The Gaze and the Media - Lecture 2

Helen Clarke - The Gaze and the Media - lecture 2

From Ways of Seeing Chapter 3

Investigation of the gaze through the nude in european oli painting

This does not mean that women are vain. Women watch themselves being looked at because of the many representations of women that surround us.

Women survey their own femininity and idea of this. 

Angle of mirror is incorrect in reflection. the womans face in mirror is full. 

Double view of face, mirror placed in hand as device to justify act of looking. Painter makes painting so they can enjoy nudity. Allows us to look at her without.

Slight challenge to the gaze as she looks back from the mirror. Checking mirror - how do i look? 

Tendency to depict female body which doesn't allow us to look at the gaze.

Reclinig figure, 3/4 picture taken up of the body, legs open dn hand on breast. Because of this the advert was banned, they ended up turning the image round, from horizontal to vertical when publishing - takes emphasis of sexual body position. 

Titians Venus of Urbino; 1538

Berger makes the comparison :Traditional nude- regarding us coquettishly

Olympia transforms a dignified goddess into the simple nakedness of humanity. Olympia does not belong to the world of mythology - Olympia stood “as the first nude to represent modern reality” because she is a prostitute rather than a goodness figure.Shocked Modern society - Olympia is adorned with the trappings of success - jewels / bracelets etc not the degraded prostitute of popular myth - Courtesan

Cat is symbol of individual femininity and independence. Olympia ignores the flowers presented to her, probably as a gift to her from an admirer.

Guerrilla Girls formed in 1985 in response to the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture" which showcased 169 artists; out of those 169, only 17 were women. The curator's press release for the exhibition stated: "Any artist who is not in my show should rethink his career." 

Asked to design a billboard for the Public Art Fund in New York, we welcomed the chance to do something that would appeal to a general audience. One Sunday morning we conducted a "weenie count" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, comparing the number of nude males to nude females in the artworks on display. The results were very "revealing."

The PAF said our design wasn't clear enough (????) and rejected it. We then rented advertising space on NYC buses and ran it ourselves, until the bus company canceled our lease, saying that the image, based on Ingres' famous Odalisque, was too suggestive and that the figure appeared to have more than a fan in her hand.

Phallic implication

Take object to be some sort of sexual object - sexual connotation and therefore poster was banned from public view.

MANET - Bar at the Folies Bergeres

Again, self-portrait…

Skewed perspective.

Dissaffected from society, unhappy at work and not involved with the revelry - Marginalised members of this great new Modernist society

Role of women - disaffected, no longer the passively available, sexualised Nymphs

Locket around the hints at another life - escapism - a love token from another world

She is the only figure not reflected - Paris as a hall of mirrors - Superficiality

See her from 2 positions at once, see her as herself and as the character 'gent' in the corner. 

She looks at us and returns our gaze.

Picture for Women was inspired by Edouard Manet's masterpiece A Bar at the Folies-Bergères (1881–82). In Manet's painting, a barmaid gazes out of frame, observed by a shadowy male figure. The whole scene appears to be reflected in the mirror behind the bar, creating a complex web of viewpoints. Wall borrows the internal structure of the painting, and motifs such as the light bulbs that give it spatial depth. The figures are similarly reflected in a mirror, and the woman has the absorbed gaze and posture of Manet's barmaid, while the man is the artist himself. Though issues of the male gaze, particularly the power relationship between male artist and female model, and the viewer's role as onlooker, are implicit in Manet's painting, Wall updates the theme by positioning the camera at the centre of the work, so that it captures the act of making the image (the scene reflected in the mirror) and, at the same time, looks straight out at us.

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/jeffwall/rooms/room1.shtm

GAZE OF CAMERA AND GAZE OF WOMAN. 

From her essay “the look”

Nudity

Sunglasses

Normalises the display of bodies

Voyeurism: the compulsion to seek sexual gratification by secretively looking at sexual objects or acts; the actions of a Peeping Tom. 

To do with quantity - no. of images of naked male bodies is outweigh by female bodies. 

There are examples where the male body is objectified in a similar way

The issue of male objectification is often raised in gender classes that I have taught. I have heard many men and women suggest that men are now equally objectified in popular culture. Many a people have focused on the Lucky Vanos ads of years past as a sign of advertisers recognizing the desire of women to objectify men in our society. But what is really happening in advertising? Can men be objectified as women? If so, in what frequency is objectification present in ads? The Ads: Consider the number of ads presented in this male trope as compared to other examples of female objectification. It is interesting that when I first began the Web site many years ago, the number of ads in this exhibit were small. Today, there are nearly 60 such ads. 

Laura Mulvey did not undertake empirical studies of actual filmgoers, but declared her intention to make ‘political use’ of Freudian psychoanalytic theory (in a version influenced by Jacques Lacan) in a study of cinematic spectatorship in narrative Hollywood cinema.

