless Gaze” as it appears in the “uncanny manifestation of a double” in a mirror In a mirror, Carlsson says, “I am the Other elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 40 and the Other is me . . I come to realize the worst of apprehensions, that which confirms the ubiquitous nothingness . . through the insight of the temporary obliteration of the self” in front of the mirror If the mirror image is me, in fact, I am no longer on this side of the mirror; but when I am not there, the Other in the mirror ceases to exist This annihilation of the gazing subject through her mirror image is put in terms of interpersonal relationships in this unserious Nancy cartoon from 1964 Read in Carlsson’s terms, the cartoon also shows how subjects “desire the secret enjoyment of the Other, but … pursue in the Other more than the Other has to offer,” hence experiencing their own nothingness In the cartoon, the painter is the Other for Nancy: she seeks to observe him unnoticed, even against a prohibition However, she also seems to expect to be seen as the Other by the painter himself, as she ignores the urgent warning pinned on the fence, peeping through the hole in spite of it The painter, however, cannot rise to this expectation, because the fence hides, annihilates the peeping girl: she does not exist in his eyes, even her eye in the peephole is part of the fence for him—and so he paints over it He disappears from Nancy’s perception as she does from his, in mutual annihilation 11/19/19 05:36 PM 4.4 Gender and Identity Discourse | 41 Rather, Lacan’s screen is an interface, more opaque than permeable, between the seeing subject and the sources of the image visible on it The viewer is attracted by the “depth of field” implicit in the image; she assumes that there must be something else behind it, an “other” corresponding to the “point of light” that brings it about, and strives to gather its ultimate meaning The idea of the screen can thus be read as an appeal not to be blinded by the appearances of images, but to understand the grammar that constitutes them Moreover, the screen is the place where both the “other” (the physical world, other people, the artist, regimes of power) and the viewer herself are inscribed like actors in a theatrical tableau (an arrangement of static figures onstage) So Lacan identifies himself not with the picture but with the screen: “And if I am anything in the picture,” he says, “it is always in the form of the screen, which I earlier called the stain, the spot.” In this way he brings his account into line with Heidegger’s sense of the self as the in-between 4.4 Gender and Identity Discourse At least since Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), the male gaze has dominated discussions of the theory of the gaze The male gaze is the visible sign of the shaping of entire genres of art in terms of male desire Mulvey’s definition remains the most passionate In her view the “function of woman” as viewed object, especially in cinema, is to stand in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by the symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command, by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as a bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning Narrative cinema, she says, is fundamentally about the human form: “scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic.” Film “satisfies a primordial wish for pleasureful looking”—principally looking at the female form In this libidinal economy, “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female,” so that women in film become particular kinds of objects whose significance is their “to-belooked-at-ness.” On the one hand is the spectator, in direct “scopophilic” contact (meaning he takes pleasure in the act of seeing) with the female form displayed for his enjoyment, and on the other is the spectator, again male, who is “fascinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space,” and gains a sense of “control and possession” of the woman whom his screen surrogate sees The entire apparatus of narrative cinema is structured to support the dynamics of this kind of seeing: even the male cameramen, the male stage hands, and the concept of the camera’s eye exemplify the dynamic of seeing male and seen female The excision of female looking is emblematized by the dissection of the iris in Un chien andalou (1929), elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 41 to-be-looked-at-ness the suitability of an object for being seen by a gazing subject; used in the theory of the gaze and in particular, Mulvey’s critique of narrative cinema 11/19/19 05:36 PM 42 | THE GAZE Figure 4.6 Yinka Shonibare, Diary of a Victorian Dandy 1998 and by that film’s visual prosections of female bodies (A prosection