Junk for Code

The pictorial turn#2

The pictorial turn mentioned in the previous post that "the eye "or the "gaze"or "looking" has been opened up to historical and cultural interpretation. Hence we have different ways of seeing in reponse to an older theory of the eye as passive receiver.

Goya, Nude Maja, 1800

This pictorial turn involves a probing of the hidden effects of the fundamental assumptions of the visual metaphors and visual practices. Thus the assumptions of the Goya image is that men are the sex that looks and women the sex that is looked at. The nude figures rarely have much personality; they exist simply to be contemplated and enjoyed by men.

One of the prime examples of this was the feminist account of the male gaze. This gaze was seen to be one of the primary mechanisms by which oppressive patriarchal relations are maintained.

A distinction is sometimes made between the gaze and the look. The look is a perceptual mode open to all, whilst the gaze is a mode of viewing reflecting a gendered code of desire. The gaze was related to cinema. Hollywood cinema was seen as an instrument of the male gaze, producing representations of women, the good life, and sexual fantasy from a male point of view.

The general line of argument is that women have been fetishized by the male creative subject. They have both been revered and feared as "Other;" admired for the formal aspects of the female body (the beautiful) and cast in a passive role as object of the male gaze.

Velazquez, Venus at her Mirror, 1649-51

Photographers continued producing ‘woman as image’. The image becomes a ‘spectacle’ for men who do the looking.

Jan Saudek, Phorographer as Jesus, 1991

In the society of the spectacle women are there to be looked at.

Consequently, women's visual representations of women has been mitigated by the cultural awareness of woman as object, particularly in the visual arts. They contain a certain self-consciousness of the social construction of the feminine as surface and image: the narcissistic gaze in the mirror.

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Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 13, 2004 10:55 PM | TrackBack