Abstract
Ways of Seeing, the film series directed by Mike Dibb and broadcast on BBC2 in 1972, preceded the timeless original, the 1972 book, a copy of a 1980s edition of which I still keep close at hand as a manual to hand to students new to visual studies. Crumbling with age and stained with use, its grainy black and white reproductions convey to me more feeling than the actual presence of many of the paintings they describe. They record a collective conversation over time in comments, coffee stains, and disdainful punctuation. Randall van Schepen (2007) recalls Benjamin’s comments on the auratic quality of the book in the hands of its collector: ‘in qualities that echo those of photography, the book’s ironic status as a “unique copy”, its provenance, and the life represented within its pages give the collector a subjectively auratic experience’ (p. 3). But that experience, in the case of the circulating copy that is this 1982 book version of Ways of Seeing, what is evoked is not a past revered but a tablet of practice in skeptical reading, a condensation of marks that document training in not the work of the eye, or even knowledge about its ways of seeing, but the practices of critical appropriation, bemusement, and defacement.
As is so often the case, television gets right to the point. The Ways of Seeing broadcast series flew in the face of Kenneth Clark’s 1969 Civilization, a series that was as edifying as Berger’s was cutting. In the opening shot of the first episode, we see Berger from behind. He’s standing before a studio wall papered in brown-flocked cream damask, on which hangs an even more ornate framed reproduction of Sandro Botticelli’s 1483 Venus and Mars. The joke about tacky opulence in the era of minimalism ripens with age. Berger himself is clad in a swinging shirt with geometric patterned bands that produce a weird camouflage effect against the wallpaper. Violating the taboo of touching the work of art on gallery display, he raises his hand to the canvas, making the film’s opening sound, which is also its first cut. An amplified scratch breaks the hollow quiet of the gallery soundtrack as he defaces the work, methodically slitting the canvas with a knife. Echoing Luis Buñuel’s anti-museumifying gesture performed in the opening shot of Un Chien Andalou, Berger starts his series by cutting from this iconic painting its most powerful set of eyes. We hear the sound of canvas ripping in sync with this image of Berger as art vandal even before his disembodied voiceover cuts in to tell us: ‘It isn’t so much the paintings themselves that I want to consider as the way we now see them.’
It is easy to see that the object of his cut is not the painting per se, but the look it contains. He’s cut off the head of Venus, in the process removing from the painting its represented source of cognizance, its embodiment of the goddess’s active female gaze turned upon a passive male body, the unconscious figure of Mars. The god’s own eyes are by contrast incognizant, rolled back in his head. While some have interpreted Mars’ stupor as post-coital bliss, others have insisted it’s meant to suggest he’s succumbed to the narcotic effects of Datura stronomium, or Jimson weed, a spiny fruit of which is clutched in the chubby little hand of the satyr who peeps out from under the god’s flaccid arm. We may notice all this because in the place of Venus’s prominent head, to which we might have looked before, we now have, quite simply, a hole.
Many things get performed in the first few moments of Berger on television. It is clear that Berger’s and Dibb’s intent was to undercut Civilization, and to do so without eschewing humor along its pompous way. The Klein-blue hue of matteboard exposed by the rectangular cut may have been a random element, but it’s worth noting that in 1972 there is potential humor if not irony in a blank square of this trademark color emerging, portrait-like, in the place of a female face. The excised face makes its appearance again in the very next scene of the episode, this time in the form of a miniature portrait on a gridded page of postcards, a catalog of classic works of art. The page is replicated multiple times on a printing press, where it appears to make Walter Benjamin’s famous point about the changing experience of unique works of art through their reproductions. Berger’s edgy vandalism is revealed to be a democratizing editorial act that releases the work of art for our recognition of its common consumption in other forms and contexts. ‘Now, as you look at these on your screen’, Berger tells his listeners in voiceover about a host of classic works tossed down one after another on a copy stand under a stationary camera, ‘your wallpaper is around them, your window is opposite them, your carpet in below them … You are seeing them in the context of your own life.’ The attention of the television viewed is thus redirected from Berger, the paintings he shows us, and the television screen to the living room, to the viewers of the episode in their own Bourdieuian habitus seated before their Spigelian hearth. The television audience is invited to recognize its own curatorial hand in the very sort of process Berger has performed on Clark, launching the era of critical appropriation that opened the floodgates to the new realism of the 1980s.
There is another text that gets remade in Ways of Seeing. Near my office copy of Ways of Seeing is G. (1992[1972]), the Man Booker-prize-winning novel published in the same year as the television series, marked up to serve as a skeptic’s reference manual for the curious primer in art criticism. It’s also riddled with its own passages, like the opening one of the television series, which build on feminine absence and invisibility. On G.’s mother, for example, Berger wrote: ‘The mystery of her own poor health began with his [her father’s] death and gradually established the foundation of a lifelong right: the right to be less than present, the right to withdraw’ (p. 3). And on the body and aging: ‘The process of maturing and, later, of ageing involves a gradual but increasing withdrawal of the self from the exterior surface of the body’ (p. 84). And then, his classic take-home for feminism:
The subjunctive realm of the woman, this realm of her presence, guaranteed that no such action undertaken within it could ever possess full integrity; in each action there was an ambiguity which corresponded to an ambiguity in the self, divided between surveyor and surveyed. The so-called duplicity of woman was the result of the monolithic dominance of man. (p. 150)
and, finally,
‘For the woman the state of being in love was an hallucinatory interregnum between two owners, her bridegroom taking the place of her father, or later, perhaps, a lover taking the place of her husband … The surveyor-within-herself quickly became identified with the new owner. She would begin to watch herself as if she were him. (p. 152)
The book is inscribed ‘For Anya and her sisters in Women’s Liberation’, a sentiment that made me hope to find more redeeming value in the critical text.