is a dissection that demonstrates something, revealing it by separating it from its surrounding tissue Films suture the difference between the spectator and the camera’s gaze, but they prosect women’s bodies.) The same dynamics, with different content, characterize accounts of gazes informed by ethnicity, class, and other forms of power Yinka Shonibare’s photographs of the late 1990s play with western European conventions of painting and film In his Diary of a Victorian Dandy (Figure 4.6), a “Victorian dandy” is telling a captivating story; everyone around listens and admires In this case the quality of to-be-looked-at-ness is possessed by the putatively impossible figure of the black Victorian dandy He is a signifier of the visitor’s gaze, which is supposedly unexpectedly shocked by the appearance of a black man where only a white man “should” be Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992–1993; Figure 4.7) included paintings from the collection of the Maryland Historical Society, which were installed with motion detectors and spotlights When visitors stepped in front of the paintings, the spotlights shone on the slaves and servants, and a recorded voice asked things like, “Am I your friend? Am I your pet? Who comforts me when I’m afraid?” As in Shonibare’s elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 42 11/19/19 05:36 PM 44 | THE GAZE Figure 4.8 Screen shot of Chatroulette, 2011 December 2009, presented a random sequence of images from webcams, under precarious conditions of anonymity (there is an explicit warning against scammers recording webcams and blackmailing the owner, and the urgent appeal “Don't anything on webcam that can be used against you”) Many of the interactions had to with gender, ethnicity, and identity, but they were evanescent and unpredictable Chatroulette normally staged encounters between individuals In Figure 4.8 a user was surprised by being projected onscreen, creating a new kind of social interaction in which the public exposure was also unexpectedly private (Chatroulette is also discussed as self-surveillance in Chapter 22.) These examples—Snow, Doane, and Chatroulette—are just three of many developments of the gender and identity discourse of the gaze Even now, 40 years after Mulvey’s text, the field is developing and has not coalesced into a single theory 4.5 Spatial Discourse Not all versions of the theory of the gaze have developed from the line of thinking that began with Fiedler, Husserl, and Heidegger, and led to LAcan, Mulvey, and Silverman In particular, the gaze has been theorized in terms of spatial relations Brian Rotman’s inventive book Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (1987) begins a discussion of the phenomenon he calls the “closure of the vanishing point” with an excerpt from Norman Bryson’s Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1983) Bryson asserted that the “first geological age of perspective” saw the gradual clarification of the position of the observer and the eventual confinement of the observer to elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 44 11/19/19 05:36 PM 4.5 Spatial Discourse “the Gaze, a transcendent point of vision that has discarded the body.” Rotman’s historical sequence of subjects is as follows: • The “Gothic subject … whose mode of seeing is dominated by the iconic,” made up of what Bryson calls “diffuse non-localised nebula[e] of imaginary definitions.” • The perspectival subject, “coded by the meta-sign of the vanishing point,” situated outside the frame in an imagined identification with the artist’s viewpoint • The looker, “the figure of internal vision in Dutch art, an internalization of the perspectival subject, whose interior presence calls into question, and so suggests the absence of, any exterior point of view.” • The meta-subject, “able to signify what the presence of the ‘looker’ can only raise as an interpretive possibility, namely the necessary absence of any externally situated, perspectival seeing.” Taddeo Gaddi’s drawing for his fresco The Presentation of the Virgin (Figure 4.9) could be taken as an example of the first or Gothic stage The stairs were drawn in groups, each observed from a slightly different vantage; they not align with a vanishing point the way they would in a photograph Geometrically, that means the drawing implies a number of viewers, each at slightly different, but “diffuse” or imprecise, positions in front of the image Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin (Figure 4.10) is an example of Rotman’s first and second stages The top portion of the scene takes place in heaven; Fra Angelico paints flattened figures that look like overlapping playing cards They are painted in a pre- perspectival, early Renaissance style, which Fra Angelico adopted