Looking vs. Seeing Art
Art can be the expressway of one’s feelings through a canvas or the reciprocal image of what one may see from their vantage point reproduced. One individual’s viewpoint on art may vary vastly from another. However, no matter what one person may take from an artwork, art can be accepted as a universal language. Art allows people with different ideologies to strike up common ground when discussing their respective takes on something.
Two individuals who had contrasting viewpoints as to what constitutes an artwork were John Berger and Alice Elizabeth Chase. In both of their respective books, John Berger and Alice Elizabeth Chase emphasized the point that the first way in which an individual understands art is through looking. We see then we use words to describe what is present. However, the two differed in their views as to how the invention of the camera came to affect art as well as what makes an artwork unique.
In Ways of Seeing, John Berger was completely anti-camera in the sense that it took away the uniqueness of an original work. He felt as though the camera isolated “momentary appearances” and thereby rendered away an artwork’s true meaning. The camera enabled artworks to be taken out of the place it used to reside and where the work’s original meaning was best conveyed. People no longer traveled to works of art with high frequency when it become possible for it to come to them.
For example, since paintings were allowed to appear simultaneously on people’s television, depending on the area around the television, two different meanings could be derived. If a family saw an image of a flame on their TV and their house was cold; this image could mean heat and warmth. On the contrary, if a painting of a flame appeared on the TV in a family’s house that was already warm and very religious, such an image could remind them of hell and how people burn for their unrepented acts of immorality.
Berger essentially constituted art as being a work of authenticity. He emphasized on the importance of the little details such as the people and their expressions being paramount. When describing the difference between naked and nude, Berger didn’t focus on describing the background. Rather that in a nude artwork, there is a female on display, bearing herself and the hairs on her body with her attention directed at the viewer.
On the other hand, in Looking at Art, Alice Elizabeth Chase reasoned that the camera didn’t take away from the original image; rather, it conveyed exactly the way things look. She reasoned it was easier for a camera to capture a view as compared to an artist who has to map out a way to illustrate the wide and distant elements from a given point of view since in a landscape everything isn’t necessarily on the same plane.
With a landscape, Alice Elizabeth Chase found that it was one of the most important subjects in art in its ability to reflect the moods of man and the infinity of God. For example, as described in the third chapter of her book, although the event of the Baptism of Christ is only incident of the forefront of the image as stated, such didn’t lessen the importance of the landscape in the backdrop. Through the landscape, one is able to see the presence of God through the nature in which he help made just as much as one is able to see Him through his son’s baptism.
Conversely, although photography has it pitfalls as stated in the fourth chapter of Looking At Art because certain elements can be blocked out by another one present in the view. Chase doesn’t look at this as a way to denounce photography but as a way to show how artists have more of an advantage in producing images in the way that they can use lighter and darker shades to contrast different objects. Then, to contrast different perspectives, they can simply make things increase in magnitude as the object comes towards the viewer.
In essence, Berger took the perspective of how a viewer of art would see something. Chase took the perspective of how an artist would look at something then reciprocate it. As a result, they each garnered different takes on different artistic elements not because they necessarily define art as two separate entities. Rather, both Chase and Berger just examine it from two opposite perspectives.
