Abstract
It is hard to convey the powerful impact of Ways of Seeing on TV and as a book c. 1972. When the Women’s Arts and Histories Collective was formed in 1973 – informally as was the manner of the loose confederation of groups that constituted the Women’s Liberation Movement in the early 1970s in London – we had to cobble together a resource pack for our assault on art history. We had Nochlin just, Gunnar Myrdal and Berger. If Kenneth Clark’s self-congratulatory and patrician televisualization of Ernst Gombrich’s Story of Art had made visible the ideological and sociological function of art history at the time, Berger, emerging out of what was to us an occluded Marxist and socialist humanist tradition of British realism that had been so vivid in British culture during the 1950s and 1960s, arrived on the TV screens and in the bookshop just when we needed a ready-made and persuasive critique of the art establishment, advertising and images of women. Much later, once cultural studies had emerged, it was possible to reconstruct the genealogy of New Left cultural criticism finding its home in New Left Review alongside Penguin Books’ publications of E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart as well as the role of translations of Walter Benjamin, such as Illuminations introduced by Hannah Arendt.
Taken as a whole, Berger’s opening reframing of the art of the past through a popularized presentation of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) which was not yet on the reading list since social history of art or cultural studies did not exist yet, laid beside this analysis of oil painting as the visual culture of capitalist property values, his reading of what he quaintly called ‘publicity’ (advertising would come to take over as the term of cultural analysis) had an electrifying effect of opening up a parallel universe. If emergent feminist politics were identifying gender as an axis of social, economic and cultural power, and relations between the sexes as relations of domination and oppression, even less formulated feminist cultural analysis was in desperate need of terms and methods for the critique of culture’s role, of representation, the image and the gaze. In the first half of the 1970s, Screen magazine was importing continental Europe’s new leftism which was structuralist and psychoanalytical as well as Brechtian and looking back to the Soviet Russian experiments of the 1920s. Later the dominant paradigm for cultural critique would be shaped by the cinematic not the art historical. But the ‘moment’ of Ways of Seeing brought the visual arts onto the agitated and exciting political stage. To be an art history student at that time, and politically engaged with trying to make sense of being so amidst the crisis of culture, was to feel split in two – until Berger’s Ways of Seeing inexplicably and effortlessly exploded the aura the institutions of art history fabricated and allowed the visual arts to become interesting if not significant locations for analysis of power and the deconstruction of classed, raced and gendered meanings.
Later the vocabularies with which we would perform both tasks and teach them acquired more multi-lingual resources. Structuralism, semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis and deconstruction made access to the critique of culture tough intellectual work. What strikes me as strange in retrospect is the elegance and confidence of Ways of Seeing in its accessible formulations, its everyday vocabularies, and above all its telling class politics. This makes it singularly British in a way that has got lost from cultural studies. There is shame in class politics just as there is embarrassment about the frontal assault in the book about its gender politics. Oil paintings depict things that a class of people want, own and then celebrate as possessions that confirm their power to want and to own. This belongs to a historical moment. Advertising becomes the lingua franca of a democratizing capitalism which requires that all of us become the kind of people who want and own things. But instead of property as symbolic of power we are required to want and own things that become the site of our submission to the power of the image which is not the symbol but the instrument of our submission to the capitalist system of commodity production. The publicity/advertisement image is the subjectivization of our subjectification by consumption. Thus it is to the present what the oil painting was to an earlier moment of the formation of accumulating capitalism – in its still mercantile and landed property stage. Hinged between these two ‘moments’ – one of Berger’s critical contributions to a non-teleological approach to the history of the regimes of representation – is Berger’s analysis of the differential imagery of the gendered body. This chapter remains immensely complex. On the one hand its juxtapositions of old master paintings and contemporary advertisements anticipate the final section on the continuities and differences between these two regimes. On the other it is the locus of subtle differentiations within the Old Master tradition that allows for inscriptions within it of varied inflections by individual painters. (Berger’s critique of oil painting involves focusing on the mass of relatively insignificant works produced rather than on the historically inaccurate selectivity that forms the art historical canon.) There are spectator–owners for whom the manner of display of a sexual body of a heterosexual other fashions a proprietorial identity. But there are artist–painters whose manner of painting this conventionalized icon, the nude as the encounter with nakedness, articulates the play of desire, vulnerability