intentionally If pre-perspectival conventions are proper to heaven, then worship on earth must take place according to the stricter regimen of mundane space Fra Angelico places his human worshippers in strong relief (rilievo), on a perspective pavement For Rotman, the pavement’s vanishing point is a meta-sign of the viewer of the painting Before the meta-sign, there was only vagueness: a negative condition, awaiting the focus of perspective In the third stage the looker stands within the fictive space and sees things we cannot see In Pieter Jansz Saenredam’s Interior of the Church of St Bavo in Haarlem (Figure 4.11), the looker gazes at the image on the altar, an invisible picture within the picture The fact that he is inside the space, looking “elsewhere” in it, makes makes it seem as if we not exist: as Rotman says, the looker suggests our absence The idea of the looker was introduced by Svetlana Alpers in the Art of Describing (1983) She got elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 45 | 45 meta-sign in Rotman’s account, an aspect of an image that acknowledges the presence of an external viewer, such as the vanishing point of a perspective representation The term is analogous to metafiction, in which the author addresses the reader or otherwise acknowledges the work is fiction looker in Alpers’s account, a figure within an image, most often a painting, that sees parts of the image from a different perspective than that of the external viewer meta-subject in Rotman’s account, a sign that tells us a picture does not imply any external viewer in the way that perspective pictures Figure 4.9 Taddeo Gaddi, The Presentation of the Virgin, drawing, 1328–1338 11/19/19 05:36 PM 46 | THE GAZE Figure 4.10 Fra Angelico, Coronation of the Virgin c 1432 the idea from Italian Renaissance perspective texts, in which there is sometimes a figure who seems to be seeing things from a different perspective than ours In such diagrams, the observer is intended to represent our own perspective, as seen from the side (Figure 4.12) Alpers claims that in the Northern European reception of Italian linear perspective the painting surface itself is what mattered: these figures were conceived of as inside the picture, looking at it, and at things within it In this way it becomes plausible to imagine ourselves wholly inside a painting like Saenredam’s Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (Figure 4.13) would also be an example, because it has a passage in painstaking perspective (the network of “standard stoppages” that feed fluids from the “malic molds,” on the bottom half, at the left) and other parts that are not in perspective or are collaged from perspective images (such as the body of the bride at the top, which has three forms that were traced from a photograph of cloths over open windows) The mixture of kinds of representation functions as what Rotman calls a “meta-subject,” demonstrating the “necessary absence of any externally situated, perspectival seeing.” elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 46 11/19/19 05:36 PM 4.6 Non-European Gazes | 47 Rotman’s set of four stages encounters some difficulty when it is applied to individual pictures All four are present at once in Saenredam’s painting: in the “diffuse, non-localised nebula” of positions implied by the figure of Jesus painted on the organ door (Figure 4.14); in the clear framework of perspective consistent with “Albertian” perspective; in the looker; and in the “metasubject” of the historically unnaturally high angle of view, incommensurate with what would have normally stood as a signifier for human vision There are also several forms of looking that are not included in Rotman’s list What is our relation to the startled soldier painted in the altar wing, who hoists his spear as Christ rises in front of him: Does a viewer even belong in his universe? And what about the man, his face half-concealed, who talks to the woman in the gallery (Figure 4.11): How are we positioned in relation to him? 4.6 Non-European Gazes There are many non-European and North American examples of gazes that escape these discourses These examples are parallel, in their way, to the non-European terms we are introducing such as xiang 韌, citta C(Q(, or the Akkadian word nekelmû(m), in the sense gg I Figure 4.11 Pieter Jansz Saenredam, Interior of the Church of St Bavo in Haarlem, 1636 H M K X L Y D C Z T S A R P Q ff ee E dd aa bb cc Figure 4.12 Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, perspective construction, adapted from Due regole della prospettiva pratica 1583 elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 47 11/19/19 05:36 PM 48 | THE GAZE Figure 4.13 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–1923 that the kinds of gaze they