Visibility, absence, and reversibility in the logic of the gaze were in fact the basis for a critical logic introduced in the text. One can very well see that it is Mars not Venus for whom the state of being in love was an hallucinatory interregnum between two owners, if we may consider the two accounts of his state of lethargy, post-coital and narcotic bliss, to suggest two agents in the production of that sated look: the hand of the goddess, and the needle of the fruit wielded by the sly little satyr. But three episodes later, discussing classic European painting, Berger makes a switch to the side of materiality and presence, noting the tangibility, the solidity, the weight, the graspability of what is depicted on the canvas. ‘What was real’ for the collectors who all but papered the walls of their homes in paintings depicting treasured objects, he explains, consisted in ‘what you could put your hands on’. The idea that a thing is only valuable and real if it appeared from the painting that you could hold it, he continues, ‘may be connected to the idea of taking the thing to pieces to see how it works’. He then segues to instruments of navigation introduced at the start of the European slave trade. But he could also have been discussing his own act of identifying the object (the painting, the woman) and then taking the thing to pieces at the beginning of the series, and his decision to leave behind the senseless body of the man while we follow the disembodied head to the printing press. I find it unsurprising that a 2011 blogger recounting his interest in the novel that is G. compares reading Berger’s novel to watching the very sort of tinkerer Berger described in the television series: ‘Now imagine that you have to sit there while this watchmaker takes apart and reassembles four or five different watches, explaining the process in the same excruciating detail’ (Rose City Reader, 2011).
I want to fast-forward here to the bodies of two men in a work that has recently come into the foreground again based on some renewed taking apart. In early 2011, conservators at Madrid’s Prado Museum announced that they had been engaged in the painstaking process of removing a background layer from a painting that had been believed to be a 16th or 17th century replica of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. A surface of black overpaint was stripped away from the surface of the replica’s background, revealing a series of landscape layers that corresponded, layer for layer, with the successive layers of changes that make up the original that hangs at the Louvre. What struck many as interesting about this correspondence of copy and original is that it suggested a kind of temporality of copy-production that one commentator described in the television-era language of ‘real-time’: it appears the copy was made at the same time and in the same place as the masterpiece, in the presence of the master in the act of rendering the work. If we think of each layer of the background as a frame, we can begin to understand the canvas’s layers as a kind of film-like register of the work of the hands over time. What was rendered on the copy-canvas was not so much the look of the original, scrutinized and reproduced, but the work over time of the hand of the master, observed and copied on the spot and in sync. The copy was a copy not of the look of the work, but of the way of the hand.
A few years after the publication of Ways of Seeing, a kind of unwittingly mirror-image copy manual was produced in the field of sociology. In Ways of the Hand (1978), David Sudnow described the painstaking work of teaching, or being led by, his fingers, as he acquired the ability to compose jazz aloud on the piano. The routine of playing by ear and by hand became the focus of his painstaking account of embodied practice. He focused on the growth of a skill of the hand, a critical skill involving the ability to reproduce scales and then to change them up, to rework them over time in organized improvised conduct. Keeping as close to the phenomenon as possible, he described in diary-like detail the temporal progression of learning to perform scales, then to improvise in jazz form, and finally to teach a method that is essentially one of creative reproduction. He marveled at the question of what it is we reproduce when we perform interpretive acts that make something in another form (audio, visual) emerge with a difference that matters:
At live performances I had watched the very rapid improvisation of players whose records had served as my models, but their body idioms in no way seemed connected in details to the nature of their melodies, and my occasional attempts to emulate the former had no appreciable bearing on my success with the latter. This, for example, had a little shoulder tic, but mimicking that (which I found myself doing after a night of watching him) did not make his sorts of melodies happen. Another sat tightly hunched over the piano, playing furiously fast, but assuming that posture seemed to have no intrinsic relationship to getting my jazz to happen as his did. (p82)
I am moving toward the suggestion that the beauty of Ways of Seeing is its suggestion of an embodied practice of appropriation that was not simply about capturing the look, but of performing the material action, through which we experience art as an intersubjective embodied process. It is not surprising to me that Berger never gave up his practices of drawing and painting. Yet to see the works in their copies online one must dig through screen after screen of miniatures of other people’s works, catalogs of the classics he took apart and remade. These reproductions of classics stand under the sign of his name, ticking away on the web like so many watches that he has rewound.
Is it ironic or interesting that the first image of his work that I encounter is a female nude? ‘At first’, he writes about his drawing of the Spanish dancer María Muñoz, ‘you question the model … in order to discover lines, shapes, tones that you can trace on the paper. Also, of course, it accumulates corrections, after further questioning of the first answers. Drawing is correcting.’
Correcting, like seeing, is an intersubjective action. Berger’s hand was in fact corrected not by himself, but by his subject. He relates that his request to Muñoz to draw her was made in a studio where the film crew of Artangel’s TV series Life Class was engaged in a shoot. He relates her response:
Let me show you something, she suggested, it’s a preparatory position we take on the floor like this and we call it the Bridge, because our weight is suspended between our left hand palm down on the floor and our right foot also flat on the floor. Between those two fixed points the whole body is expectant, waiting, suspended … Drawing Maria in the Bridge position was like drawing a coal miner working in a very narrow seam. Maria’s body was highly feminine, but what was comparable was its visible experience of exertion and endurance.
Berger’s account tells us not so much about his ways of seeing, but rather about his ways of the hand, and his lesson in the ways of embodied performance under the instruction of Muñoz. By reading Ways of Seeing through Ways of the Hand, perhaps we can find an account of the place of practice and the ways that drawing joins writing in the work of Berger’s long and multidisciplinary career which has engendered so much in the way of teaching us the expressive practice of critical thinking.