"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak"- John Berger.
John Berger's Ways Of Seeing (1972) has sat on my bookshelves for so long now I can no longer remember if it was a gift (and if it was, who from?) or if I bought it myself. Considering it is deemed by many to be a seminal text of art criticism, hell - of art understanding, I thought it was time I finally dusted it off, cracked its spine, and subjected it to the full EIAPOE review treatment.
Rene Magritte - The Key of Dreams (1930)
I was not to be disappointed. Starting with Berger's theory that seeing doesn't just come before words but also establishes our place in the surrounding world, and using Rene Magritte's The Key of Dreams to illustrate this, Ways of Seeing looks at how the relationship between what we see and what we know is fluid and is circumstantial on many things.
Berger isn't interested so much in why we look at paintings or even what is in those paintings or what style they have been painted in. But in HOW we look at paintings - as well as architecture and even, by extension, nature and each other. We can watch the sun set every evening of our life and while we know that it is the Earth that is turning away from the sun and not the other way round it, for some reason, doesn't feel like that is the case.
He describes how the sight of a person we are in love with makes us feel complete (even though many other people may have seen this exact same sight the same day and not felt anything). How we can look at a Van Gogh painting and think it's pretty and how we can look, again, at the same Van Gogh painting, now knowing it was the last one he painted before he took his own life, and see in it the artist's own despair and anxiety.
Vincent van Gogh - Wheatfield with Crows (1890)
These things are harder to rationalise in our mind than it is to understand what Berger means when he talks about standing in front of a Renaissance painting in the National Gallery thinking "if I look at this painting hard enough, I should somehow be able to feel its authenticity" but often paintings that have become famous have become so not because of their undoubted brilliance or, indeed, authenticity but because they are worth a lot of money - and Berger does not shy away when it comes to talking about how filthy lucre has tainted, or at least changed, our view of what makes great art.
He talks of a "bogus religiosity" driven by market values that has, since the invention of the camera, replaced their original unique qualities and he goes on to say that, because of this, art galleries and museums are, or were in 1972, of little interest to the layman. Replaced by the pop concert or the football game as weekend activities and considered too snobbish, or too elite, for most of us to be able to enjoy.
Berger quietly lambasts received ideas of ownership, capitalism, and even museum curatorship (he cuttingly, yet optmistically, calls curators "clerks of the nostalgia of the ruling class in decline") and he talks of how publicity and advertising exploits us, the viewers, makes us complicit in an unfair world, and, ultimately, leads us to being unhappier.
While he rails against the way we interpret society being dictated by those who control culture he doesn't let us completely off the hook and delves into our own, often accidental, culpability in allowing this to happen. He writes about the choices we make when it comes to not just what we see, but what we look at. When we look at a photograph we see what is in that photograph but we also know, on some level, that the photographer chose how to frame that image, what to include, and what to leave out. We may also ask ourselves why the photographer made those decisions or, in fact, why any artist should choose to create any image and we may, if we're even bolder, ask ourselves if, when interpreting what is presented to us, have arrived at our conclusions using our own unconscious or, sometimes, conscious, biases.
Most famously of all, Berger speaks about how differently we view images of men to how we view those of women. His contention is that when we look at an image of a man we think what he can do for us and when we look at an image of a woman we think that we can do for, with, or to her. This, of course, is a male perspective (Berger is a man) but it is an enlightened one for the era, for the early seventies.
Hans Memling - Vanity (c.1485)
Men, Berger goes on to say, survey women before deciding how they will treat them and women know that and, accordingly, survey themselves constantly. This isn't a natural state of affairs, one we're inherently born with, but a societal thing - Berger makes an arguable case that non-Western art is far less guilty of this kind of objectification. A learnt behaviour. Men look at women (witness all the female nudes hanging in the grand and celebrated galleries around the world) and women look at themselves being looked at (see how many male nudes there are next to these female nudes).
In some cases, Berger goes on to say, men painted naked women so that they could look at them and then painted them staring at a mirror, calling the painting something like Vanity, and somehow managed to blame the women for the weakness they feel at giving in to their own carnal desires. The reason for this is, historically, because the presumption that the viewer, the ideal viewer, of art is a man. Ideally a heterosexual man. Ideally a wealthy heterosexual man.
Edouard Manet - Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe (1863)
Perhaps, with this obsession with capturing the naked, or nude, female form on canvas, Berger proposes, quite sensibly, that images were first made to capture an absence and that they do but they also capture not just what is caught in that image (a sitter, a landscape, some flowers or fruit) but how the artist themselves looked at it while creating that image (their state of mind, their age, their sexuality, an inconceivably high number of inherent biases and prejudices).
When he drills down into that, Ways of Seeing is just as fascinating as it is when he considers the inbuilt structure of gendered roles within art history and how business and finance have corrupted the idea that art is something that all can enjoy on an equal level. The way Berger puts sentences together, short - precise - exact - powerful, makes him an easy writer to read but the ideas he presents sometimes need time to settle in your mind. The way the book is broken up into text and sections of illustrations gives you ample time to do so and when it comes to referencing artists, Berger is pretty comprehensive.
Frans Hals - Regents of the Old Men's Alms House (1664)
The list of those mentioned is exhaustive and includes Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Picasso, Durer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Goya, Chardin, Turner, Monet, Constable, Cezanne, Ingres, Poussin, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, El Greco, Vermeer, Warhol, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Frans Hals, and our old friend William Blake (and there are illustrations from many others:- Giotto, Cimabue, Raphael, Murillo, Gericault, Piero Della Francesca) - and elsewhere there are name checks for such unlikely bedfellows as Balzac, Claude Levi-Strauss, Marilyn Monroe, Kenneth Clark, the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, and, best of all - for me, Walter Benjamin. Even buildings like the Church of St Francis in Assisi are considered.
Even without these references, Berger makes his points clearly and proudly and never apologises for doing so. Deep and meaningful thoughts are presented to the reader in an easily readable and readily digestible series of essays that may have seemed almost revolutionary at the time but have now become, or at least mostly become, part of the art viewer's armoury. A lovely little read and one everyone interested in art, or who simply likes looking at things, should read at least once in their life.
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