imply can seem incompatible with more familiar theories Chinese ritual bronze vessels were traditionally decorated with the faces and bodies of the unspecifiable mythic animal called the taotie (Figure 4.16, Figure 4.17) Some of the decorations are strongly naturalistic, and cast in bas-relief with half-spherical eyes On other vessels the elements of the taotie’s face—horns or ears, mouth, nose, eyes, and even parts of the body—are dissolved into a uniform “cloud pattern” of spiral motifs, and only the eyes remain, staring out from the thickets of curved lines On still other vessels there are many taoties, of different sizes and shapes, and even other animals like turtles, cicadas, and birds In museums that display collections of these Chinese bronzes, there can be dozens or hundreds of eyes, all apparently staring at the viewer Some will be large and obvious, and others so small and abstract that they can only be seen from up close and in good lighting There can seem to be no end to the eyes: it’s a very Figure 4.14 Pieter Jansz Saenredam, Interior of the Church of St Bavo in Haarlem, detail elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 48 11/19/19 05:36 PM 4.6 Non-European Gazes | 49 TEXT BOX 4.3 The Structure of Beholding The art historian Michael Fried’s analysis of gazes in Courbet’s Burial at Ornans may be the most intricate yet attempted in art history Fried is interested in the painting’s “structure of beholding,” which includes both the viewer’s plausible and implied positions, and the gazes of the viewers and lookers depicted in the painting He makes use of a composite term, painter-beholder, to name the agent who sees such a painting from the places where the painter might plausibly have seen it In the painting, the man holding the crucifix looks out at us—at the painter-beholder But we look past him to a man, identified as a friend of Courbet’s named Buchon, who stands at the very back of the snaking line of mourners (his profile head is visible to the left of the crucifix) Fried says that the juxtaposition between the crucifix-bearer looking out and our own gaze looking in toward Buchon creates a “separation between what might be described as the painting's gaze out at the beholder-‘in’-the-painter-beholder and the painter-‘in’-the-painter-beholder's gaze into the painting.” Fried is positing a distinction between two kinds of looking in the painting: one elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 49 outward to a certain kind of viewer, in whom the beholder of the painting and the painter himself coincide; and the other inward, toward the back of the painting’s space, from another kind of viewer, who can be identified with the painter as he considers the possible effect of the scene while painting But it is a remarkable example of how quickly language can fail in the attempt to describe gazes in images: the italics and the hyphenated constructions are in Fried’s original text, signaling that the expressions and the compound phrases are intended to work as new concepts for description But they are nearly impossible to hold in mind, or to use as critical concepts 11/19/19 05:36 PM 50 | THE GAZE Figure 4.15 Pieter Jansz Saenredam, Interior of the Church of St Bavo in Haarlem 1636 Crest Lower jaw Forehead Figure 4.16 Diagram of a taotie elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 50 Fang Snout Upper jaw or trunk C-horn Beak or fang Tail Quill Eye Leg different situation than in European painting, sculpture, and film, the usual subjects of the theory of the gaze There is also the question of viewpoint, because the taotie is bilaterally symmetrical: it can be seen from the front, as we are reproducing it here But each half often forms an independent face or body seen in profile Depending on the curvature of the vessel, those half-taoties can appear to be moving around the vessels, but always, at the same time, looking out at us 11/19/19 05:36 PM 4.6 Non-European Gazes Two more examples from art outside Europe help show the limitations of the usual theories of the gaze Teotihuacán is an archaeological site outside Mexico City, which covers over 30 square miles Its central features are two large stone pyramids and a wide central road Before it was burned around 550 a.c.e., Teotihuacán was probably Mesoamerica’s largest city One of the smaller pyramids, known as the Temple of Quetzalcoatl or Temple of the Feathered Serpent, is studded with two kinds of sculpted heads One is conventionally called Tlaloc, after the later Aztec storm god; it has features reminiscent of corn The other is called Quetzalcoatl, after the later Aztec feathered serpent (Figure 4.18, a and b) No one knows the precise meanings of these heads Their stares, however, are arresting Tlaloc looks straight ahead from two