Journal Post #1
One of the most interesting bits in Berger’s Ways of Seeing concerns sight and how knowledge can change the way we perceive. He illustrates this powerfully by having the reader examine Wheatfield with Crows (1890) totally without comment
before revealing on the next page that it was the last picture Vincent Van Gogh completed before ending his own life. Suddenly, the image takes on a whole new life and tells so much more of a story than it did just a turn of the page before. I quite like Van Gogh but I must profess that I didn’t find the above to be his top-notch work. After learning about its background, though, I felt I needed to give it more consideration than I did. Because of its tragic circumstances, I found myself thinking there must have been something I missed initially and that the great tragedy and internal turmoil he was dealing with at the time must somehow be woven into the piece’s composition. This self-doubt and re-examination spurred on by the revelation of the painting’s background caused me to wonder if it’s really fair to either the artist or the viewer to attach blurbs explaining the work’s circumstances to them. By doing so, you remove the possibility of the purely visceral reactions upon which I think the visual arts are largely based. What makes Art so, in my humble opinion, is the drawing of strong reactions, favorable or no. If you force the viewer to consider more than their own feelings upon the initial viewing, you remove them from the process and their opinions become less than own and more what the blurb’s writer wrote. The artist is also robbed because his piece has been stripped of its ability to bring forth straight-forward reactions from his audience. To keep Art pure of other humans’ conceptions and biases, I feel it’s best to present it naked, totally without explanation. Then there can be real Truth, though there might be less consensus.
I found Friday’s class discussion about the first three essays in John Berger’s Ways Of Seeing fascinating and enlightening. Prior to my entry into the Macaulay Honors Program, I have had little experience with “art.” Excluding music, I have no idea what makes art be considered “art” or why certain people praise or detest pieces of artwork.
However, both this book and Friday’s class showed me a whole new perspective on looking at and enjoying art. I realized I have much to learn when it comes to appreciating art.
This novel showed that there are several ways to view art and how it has different meanings. The way how I see a work of art is going to be different from how someone else will interpret it. For example, the way that I would interpret a painting would be the same way that I interpret a song or musical piece, what the artist was feeling when he or she created the piece. However, the essays in this novel showed there are multiple facets to this. I had no idea that a reproduction of a painting could take away the luster the original had. If anything, I thought it was a good thing for it to be reproduced in that the image gets seen around the world, spreading its influence across a wider range and demographics of people.
I look forward to being educated more about the arts in the upcoming weeks and how I can broaden my tastes in culture and fully appreciate art for what it is.
“Ways of Seeing” Journal Entry #1
With every turn of the page in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing there is an infinite amount of analytical information that I think can be summarized by Berger’s quote from the first page of the book, “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled”. As I progressed from the first essay to the second and finally on to the third, I kept seeing various connections between this quote and other central points that Berger continued to express in his essays. Berger provides a very general example to explain this quote by pointing out that we see the sun set every evening. We know the reason the sun sets is that the earth is turning away from the sun; however, we cannot make a connection between what we know and what we see because we never visually see the earth rotating. I believe that this same logic can be applied to interactions with various forms of art, specifically paintings. What we see and what we know can be similar is some aspects, but vastly different, even shocking, in other situations. Often we make judgments about various things such as books, people, places, art etc. and our notions, established by our eyes, can be can be completely supported or contradicted by what we later find out.
While progressing through the book, my thoughts kept coming back to this quote and I found myself trying to analyze the various paintings, primarily Ingres’s LA Grande Odalisque, only by seeing and then later on by research.
La Grande Odalisque is a young woman, in her mid 20’s, turned away from the painter, but at the same time glancing back with a serene and straightforward expression. She is in an expensive and luxurious bed. The jewels at her head, and what looks like an elaborate feather duster in her hand, suggests that she comes from a wealthy family.
After forming these observations and countless other, I decided to research and went to the Louvre website to authenticate my observations. The website writes that this painting of Ingres received a lot of criticism because the body proportions bear “little resemblance to anatomical reality”. What looked like a perfect picture before now seemed full of errors to me. I started paying close attention to her body parts and noticed that her back seemed longer than what must be anatomically possible for her. I would not have seen this observation if I did not know this description, but at the same time knowing that her limbs are too long doesn’t immediately downgrade the painting in my view. The website also writes that many of Ingres’s paintings represent orientalist themes, in which he depicted women in various harems around the Middle East. What I had seen as her expensive bed and her jewels are accessories that represent the sensuous setting of the harem.
I analyzed many pictures in “Ways of Seeing” and there were some for whom my observation agreed with the research done upon the painting, but there were many of them for whom my initial observation changed after reading descriptions or research passages about them.
Frankly, I enjoyed this exercise. Whether I was proved right or wrong by some art specialist during my exercise, I still liked looking at a painting and letting my imagination go wild. For me, ART is a form of creativity that is open to any interpretation. I like looking at a picture and asking myself a hundred and one questions about the origin, the form, the colors, the painter and every other aspect associated with that piece of art. Art is a secret that I will never be able to understand, but still have the power to seek out.
Reference:
Berger, John. Ways of seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972. Print
The Louvre, France
Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres, La Grande Odalisque. WEB. 1814
Anna Kryukova
Journal #1
An interesting subject that John Berger introduces in “The Ways of Seeing” is that our understanding of what we see if informed by what we already know.This is true for most experiences we have in our daily life because we see everything through a lens of our own personal experiences. This example applies to the discussion of behavior of a former Disney star, Miley Cyrus. The audience that is used to her as a character on a show they watched in their childhood are deeply disturbed by the performance while those who we’re never fans of Cyrus, don’t have much of an emotional reaction. Her fans formed an attachment to her as a child actress and they way they viewed her behavior was impacted by those memories. The same principle applies to all art: our personal experiences can evoke emotional responses and influence how we interpret the art that we see. The ultimate goal of a painter who works with fine art is to capture a moment isolated in time. The content of the painting will never change while the way people view and interpret it can vary throughout history. The artists own vision for the art work can also influence it in many ways. Berger includes an example that in the past when people believed in hell, the artwork with flames and fire evoked negative feelings. What they knew about hell influenced the ways they perceived artwork. Our personal knowledge, although not the only factor that impacts our understanding but it certainly plays an integral role in the way that we interpret and study art.