Quote slide 1..
Women have an idea that they're being looked at.
Nude - in european oil paintings.
Hans Memling 'Vanity' 1484.
The mirror is present, device, distracts. Paints the woman so people enjoy looking at her. Make moral judgements, sinful regard for herself.
Mirror is the device.
Contemporary advertising.
Being lost in the moment. Absorbed in thought.
The woman's eyes, return of the gaze.
Cabanel "Birth of Venus" 1863
Reclining position.
Covers her eyes, just waking or going to sleep. Look at her body, but cant see her eyes, so she cant se us looking.
Sophie Dahl for Opium
Contemporary version of birth of venus.
Her body is the focus.
Advert not approved so they changed the image from horizontal to vertical.
Means that there was more emphasis on her face and not her body.
Venus of Urbino 1538.
Way shes looking at us, seems relaxed, wealthy woman. Knows that we are looking at her.
Manet - Olympia 1863.
Painted during modernism. Sitting elevated, looking at us directly. Pose is more assertive, shes a prostitute but she receives gifts from her admirers. Offering of flowers - she disregards them.
Ingres 'Le grand odalisququuwreuehfjh' 1814
Gurrilla Girls. Do women have to be naked to get into the met museum?
Manet
Bar at the foiles Bergres. 1882
Manet painted himself in the top right corner.
Different perspectives. Distorted mirror reflection.
Woman is asking what do you want to drink - well she is working behind the bar so what else would she be doing?
Jeff Wall, picture for women 1979
Represents the manet painting. Spacial depth. Woman has absorbed gaze. Picture camera, camera is at the centre of the image, divided into thirds, separate us from the woman and the photographer.
Rosalind Coward. 1984
Camera in contemporary media has been put to use as an extension of the male gaze at women on the streets.
Woman is wearing sunglasses - so not challenged by her look.
Eva Herzigova 1994
Hello Boys.
Looking down at herself but also down at us - in the context of a massive billboard.
Rosalind Coward 1984
Peeping Tom 1960
The profusion of images which characterises contemporary society could be seen as an obsessive distancing of women.. a form of voyeurism.
Male model in add - reclining position.
Eyes closed hand behind head. Much like the earlier european oil paintings.
Dr Scott Lucas
Genderadds.com
Are men objectified like women?
D & G add. 2007. Gym.
Sport, powerful body.
Obsession with health. Male beauty. they all return the gaze. Ooo.
1950 & 1960's Cinema.
Freud - cinema, cant see other people looking and also turning the body on screen into an object.
Active male passive female.
Judith beheading Holofermes 1620.
Slaying, grizzly representation. Pollock 1981,
woman marginalised within the masculine discourses of art history.
Andy Sherman 1977 - 79
Untitled film stills 6.
Turned around the reading body, holding mirror but it is not obvious and is not used as a device.
Barbara Kruger
Your gaze hits the side of my face.
Hand to face movement.
I shop therefore I am.
Sarah Lucas "Eating a banana"
1990.
Self portrait with fried eggs, 1996
Tracy Emin.
Money photo 2001.
Stuffing money inside her. Emin says why shouldn't I make money?
Well because you're 'art' isn't very good.
Amanda Knox. accused of murdering Meridith Kercher.
Susan Sontag on 1979 photography. Paparazzi shot of princess Diana.
Passive consumption of imagery. Desire to see the mask of celebs exposed.
Reality television.
Passive consumption of reality give is the power of the gaze.
Consuming something that isnt reality.
The Truman show 1988.
Peter Weir.
Big Brother contestants are almost performing.
- Whilst these notes are concerned more generally with ‘the gaze’ in the mass media, the term originates in film theory and a brief discussion of its use in film theory is appropriate here.
As Jonathan Schroeder notes, 'Film has been called an instrument of the male gaze, producing representations of women, the good life, and sexual fantasy from a male point of view' (Schroeder 1998, 208). The concept derives from a seminal article called ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ by Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist. It was published in 1975 and is one of the most widely cited and anthologized (though certainly not one of the most accessible) articles in the whole of contemporary film theory.
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. Such psychoanalytically-inspired studies of 'spectatorship' focus on how 'subject positions' are constructed by media texts rather than investigating the viewing practices of individuals in specific social contexts. 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 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. 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). This is reflected in the dominant forms of cinema. Conventional narrative films in the ‘classical’ Hollywood tradition not only typically focus on a male protagonist in the narrative but also assume a male spectator. ‘As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence’ (ibid., 28). Traditional films present men as active, controlling subjects and treat women as passive objects of desire for men in both the story and in the audience, and do not allow women to be desiring sexual subjects in their own right. Such films objectify women in relation to ‘the controlling male gaze’ (ibid., 33), presenting ‘woman as image’ (or ‘spectacle’) and man as ‘bearer of the look’ (ibid., 27). Men do the looking; women are there to be looked at. The cinematic codes of popular films ‘are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego’ (ibid., 33). It was Mulvey who coined the term 'the male gaze'.
Mulvey distinguishes between two modes of looking for the film spectator: voyeuristic and fetishistic, which she presents in Freudian terms as responses to male ‘castration anxiety’. Voyeuristic looking involves a controlling gaze and Mulvey argues that this has has associations with sadism: ‘pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt - asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness’ (Mulvey 1992, 29). Fetishistic looking, in contrast, involves ‘the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous. This builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The erotic instinct is focused on the look alone’. Fetishistic looking, she suggests, leads to overvaluation of the female image and to the cult of the female movie star. Mulvey argues that the film spectator oscillates between these two forms of looking (ibid.; see also Neale 1992, 283ff; Ellis 1982, 45ff; Macdonald 1995, 26ff; Lapsley & Westlake 1988, 77-9).
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/gaze09.html
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