Art is not merely strokes of color or graphite on a piece of canvas to be simply looked at- art is to be interpreted. Because of it’s nature, interpreting art, subjectively, gives the piece more meaning. Two pieces, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and Alice Elizabeth Chase’s Looking at Art, discuss ways to view and understand art. Though the words ‘seeing’ and ‘looking’ are seemingly interchangeable, the two writings convey differences in perception.
Alice Elizabeth Chase begins her work by describing the difference between an average person’s view of art versus an artist’s view of art. According to Chase, regular people see art in colors, near or far, big or small. Artists see what is in front of them and reinterpret it to match their view of the world. Artists are faced with the scenario of confining a real life view to a canvas- restructuring and tweaking what is visible in order to express his ideas on it. Chase supports her statements by giving examples of the ways different cultures have created art. Egyptians were more concerned with the shape of objects and viewed a scene as a map; thus, they represented what they saw with simple shapes and lines. Romans enjoyed vibrant paintings of landscapes as sharp contrasts to the turmoil-ridden cities they lived in. Chinese reflected the importance of landscape as the “moods of man and the infinity of God.” In America, once the country had established itself, artists began to look to painting the countryside as an enthusiastic form of patriotism. Overall, Chase relays the idea that art is a reflection of the culture and time period of which it was created in combination with the artist’s personal view of the world.
Chapter 4 in Chase’s work describes the way in which artists used space. Egyptian representations of humans were often inaccurate; typically displaying a profiled face, forward facing shoulders, and side-facing legs. Artists used size and shape to represent importance as was done in King Assurnasirpal’s Encampment an Stables. It was the Greeks who began to add a third-dimension to their artwork. Greek artists employed shadows and foreshortening to suggest depth. Another topic discussed by Chase was perspective. She describes the evolution of perspective used in art ranging from the vanishing-point perspective used by Italians to the isometric perspective used by the Japanese. Chase once again makes it clear that there is no way “right” way to create art; beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Berger shares a similar view to Chase’s, however, his work “Ways of Seeing” focuses more on the individual viewing the piece of art as opposed to Chase’s focus, the artist who created the art. Berger believes that modern day art viewers’ perceptions are skewed to reflect what society has taught us of beauty, form, and truth. Berger also touches upon an aspect that Chase did not mention: technology. Berger believes that the value of perceived art comes not from what we see, but it’s uniqueness. He states that technology and the camera’s ability to reproduce copies of art in different sizes “destroys its unique original meaning.”
Art is infinite in meaning, there is no “correct” way to create art or look at art. The meaning of art is hidden in a combination of what the artist intended to create and portray and what the viewer interprets it as. Chase and Berger both express different views on how art should be looked at and see, but one thing is constant: art is dynamic, a forever changing entity that is always interpreted and reinterpreted.