Mulvey notes that Freud had referred to (infantile) - the pleasure involved in looking at other people’s bodies as (particularly, erotic) objects. In the darkness of the cinema auditorium it is notable that one may look without being seen either by those on screen by other members of the audience.argues that various features of cinema viewing conditions facilitate for the viewer both the voyeuristic process of objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic process of identification with an ‘ideal ego’ seen on the screen. She declares that in patriarchal society ‘pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female

Action character - men led stories, woman are accessories in stories, Lara croft - leading female? Visual special - something thats a sexualised object - overly sexualised. 

Two women are trying to cut off a man's head on a bed. Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Beheading Holofernes shows a famous Biblical assassination. The sword-woman is Judith, a Jewish lady. The other woman is her maid, Abra. Their victim is Holofernes, the Assyrian general.

Judith has got into his tent and got him deeply drunk. To judge from his naked body in the sheets and from her slipped dress, she's got him into bed too, before he passed out and they could get to work. Gentileschi pays attention to her story.

And now the drunk man has woken in the middle of their attack. Candlelight reveals the tight, desperate wrestling of limbs. Judith, she with the blade, is keeping herself at arm's length, partly, as her pursed, slightly averted face suggests, out of a revulsion from the disgusting though necessary job (how many heads has she cut off before?); partly to stay out of the fight, so far as this is possible, because both her hands are needed for leverage, grasping his head by the hair, pushing the blade through his neck.

Abra meanwhile tries to hold him down. Her calm and beautiful face is directly above him, looking straight down on to him. Her efficient hospital gestures restrain his thrashing body. They indicate her perfect managing indifference to this creature's battle for life. But both women are ruthless. Judith is disposing of a rat. Abra is drowning kittens.

There is plenty of sensation to enjoy, the blood-stained sheets, the flesh. But Gentileschi's emphasis is on how hard it is, how long it can take, to kill someone. She stresses the hows and difficulties. The strain and strength in Judith's parallel arms, driving the sword through spine and gristle, is evident. The visual confusion of plunging arms and gripping hands – whose is whose? – mimics Abra's trouble keeping control of the man, holding one arm down while another breaks free.

This violence, in other words, is violent. This outcome is clear, probably imminent, the cut is almost through, the head will come free. But that's not how the picture makes you feel. There is no sense of a clean gesture, a chop. They're in the thick of it, the carving blade still in the neck, their bodies tangled with his like lovers. The killers are intimately implicated in their murder.

This killing isn't pictured as a heroic deed, a sword raised to strike, a head raised as a trophy. It's an ongoing business, which never seems to end. Muori, dannato! Muori!, as Tosca cries in the opera: Die, damned one! And in this painting, the struggle continues.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/great-works-judith-beheading-holofernes-161213-artemisia-gentileschi-1807173.html

Image and text using found imergery. Turning away form the male gaze, feminist work, figure in image literally turning away - implication of violence on the 'hits' in title. 

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Humorous challenge - implies sexual act but picturing the self consciousness that because of connotation, of sexual act, might produce a self conciseness - conforoontational look. 

FROM POWERPOINT:

The idea that women are natural liars has a long pedigree. The key document in this centuries-long tradition is the notorious witch-hunter's manual, the Malleus Maleficarum or The Hammer of Witches, which was commissioned by Pope Innocent VIII. The book was written by two Dominican monks and published in 1486. It unleashed a flood of irrational beliefs about women's "dual" nature. "A woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep," the authors warned. They also claimed that "all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable".

It's not difficult to see these myths lurking behind Pacelli's description of Knox: "She was a diabolical, satantic, demonic she-devil. She was muddy on the outside and dirty on the inside. She has two souls, the clean one you see before you and the other." The lawyer's claim that she was motivated by "lust" could have come straight from the Malleus, which insists that women are more "carnal" than men.

Looking stunned? headline reenforce story - mistake - reveals media tricks - prepare 2 stories - one for each outcome - gets published - totally fabricated - published wrong story. Gaze of media? decided on the portrayal for people in a way.  

As Knox realised the enormity of what judge Hellman was saying she sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably while her family and friends hugged each other in tears.

A few feet away Meredith's mother Arline, her sister Stephanie and brother Lyle, who had flown in especially for the verdict remained expressionless, staring straight ahead, glancing over just once at the distraught Knox family.

Prosecutors were delighted with the verdict and said that 'justice has been done' although they said on a 'human factor it was sad two young people would be spending years in jail'".

FB normalises voyeurism

Male or female posting doesn’t matter.

One hundred and 93 thousand young people ‘like’ or relate to this image

Media and male gaze are one , as Rosalind Coward says in ‘The Look’ 

Pap images steal shots for personal financial gain

The publication of these shots creates a market for their passive consumption (mags and newspapers)

We contribute to the perpetuation of this cycle buy buying the mags, we create the market for our own voyeuristic pleasure

Our desire is to see the mask of celebrity lifted, and ordinary life exposed.

This is ultimately what killed Princess Diana

Male females to gaze upon.

Chair is designed for maximum exposure

Voyeurism becomes everyday

Original idea was that all would be exposed but ten years on we accept that the programme is edited.

Fantasy that they cannot see us but they are constantly picturing themselves, in mirrors etc and speculating about how the public wil percieve them (they are professionally aware of this)

They know the premise of the show and the viewing figures.

They effuse to be looked at ness.

Ultimate passive viewing experience.