large eyes, and two eyelike forms just above (which may be a headdress or mask) Quetzalcoatl also stares straight ahead Because these heads are repeated in different steps of the pyramid, a visitor who climbs the steps (visible at the left of the general view) is stared at in turn by a number of heads, and stared past by dozens more At the same time heads look out in the other three directions from the sides and back of the pyramid The number, kind, and force of the gazes in Teotihuacán is difficult to assess However, the distribution of the sculptures suggests that significant importance was given to the ubiquity of divine gazes: their presence crosses and recrosses the space In Sumerian literature, gods can look with a malicious gaze that has adverse consequences The cuneiform spelling is transliterated igi-hul (-š i-) bar, where igi is eyes or face, and hul is evil In Akkadian, the verb “to glare” nekelmû(m) is normally associated with a divine subject According to a study by Ainsley Dicks, in 83 percent of attested examples there are “adverse consequences for the verb’s direct object.” Figure 4.19 is from a text about the Neo-Babylonian god Marduk: his “radiance is frightful,” the text reads; “no man can stand up to his glare.” The words for “radiance” or “splendor” are often associated with the gaze, and as Ancient Oriental Studies Professor Elena Cassin has argued, “radiance” or “splendor” (melammu) can even repel a malicious gaze In some texts, a “maleficent glare has the effect of snuffing out radiance”; in other texts, the two work together Like the heavenly bodies with which they were associated, Mesopotamian gods possessed both radiance and gaze Humans were at a disadvantage, relying on the gods’ elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 51 | 51 Figure 4.17 Example of a taotie on a Chinese bronze vessel painter-beholder an idea due to Fried that describes a way of thinking about seeing a painting that combines the signs of the actual painter who made the work (the places she stood, the gestures she made) with the positions and gazes of the implied viewer of the painting 11/19/19 05:36 PM 52 | THE GAZE radiance to gaze on the world In this drawing after a small seal from the Achaemenid period (550–330 b.c.e.) found on the northeastern coast of the Black Sea, the Iranian goddess Anahita appears to a Persian king * Figure 4.18 a/b Teotihuacan, Temple of Tlaloc A: “Tlaloc” head; b: Tlaloc and feathered serpent heads How are we constituted as viewers in the light of such an onslaught of seeing? Alois Riegl felt this possibility, as Margaret Olin has remarked, when he saw “hundreds of eyes” between the trees in Jacob Ruisdael’s peaceful Village in the Forest Valley Is a Chinese vessel decorated with taotie also a theater full of eyes? Is it an occasion for what Bryson has termed the characteristic “paranoia” of the gaze? Or we need an entirely different way of responding to so many eyes? Yet it is not only such gazes that require conceptualization Whether it is psychoanalytically inflected or determined only by perspectival criteria, most works of art—from de Witte and Vermeer to Duchamp and Velázquez, indeed, entire corpora of European and American art—are more complex than the present theories of the gaze can accommodate The multiplicity of the gaze is still far from being adequately deciphered Figure 4.19 The NeoBabylonian god Marduk elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 52 11/19/19 05:36 PM Further Reading | 53 Further Reading Olin, Margaret: “The Gaze,” in Critical Terms for Art History, edited by Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff, 1996, pp 318–29 Hollander, Martha: An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, 2002, p 98 Mulvey, Laura: Visual and Other Pleasures, 1989 Fiedler, Konrad: Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art: From Impressionism to Kandinsky, volume 3, 2000, p 126, quoting Fiedler, “Über den Ursprung der künstlerischen Tätigkeit,” in Konrad Fiedlers Schriften über Kunst, edited by Hermann Konnerth, 1913–1914, p 255 Husserl, Edmund: Logical Investigations, translated by J N Findlay, 1970 Heidegger, Martin: What Is a Thing?, translated by W B Barton and Vera Deutsch, 1967; Robert Mugeraue, Heidegger and Homecoming: The Leitmotif in the Later Writings, 2008, p 153, quoting Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) [1936–1938], translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, 1989, p 361; see also Eveline Cioflec, Der Begriff des Zwischen bei Martin Heidegger Eine Erörterung ausgehend von Sein und Zeit, 2012 Sartre, Jean Paul: Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel Barnes, 1969, p 364 Lacan’s theory: Blickzähmung und Augentäuschung Zu Jacques Lacans Bildtheorie Hrsg, von Claudia Blümle