From the book " Way of seeing "
John Berger
The Ways Of Seeing
Chapter 1
seeing comes before words.The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.But there is also another sense on which seeing comes before words.It is seeing which establishes our place in the serounding world;we explain that world with words,but words can never undo the fact that we are serounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never setteled.Each evening we see the sun set.We know that the earth is turning away from it.Yet the knowledge,the explanation,never quite fits the sight.The Surrealist painter Magritte commented on this always-present gap between words and seeing in a painting called " The Key of Dreams ".
The way we see things is affected by what know or what we believe.In the middle ages when men believed in the pihysical existence of hell the sight of fire must have meant something diffrent from what it means today.Nevertheless their idea of hell owed a lot to the sight of fire consuming and the ashes remaining- as well as to their exprience of the pain of burns.
When in love,the sight of the beloved has a cpmpleteness which no words and no embrace which only the act of making love can temporarily of the pain accommodate.Yet this seeing which comes before words,and can never be quite covered by them,is not a question of mechanically reacting to stimuli. ( It can only be thought of in this way if one isolates the small part of the process which concerns the eyes's retina.).We only see what we look at.To look is an act of choice.As a result of this act ,what we see is brought within our reach-thought not necessarily within arm's reach.To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it.(close your eyes,move round the room and notice how the faculty of touch is like a static,limited form of sight.) We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves .Our vision is continually active,continually moving,contunually holding things in a circle around itself,constituting what is present to us as what we are.
Soon after we can see,we are aware that we can also be seen.The eye of the other combines with our own eyes to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world.If we accept that we can see that hill over there,we propose that form that hill we can be seen.The reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental than that of spoken dialogue.And often dialogue is an attempt to verbalize this- an attempt to explain how,either metaphorically or literally, 'you see things', and an attempt to discover how ' he sees things' In the sensein which we use the word in this book,all images are man-made.
An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced.It is an appearance,or a set of apprearances,which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its apprearances and preserved - for a few moments or a few centuries.Every image embodies a way of seeing.Even a photograph.For photographs are not,as is often assumed,a mechanical record.Every time we look at a photograph,we are aware,however slightly,of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sight.This is true even in the most casual family snapshot.The photographer's way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject.The painter's way of seeing is reconstituted by the marks he makes on the canvas or paper.Yet,although every image embodies a way of seeing,our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing. (It may be,for example,that Shiela is one figure among twenty;but for our own reasons she is the one we have eyes for.)
images were first made to conjure up the apprearances of something that was absent.Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented;it then showed how something or somebody had once looked-and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people.Later still the specific vision of the image-maker was also recognized as part of the record.An image become a record how X had see Y.This was the result of an increasing consciouness of individuality,accompanying an increasing awareness of history.It would be rash to try to date this last development precisely.But certainly in Europe such consciouness has existed since the beginning of the Renaissance.
No other kind of relic or text from the past can offer such a direct testimony about the world which serrounded other people at other times.In this respect images are more precise and richer than liturature.To say this is not to deny the expressive or imaginative quality of art,,treating it as mere documentary evident; the more imaginative the work,the more profoundly it allows us to share the artist's exprience of the visible.
Yet when an image is presented as a work of art,the way people look at it is affected by a whole of learnt assumptions about art.Assumptions concerning.
Beauty
Truth
Genius
Civilization
Form
Status
Taste,etc
Many of these assumptions no longer accord with the world as it is. ( The world-as-it-is is more than oure objective fact,it includes consciouness.) Out of true with the present ,these assumptions obscure the past.The mystify rather than clarify.The past is never there waiting to be discovered,to be recognized for exactly what it is.History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past.Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of from which we draw in order to act.Cultural mystification of the past entials a double loss.Works of art are made unnescessarily remote.And the past offers us fewer conclusions to complete in action.
When we 'see' a landscape,we situate ourselves in it.If we 'saw'the art of the past,we would situate ourselves in history.When we are prevented
from seeing it,we are being deprived of the history which belongs to us.Who benefits from this deprivation? In the end,the at of the past is being mystified becouse a privileged minority is striving of invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes,and such a justification can no longer make sense in modern terms.And so,inevitably,it mystifies.
