The Gaze and the Media

‘according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome - men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’
                                                (Berger 1972) From the Ways of seeing chapter 3

Women watch themselves being looked at, not because they are vain but because of the many representations of women that surround us. Women survey their own femininity.

Hans Memling 'Vanity' (1485)

Mirror as device of justification, moral condemnation

Present day version, although now she is looking back at herself in the mirror.

MANET - Bar at the Folies Bergeres, 1882

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

Jeff Wall 'Picture for Women'

• inspired by 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. 
• 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. 
• Issues of the male gaze, particularly the power relationship between male artist and female model, and the viewer's role as onlooker

Coward, R. (1984) Peeping Tom   

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

Shift towards men also becoming objectified in pop culture.

Advert with men in their underwear.

Loads more adverts where men are the object now, compared to 50 years ago.

Mulvey notes that Freud had referred to (infantile) scopophilia - the pleasure involved in looking at other people’s bodies as (particularly, erotic) objects. 

In the cinema you can look without being seen my the actors, or the people around you.

Mulvey 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’ (Mulvey 1992, 27). 

Artemisia Gentileschi ‘Judith Beheading Holofernes’ 1620, 

Two women are trying to cut off a man's head on a bed    

G,Pollock 1981

•Women ‘marginalised within the masculine discourses of art history’

•This marginalisation supports the ‘hegemony of men in cultural practice, in art’

•Women not only marginalised but supposed to be marginalised

Barbara Kruger

‘Your Gaze Hits The Side of My Face’

(1981)

Challenging the male gaze

from slide -

"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"

Susan Sontag, On photography

•To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed'

•The act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging what is going on to keep on happening'

Reality TV

Appears to offer us the position as the all-seeing eye- the power of the gaze

Allows us a voyeuristic passive consumption of a type of reality

Editing means that there is no reality

Contestants are aware of their representation