und Anne von der Heiden, 2005 Silverman, Kaja: The Threshold of the Visible World, 1996, p 221 Mulvey’s Male Gaze: Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1975, quotes on pp 14, 15, 17, 19, 25, 21 suture: Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, 1983 Doane, Mary Anne: Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator, 1982, quotes on p 78 Rotman, Brian: Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero, 1987, quotes on pp 32, 40 Quetzalcoatl: Alfredo López Austin, Leonardo López Luján and Saburo Sugiyama, “The Temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan: Its Possible Ideological Significance,” Ancient Mesoamerica (1991): 93–105, doi:10.1017/S0956536100000419 Sumerian literature: Ainsley Dicks, “Catching the Eye of the Gods: The Gaze in Mesopotamian Literature,” PhD diss., Yale University, 2012, pp 320–21, 389, especially p 385 quoting Elena Cassin, La splendeur divine: introduction l’étude de la mentalité mésapotamienne, Paris, 1968, p 14 paranoia of the gaze: Norman Bryson, “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” in Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal Foster, 1988, p 104 Text Box 4.1: Jacques Lacan, “The Gaze as Objet Petit a,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan, 1977, 67–121; Henry Krips, Fetish: An Erotics of Culture, 1999, chapter 6; Jennifer Nelson, Image Beyond Likeness: The Chimerism of Early Protestant Visuality c 1525—1555, 2013 Text Box 4.2: Craig Saper, “A Nervous Theory: the Troubling Gaze of Psychoanalysis in Media Studies,” diacritics (1991); Mats Carlsson, “The Gaze as Constituent and Annihilator,” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture (2012) Text Box 4.3: Michael Fried, “The Structure of Beholding in Courbet's ‘Burial at Ornans.’” Critical Inquiry 9, no (June 1983): 635–83, here 667, 675, 677; Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 1993, discussed in Elkins, Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts Art History as Writing, 1997, pp 246–52 elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 53 11/19/19 05:36 PM elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 54 11/19/19 05:36 PM Conclusion PART ONE In this part of the book we have presented a number general, abstract concepts and relationships that can help us understand the peculiarities of different visual phenomena and to discriminate between them First, we have considered the nature of concepts of the image, visuality, and visibility (Chapter 1) and how physical images can be distinguished from mental representations with the help of the concepts of Darstellung and Vorstellung These concepts are not always applicable to objects from every historical period and culture, in spite of their common use in the visual studies Chapter considered abstract theories involving the traditional split between visuality and language, seeing and thinking: we pointed to the reciprocal tension between these two moments, where seeing has been discussed as knowing, and knowledge as visibility In Chapter we presented some evidence that the science of vision and its theories about the nature of seeing and visually apprehending can speak to current theoretical concerns about attention, fixation, and the nature of the mental image We also briefly addressed the difficult relation between vision science and the humanities, in particular art history (Chapter 3, section 3.4), to recall the fifth of the book’s principal themes, set out in the general introduction to the book The discourse of the humanities and arts seems mostly distinctly misaligned from science, except when science is understood as a social and cultural phenomenon Although we also leave science more or less alone in this book (technology plays a part in a number of chapters but science hardly reappears except in Chapters 9, 10, and 27), we nonetheless use tools from both art and scientific theory for our argument The idea is that it is worthwhile to test connections between the humanities and sciences of vision: to see how the two might cohere, how they might be pertinent to one another Edward O Wilson (known as the father of “sociobiology”) called this type of connection “consilience,” borrowing from the scientist and theologian William Whewell (1794–1866): a convergence of evidence from apparently unrelated sources There are, we think, many opportunities to ask for such consiliences, particularly in the theory of the gaze, which we considered in Chapter as a central concept for the definition of the subject and object of seeing We found principal ingredients of the theory of the gaze in the relation between seeing and Heidegger’s concept of the Zwischen (section 4.2), in Lacan’s idea of seeing as a network of relations (section 4.3), in the connection