and sexuality as their dialectic. ‘Lived sexual experience’ finds its unexpected registration in the image at the level of formal dislocations of the otherwise banalized conventions. These dissonances only become visible once the conventional has been established: that is once the adulation of art as the expressive gesture and confirmation of the genius–painter is displaced and the proprietorial regime as a whole is brought into view, then alone can the singularity of certain kinds of artistic gestures become legible – and art as a site of disobedience and singularity. There is danger here, but it is Berger’s socialist humanism that is speaking. Art can touch upon moments of truth in human relations that unsettle even while they operate within relations of power and property. Nakedness versus nudity is positioned as the rare and special moment of excess of potential human desire and hence vulnerability in the desiring subject over the formalization of ownership as the only mode of addressing the other, the world, things, places and people. Powerful as Berger’s argument here was, it was also difficult for feminism to use since it so clearly inscribed its own uncritical masculine heterosexuality. That is not a judgement on the latter, but a recognition of the subsequent potency of queer, feminist and postcolonial displacements of white heteromasculinity as a formerly invisible complement to class-determined power.
Ways of Seeing was published in 1972. In December 1973, our fledgling collective fell upon its first feminist correlative. Carol Duncan wrote ‘Virility and Male Domination in Early Twentieth Century Vanguard Art’ (1973) and it appeared in the Art Forum. This text remains one of the most important ever written in the field. Duncan also plots out recurring patterns of imagery across the stylistically differentiated master-modernists whose formal variations formed the key object of modernist art history. These habits concerned the representation of working-class women and women of colour in the symbolic space of the modernist studio in which images of apparent hetero-sexual freedom functioned as fantasmatic scenarios of total freedom for the spectator–owner who experienced his own regulated bourgeois life as unfreedom. Hence the bohemian myth of artist and model was the fantasy that screened both the producer’s poverty and the buyer’s subjection and benefit within the time–work discipline of a capitalist system. Duncan’s uniquely feminist move was then to reclaim the subject position of the creative woman, the would-be modernist whose artistic credentials required her to negotiate participation in the scene and its styles of self-representation while differencing that same scene enough to inscribe a different configuration of body, self, desire, and modernity. Was it possible? Feminists still cannot decide. But reading paintings for this quality of differentiation within participation has become fundamental in avoiding mere simplistic gendering of art (men do this; women do that).
My purpose in laying out this history of both Ways of Seeing and Duncan’s critical work of differencing the canon – MoMA’s and Berger’s both – is to pose a question absolutely unavailable to me then even as I absorbed their lessons. The question is: what is their method? What were they actually doing in reading art as image? In Ways of Seeing, there are three essays that are purely montages of images. I borrowed the idea of a photo-essay for Vision and Difference (1988). Only in my belated discovery of a feminist passage to the work of Aby Warburg and notably his Bilder Atlas Mnemosyne, created in the later 1920s, using the still novel resources of the photomechanical reproduction as images of hitherto fixed art objects, did I begin to recognize the debts to Warburg in Walter Benjamin’s essay on the end of aura and hence the grounds for Berger’s moves in Ways of Seeing.
Warburg’s art history is not merely iconographical studies of images in opposition to formal and stylistic indifference to content. Warburg’s elusive concept of iconology is still very poorly understood and has its foundations in later 19th-century theories of the symbol that no longer interest us. Warburg’s method struggled to hold together both anthropology and history, both structure and time. The study of the image in culture requires attention to both structural patterns with their structural impulses operating at both sociological and fantasmatic levels over prolonged epochal duration and perhaps even indicative of common conditions of human sociality, and historical transformations and tensions that generate immediate necessities for change, change that can come about because the image functions as cultural memory and its stored energy. Images transmit formulations of passion but, like batteries, they store up intensities that can be re-ignited under certain, in fact, uncertain conditions when historical change releases structural anxieties. Histories of the image do not merely generate comfortingly masterable patterns of conventions; they reveal the constant dangers inherent in the manner in which historically shifting relations of power and conflict might be articulated at the level of the image: at the level of representation and of the fantasy in the spectator who is also a social agent who might act upon what she or he learns or adopts from the image. The image is neither pure representation nor pure projection but the dynamic transport between the two, between objectified and subjectified social reality/unreality (social reality always involves fantasmatic misrecognition of material determinations and is a dialectic between the two). Hence Warburg’s art history is always a history of and for the present.
