For a text so suspicious of tradition, Ways Of Seeing has long been
canon itself. Given the ubiquity and influence of the book, it’s curious to
think that there must still be a few people today who remember experiencing it
as a bolt from the blue. Picture someone, somewhere in England, switching
channels on 8 January 1972. By chance, they land on the image of a man with
shaggy hair in a gallery, his back to the camera, cutting out a portion of
Botticelli’s Venus And Mars with a pocket knife. “This is the first of
four programmes in which I want to question some of the assumptions usually
made about European paintings…” he says. “Tonight, it isn’t so much the
paintings themselves I want to consider, but the way we now see them…”
Ways Of Seeing was originally a four-part series on the BBC, hosted
by British art critic, theorist and novelist John Berger and directed by
Michael Dibb. It was adapted that same year as a pictorial book that became—and
still remains —standard reading for students of the arts. Few watch the series
first—or at all. Yet it offers things that the book cannot, most of all Berger
himself, passionate and weirdly sexy with his open-collar shirt, his expansive
gestures and his glares at the camera (David Thomson, a film critic always
alert to sexual charge, described him as “a spellbinder on the screen, with a
slight lisp that could seem like whispered intimacy”).
In the first episode, Berger explains how photography fundamentally changed
how we see art. The European tradition of painting used the convention of
perspective, focused on the eye of a sole beholder. “Perspective makes the eye
the centre of the visible world,” he says. “But the human eye can only be in
one place at a time. It takes its visible world with it as it walks.” With the
invention of the camera, paintings could be reproduced, could travel. Works of
art—or sections of these works, like the Venus that Berger cut out of the
Botticelli—now found their original meanings altered by what was around them
(like a magazine spread) or what they are seen in relation to (someone
switching channels). Having taken a knife to tradition at the start, Berger
closes by quoting a stuffy academic book on Dutch painter Frans Hals, saying
flatly, “This is mystification,” and inviting a group of children to interpret
the paintings instead.
The second episode is the best-known portion of the series/book. It yielded
the one bit of writing by Berger that lay readers, not just art students, are
familiar with: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” We
encounter the line at the beginning of the episode, where it’s preceded by “Men
dream of women. Women dream of themselves being dreamt of”, a less electrifying
line, excised in the print edition. “How she appears to others, and
particularly how she appears to men, is of crucial importance, for it is
normally thought of as the success of her life,” he says. In the book, he adds:
“The ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman
is designed to flatter him.” Three years before film scholar Laura Mulvey
coined the phrase “male gaze” in the context of cinema, Berger was arguing
something similar in art.
Ways Of Seeing has a modesty about its own aims and a desire to push
the viewer into engagement. “I hope you will consider what I arrange, but be
sceptical of it,” Berger says at the end of the first episode. And he ends the
last with: “What I’ve shown and said…must be judged against your own
experience.” This refusal to present the show’s theories as gospel is an
unusually democratic gesture by a critic. You can see the same openness in the
second episode, when, after discussing the male surveyor and the female
surveyed, Berger brings in a group of women to talk about the same ideas. He
cedes the stage to them for half of the programme’s running time—a necessary
passing of the mic.
In the third and fourth episodes, Berger argues that oil paintings (and the
wealth, land and objects depicted therein) reflect the status of those who
commission them, and that modern publicity and advertising have replaced the
oil painting. “Publicity and oil painting…share many of the same ideals, all of
them related to the principle that you are what you have,” he says. He overlays
vapid, glossy magazine advertisements with choral music—thus testing our
alertness to something he warns of in the first episode: the ability of music
to transform the meaning of images. At one point, taking off from a
juxtaposition of a magazine story about Bangladesh and a luxury ad next to it,
he speaks with feeling about the plight of refugees. Berger’s sympathy for the
working class, the refugee and the grass-roots rebel has marked all his
writing; he donated half his winnings from his 1972 Booker Prize to the Black
Panthers movement in England, to call attention to the Booker McConnell
company’s association with West Indies plantations and slavery.
“Those who write about art, or teach about it, often raise art above life,
turning it into a kind of religion,” we are warned. Throughout Ways Of
Seeing, and in his other work, Berger always gives the impression of trying
to get through to the reader, even when the ideas he’s putting forth are
complex. It’s the reason why I, even with a layman’s knowledge of art, find his
writing so revelatory, why his sentences often seem like the best possible
statement of that particular idea. The print adaptation of Ways Of Seeing is
more staccato than his normal style, which is hardly surprising given that it’s
an expanded TV script. It’s still the ideal introduction to Berger: visually
alive, stimulating even at a remove of half a century. But watch the series
first, and imagine how exciting it would have seemed in 1972.
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