between the gaze and gender (section 4.4), and in the relation of the gaze to space (section 4.5) | elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 55 55 11/19/19 05:36 PM 56 | CONCLUSION As we will see in the next part of the book, the theory of the gaze in its narrow, original sense—a feminist psychoanalytic critique of film—can be re-elaborated not only in light of developments in philosophy and the science of vision, but also in view of the many sorts of visible objects other than film and of individual practices of seeing The connections are there to be made, even if the methods of connection are not always apparent, and the results of the connections are not yet imaginable It is important to continue to search for connections, coherences, convergences, or “consiliences.” In discussing general concepts and theories and their utility in understanding the visual, finally, we have also presented evidence that general, abstract concepts break down or lose force in the face of particular practices We looked at the inapplicability of terms like “visuality” when they are applied to prehistoric artifacts (Chapter 1, section 1.5), the inability of theories of the gaze to interpret non-European and premodern faces (Chapter 4, section 4.6), and the theory’s incapacity when it comes to complex artworks (Chapter 4, Text Box 4.3); in the same way, the science of the retina is very distant from ideas of linear image construction and analysis offered in some theories of the visual (Chapter 3, section 3.2), and philosophic theories of seeing as knowing are not useful for consideration of ways language helps or hinders seeing (Chapter 2, sections 2.2, 2.3) It is tempting to conclude that concepts such as Darstellung, the Zwischen, seeing-as, to-be-looked-at-ness, the looker and many others in these opening chapters provide a fruitful starting point for inquiries into visuality Some have in fact been widely used, and others are potentially useful in ongoing critical discussions But visual objects are stubbornly particular Images like Vermeer’s Woman Asleep at a Table (section 4.1) and visual practices such those we will consider in Part Two of the book (such things as prehistoric marking, robots that crawl inside the Great Pyramid of Kheops, visualizations of heat, or color displays of spiders), seem largely untouched by even the most insightful philosophic concepts The discourses of particular visual practices are often quite different from the discourses of image theory, raising difficult questions about the place of theory It is possible that the obdurate specificity of image practices might be an effect of our current interest in its opposite—the endless reproducibility of both images and theory Walter Benjamin was not celebrating “the age of mechanical reproducibility” when he wrote his often misquoted essay, but today a large literature celebrates the capacity of digital images to be endlessly reproduced It might be the tenor of the time to be partly blind to visual practices that resist generalization, repetition, reproduction, and even conceptualization Any resolution of this problem of particularity would require a flexible language, one capable of bridging the incident of the image to the contexts of theory No such way of talking exists except in elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 56 11/19/19 05:36 PM Conclusion | 57 remarkable individual cases, such as T J Clark’s experiments in art writing (Chapter 10) or Roland Barthes’s book on photography (Chapter 11) In the following Part Two of the book we discuss this point, asking whether general concepts and theories are weakened by individual acts of seeing Further Reading Wilson, Fred: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, 1998 Whewell, William: Novum Organon Renovatum, 1958 Benjamin, Walter: “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (1936, published in French; first published in German 1955, English translation in Illuminations, 1966) elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 57 11/19/19 05:36 PM elk90915_ch04_033-058.indd 58 11/19/19 05:36 PM ... the theory of the gaze, which we considered in Chapter as a central concept for the definition of the subject and object of seeing We found principal ingredients of the theory of the gaze in the. .. theory of the gaze The male gaze is the visible sign of the shaping of entire genres of art in terms of male desire Mulvey’s definition remains the most passionate In her view the “function of woman”... Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1983) Bryson asserted that the “first geological age of perspective” saw the gradual clarification of the position of the observer and the eventual confinement of the
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