The method and indeed the core analysis offered in Ways of Seeing seems to me now to be legible through the prism of Warburg’s early 20th-century critique of aestheticizing art history and his propositions about ways of reading image culture in the double frame of the anthropological and the historical. Warburg’s last plate of his Bilder Atlas complexly weaves a reading of a Raphael painting about the bleeding Host in the Vatican through images of contemporary German body building culture, Japanese revival of hari-kiri and news photographs of the pact signed between Mussolini and the Pope in 1928, all of which intimated the emergence of fascist and imperial violence and the vulnerability of certain bodies to its acting out. Transgressing policed boundaries between high and low forms of the image, and between political immediacy and embedded foundations for racist violence (the imagined blood of the Host fantasmatically desecrated by Jews always led to real Jewish blood being violently spilt). Warburg’s own alterity, however, displaced the risk of his confusing his position of critique with an absolute or progressive alternative. His was an anxious if not justifiably paranoid position, easier to align with current urgencies for queered, postcolonial and self-critical feminist practices than Berger’s. For in the end, we have to come back to the image.
On the occasion of the project Nine Intervals by Aurelien Froment for The Pavilio, Leeds in the autumn of 2011, two episodes of Ways of Seeing were cinematically screened at the Hyde Park Cinema. I was invited to do a short introduction to the second screening of the episode on what was then known in pre-Saatchi and Mad Men days as ‘publicity’: namely advertising. I was impressed when I reread the text. But it was the shock of the screening that set me writing. There is something so remote about the 1970s when re-encountered through the scratched 35mm film print or even old video recordings. When Fred Orton and I made programmes for the infamous Open University Modern Art and Modernism, we systematically refused to be on camera. Wisely, we did not want to be forever captured on film in what we did not know then but dimly sensed might be a terrible decade for fashion and style. But of course, John Berger’s televisual appearance was part and parcel of the class war staged unevenly across British television at the time. He had to be seen in his open shirts, thick and unkempt hair, his gritty face and directed if sometimes didactic appeal to his viewers as conversational interlocutors.
Something about the masculinity of the presentation mode arrested me. Why? Mostly because I am appalled still by the presentation of art history on TV. Apart from that strange episode when an over-enthusiastic nun, Sister Wendy, danced her way through the National and other galleries, art can only be presented by straight men on TV. The presenters have a certain style, akin to what the Victorian-imperial project called muscular Christianity: now, to make art fly on TV, we need a muscular heteromasculinity. Think of the dedicated Andrew Graham-Dixon recently travelling the American continent in a convertible to tell the story of American Art, following triumphant series on the Art of Spain, the Art of Germany, British Art and many others. Or Waldemar Januszczak giving us his versions of Gauguin and van Gogh that so purposely exist to fly in the face of postcolonial and feminist readings of their work and mythic identities. Or remember BBC TV’s The Impressionists as the Band of Brothers, made after 40 years of feminist remembering of Cassatt and Morisot. The heroic and the masculine are bonded on our screens as if there never had been or could be any other way to present art than as the story of great men having a tough time. Having personally failed to persuade any TV company ever to take up feminist analysis or feminist modes of rewriting art’s histories as visual culture – 2011 was the 30th anniversary of Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, Rozsika Parker’s and my distillation of the work of the Women’s Arts and Histories Collective – it seems time to have another go at dis-assembling the current politics of TV marketing art and the strenuous cultural efforts to keep the key fantasies of art and artist in place.