WAYS OF SEEING

Part 1:

During my years as a teacher and tutor, lecturer and adult educator, 1967 to 2005, I used various television documentaries. The doco I used more than any other was Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark, a documentary series outlining the history of  Western art, architecture and philosophy since the Dark Ages. The series was produced by the BBC and aired in 1969 on BBC2.2 

I was in the first two years of my marriage, working in a small town in rural Ontario in 1969 as a teacher, and as secretary of the local Baha'i community. I did not come to know of this series until 1974. Both the television scripts and the accompanying book version were written by art historian Lord Kenneth Clark (1903–1983), who also presented the series. The series was considered to be a landmark in British Television's broadcasting of the visual arts.

Clark as a person was sealed off; he was a mystery, even to himself. "I have no aptitude for self-analysis," he wrote in his memoirs. "When I try to examine my character, I soon give up in despair." Perhaps it was simply that, for Clark, it was better to look out than to look within, to see the barbarians at the gate not as the enemy, but as a helpful, even soothing distraction. One cannot help but feel thankful that Clark looked out and, in the process, gave us Civilization.

The series had a groundbreaking format in which an expert presenter was combined with a lavish budget for a crew accompanying him around the world to illustrate his thesis over many episodes. With a heavily illustrated book version, the series became a template for later programs. I used all of the following series as well in my teaching and/or in my personal life:  Alistair Cooke's America (1972), Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man (1973), Life on Earth(1979) and the many sequels by David Attenborough.

Part 2:

Robert Hughes' series on modern art The Shock of the New (1980), and John Berger's BBC series, Ways of Seeing (1972) would have been useful when I taught the sociology of art in 1974. Berger's series was partly a response to Clark's views. Clark was an ardent pro-individualist, humanist, and anti-Marxist.  Berger presented a radical, Marxist viewpoint. A few years later Clark made a similar but shorter TV series, The Romantic Rebellion, beginning with a book in 1973 on the art of Romanticism. This, too, would have been useful back in 1974. I knew nothing of Clark's work on Romanticism in 1974 up-to-my-ears, as I was at the time, in a relationship which became my second marriage. Another Baha'i community occupied my leisure time keeping me busy, with my work as a tutor in education studies, for at least 60 hours a week.

Ways of Seeing was a 1972 BBC four-part television series of 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. Berger's scripts were adapted into a book of the same name. The book has contributed to feminist readings of popular culture, through essays that focused particularly on depictions of women in advertisements and oil paintings. Ways of Seeing was and is considered a seminal text for current studies of visual culture and art history.

I did not even know about this series when it came out in 1972 since I had just arrived in Australia from Canada and had no TV. I was also heavily committed to at least 60 hour weeks teaching high school, and serving as the secretary of the Baha'i community of Whyalla, the only locally elected Baha'i body outside Adelaide, Darwin and Perth in western and central Australia.

Berger's series and his book criticized traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images. The series was partially a response to Kenneth

Clark's Civilisation series, which represented a more traditionalist view of the Western artistic and cultural canon. Ways of Seeing is still considered a seminal text for current studies of visual culture and art history.1

Part 3:

At the opening of Ways of Seeing John Berger notes that the cultural presence of the woman is still very much different from that of the man. Berger argues that a man's presence in the world is all about his potency and is related to what he can do, his power and ability. On the other hand, Berger says, a woman's presence is always related to itself, not the world, and she does not represent potential but rather only herself, and what can or cannot be done to her, never by her. Such was Berger's view some 40 years ago; so I came to learn some 15 years after I had retired in 1999 from a 50 year student and employment life. In 2014 I read about Ways of Seeing. The sources of a woman's identity are, for Berger, the age-old notion that the woman is destined to take care of the man. He argues that, as a result, the woman is always self-conscious, always aware of her own presence in every action she performs. The woman constantly imagines and surveys herself and, by this, her identity is split between that of the surveyor and that of the one being surveyed.

These are the two rules that she has in relation to herself. For this reason, Berger notes, her self-value is measured through the manner in which she is portrayed, in her own eyes, in others' eyes and in men's eyes.  Following Kenneth Clark John Berger, in Ways of Seeing, distinguishes "naked" or "nakedness" from "nudity" in the European tradition, with nakedness simply being the state of having no clothes on and nudity being a form of artistic representation. The nature of this artistic mode is related, according to Berger, to what he terms "lived sexuality".

Part 4:

Being naked is just being yourself, but being nude in the artistic sense of the word is being without clothes for the purpose of being looked at. A naked body has to become an object of a gaze in order to

become a nude representation. Being naked means being without any costume that you put on, but being nude means that you become your own costume. Painting and photographs which portray nudity appeal to the viewer's sexuality, the male viewer, and have nothing to do with the portrayed woman's sexuality – women are there for men to look at, not for themselves, for man's sexuality, not their own. When there is a man figure in nude painting the woman seldom addressed him, for she is aiming at her "true lover" – the viewer, which is the central figure of the painting without even being present in it.

In "Ways of Seeing" Berger also discusses the meaning of being naked outside of the artistic context. He argues that in nakedness there is the relief of finding out that someone is indeed a man or a woman, and that at the moment of being naked an element of banality comes into play and that we require this banality because it dissolves the mystery which was present up until cloths were taken off and reality became simpler. Therefore nakedness in reality, unlike representation, is for Berger a process, not a state. In concluding "Ways of Seeing" John Berger holds that the humanist tradition of European painting holds a contradiction: on the one hand the painter's, owner's and viewer's individualism and on the other the object, the woman, which is treated is abstraction. These unequal relations between men and women are, in Berger's view, deeply assimilated in our culture and in the consciousness of women who do to themselves what men do to them –objectify themselves.-Ron Price with thanks to 1 the cultural studies reader and 2 Kenneth Clark, Civilization, 1969 and Richard Dorment in The Telegraph, 14 May 2014.

Your whole existence, Kenneth, was centered on art: as collector, museum director, curator, writer, patron, social figure, and, finally, educator in the series Civilisation.

I used the series at least twice overmy 32 years in classrooms as tutor& as lecturer in the social sciences.It was a way to tell your life's story

along with several hundred paintings, sculptures, works on paper, & objets d’art. You were taught how to look atart by the best of mentors & you couldwrite about art with the best of them.

Men survey women before they relate to them. Women's actions and appearancesshow the ways in which she would like to be treated. A woman's actions indicate the way she would like to be observed, & thisis contrary to man's actions which are just actions. Such was Berger's take on women. He simplified this notion by saying that"men act and women appear"....Women objectify themselves as the subject of the gaze of men; this is the meaning of his title: Ways of Seeing, essentially meaning that the ways of seeing men & women are different.In other words ways of seeing are ways of subjecting women to men's gaze, for Berger.

Ron Price24/8/'14.