Simon Plutser-Sarno
Looking at an artwork may seem like a simple act – universal and timeless, but in Ways of Seeing John Berger shows us how intricate and charged the notion really is. The way we look at art has changed drastically throughout the course of human civilization, but never so much and so quickly as in the past several centuries. New inventions and media such as photography and film, art movements – cubism, futurism, impressionism – and the rapid change in social hierarchy have affected our perspective so profoundly that we can never return, and even often find it hard to imagine the way our ancestors must have seen it. By contrasting the direct way in which Berger proposes we look at art with the model of artistry Alice Chase outlines in Looking at Art, we can begin to understand the only and the necessary way of perceiving an image.
In the first few pages, Berger quickly cuts to the chase, and establishes that art is about perspective – “An image [is] a record of how X had seen Y… the more imaginative the work, the more profoundly it allows us to share the artist’s experience of the visible. (p.10)” After defining art in this concrete way, Berger goes on to warn us about mystification. He tells us that as soon as we observe an artwork as such, we begin to make pre-learned assumptions about it that obscure it from deeper understanding. As we mystify, we begin to examine form rather than content, historical background, monetary value, etc., and forget about the immediacy of our experience – about the fact that we are now situated within a fragment of history as an observer. In Berger’s terms, Alice Chase unknowingly mystifies art in some of her discussions. We can see this clearly when Chase states that “[A work of art] is the expression of man’s thoughts and feelings. (p.31)” and follows up with diversion on lengthy tangents that project the artists’ emotional states, and lead to a completely ambiguous analysis of the artworks as illustrating the human condition, the splendor of god’s creation, or something of the like. Berger would say that the mystifying way in which Chase views art “transfers the emotion provoked by the image from the plane of lived experience, to that of disinterested ‘art appreciation.’ (p.13)”
Another area of high contrast between Berger and Chase is their opinion on photography as a medium, and the way it changed our perspective on art. Chase holds a dismissive standpoint – often comparing photography to a simple “viewing” or “recording” of reality, and saying that, since it doesn’t give any freedom to the artist in capturing different aspects of it, it is not a real art form – it is merely documentation, and that utilitarian purpose was its only contribution. For a reader of John Berger, this notion is completely laughable. Photography has developed since the 19th century, the images produced can be highly controlled and conceptualized by the artist – change in ISO, shutter speed, angle, lens, subject, context, digital effects, etc. all make photography a fine art like any other. This is beside the point, however – Berger explains to us the real importance of photography. Today we rarely see original artwork – we mostly see photographs – reproductions. They take art out of its original context – icons out of the chapel and onto our walls, paintings out of the collection and onto our TV screen. Berger states: “In the art of pictorial reproduction the meaning of paintings is no longer attached to them. (p.24)” And truly, we now see art in advertisements, with their added definitions, we see original paintings shown in segments and those even in sequences. We see new narratives layered right on top that hide the original ones.
For Berger, the creation of art is the immediacy of the moment – the image captured and extended temporally, while its reception is our emotional and intellectual reaction to it in its silent immediacy. After reading his essays on the proper viewing of art, I find it impossible to contextualize or perceive images in any other way.