Let us consider a typical example of such mystification .A two-volume study was recently published on Frans Hals.It is the authoritative work to date on this painter.As a book of specialized art history it is no better and no worse than the average.The last two great paintings by Fran Hals potray the Governor and Governesses of an Alms House for old paupers in the Dutch seventeenth-century city of Haarlem. They were officially commissioned portraits,Hals and old man of over eighty,was destitute.Most of his life he had been in debt.During the winter of 1664,the year he began painting these pictures,he obtained three loads of peat on public charity,otherwise he would have frozen to death.Those who now sat for him were administrators of such public charity.
The author records these facts and then explicitly says that it would be incorrect to read into the painting any criticism of the sitters.There is no evidence,he says,that Hals painted them in a spirit of bitterness.The author considers them,however,remarkable works of art and explain why.Here he writes of the regentesses :
Each woman speaks to us of the human condition with equal importance.Each woman stands out with equal clarity against the enormous dark surface,yet they are linked by a firm rhythimical arrangement and the subdued diagonal pattern formed by their heads and hands.Subtle modulations of the deep,glowing blacks contribute to the harmonious fusion of the whole and form an unforgettable contrast with the powerful whites and vivid flesh tones where the detached strokes reach a peak of breadth and strength. (our italics)
The compositional unity of a painting contributes fundamentally to the power of its image.It is reasonable to consider a painting's composition.But here the composition is written about as though it were in itself the emotional charge of the painting.Term like harmonious fusion,unforgettable contrast,reaching a peak of breadth and strength transfer the emotion provoked by the image from the plane of lived exprince,to that of disinterested 'art appreciation'.All conflict disappears .One is left with the unchanging 'human condition' and the painting considered as a marvellousy made object.
Very little is knows about Hals or the Regents who commissioned him.It is not possible to produce circumstantial evidence to establish what their relation were.But there is the evidence of the paintings themselves: the evidence of a group of men and a group of women as seen by another man.the painter.Study this evidence and judge for yourself.
The art historian fears such direct judgement :
As in so many other pcitures by Hals,the penetrating characterizations almost seduce us into believing that we know the personality traits and eevn habits of the men and woman portrayed.
What is this 'seduction' he writes of? It is nothing less than the paintings working upon us.They work upon us becouse we accept the way Hals saw his sitters.We do not accept this innocently.We accept it in so far as it corresponds to our own observation of people,gestures,faces,institutions.This is possible becouse we still live in a society of comparable social relations and moral values.And it is precisely this which gives the paintings their psychological and social urgency.It is this-not the painter's skill as a 'seducer' which convices is that we can know the people portrayed.
The author continues :
In the case of some critic the seduction has been a total success.It has,for example,been asserted that the regent in the tipped slouch hat,which hardly covers any of his long,lank hair,and whose curiously set eyes do not focus,was shown in a drunken state.
Thisggest ,he suggests,is a libel.He argues that it was a fashion at the time to wear hats on the side of the head.Hi cites medical opinion to prove that the regent's expression could well be the result of facial paralysis .He insists that the painting would have been unacceptable to the regents if one of them had been portrayed drunk.One might go on discussing each of these points for pages. (Men in seventeeth-century Holland wore their hats on the side of thier head in order to be thought of as adventurous and pleasure-loving.heavy drinking was an approved practice.Etcetera.) But such a discussion would take us even farther away from the only confrontation which metters and which the author is determined to evade.
In this confrontation the Regents and Regentenesses stare at Hals,a destitute old painter who has lost his reputation and lives off public charity ; he examines them through the eyes of pauper who must nevertheless try to be objective,i.e,must try to surmount the way he sees as a pauper.This is the drama of these paintings.A dream of an unforgettable contrast'.
Mystification has little to do with the vocabulary used.Mystufication is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident. Hals was the first portraitist to paint the new characters and expressions created by capitalism.He did in pictorial terms what Balzac did two centuries later in literature.Yet the author of the authoritative work on these paintings sums up the artist's achievement by referring to
" Hals's unwavering commiment to his personal vision,which enriches our consciousness of our fellow men and heightens our awe for the ever-increasing power of the mighty impulses that enable him to give us a close view of life's vital forces."
