Fluent Essays

This week we will read a few classic articles about vision, gender and power.   Critics and Art Historians Linda Nochlin, Laura Mulvey and John Berger all made a huge impact with these three pieces in the 1970s: Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists (Links to an external site.)?”  (originally published in Artnews in 1971) https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/why-have-there-been-no-great-women-artists-4201/ Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”  Originally published in 1975 in Screen.  This illustrated version from Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York and Boston: New Museum of Contemporary Art, in association with Godine, 1984), pp. 361-373. Ways of Seeing by John Berger,  1972  video (Links to an external site.).  Web text version of Ways of Seeing (Links to an external site.).  Sturken & Cartwright: Gender and the Gaze 120-131.  (Nochlin, Mulvey and Bergers essays are also discussed here). For your journal this week, I want you to  read ALL of the above and at least one of the following: Maura Reilly ”Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills”  (you can also watch this Art21 interview with Cindy Sherman) (Links to an external site.) Hatt / Klonk chapter on “Feminism” from Art history: A critical introduction to its methods Eds.  Michael Hatt, Charlotte Klonk   (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). Jack Halberstam “Queer Faces: Photography and Subcultural Lives” from  The visual culture reader / edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff.  (London ; New York : Routledge, 2013). In your journal please DISCUSS:   --Nochlins thesis: why did women not become great artists in the past? -- According to Mulvey, how do classic Hollywood films like those by Alfred Hitchcock (that she mentions) place the movie viewer in a gendered position?  How (according to Mulvey) does this relate to visual pleasure? Is this still the case in films you are familiar with? --How has the idea of a white male gaze been disrupted in the past few decades? Use examples from the optional readings and/or the Sturken and Cartwright section. Rubricstu65717_fm_i-x.indd i 05/30/17 02:44 PM Practices of Looking stu65717_fm_i-x.indd ii 05/30/17 02:44 PM stu65717_fm_i-x.indd iii 05/30/17 02:44 PM Practices of Looking An Introduction to Visual Culture Third Edition Marita Sturken NEW YORK UNIVERSITY Lisa Cartwright UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS stu65717_fm_i-x.indd iv 05/30/17 02:44 PM Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © 2018, 2009, 2001 by Oxford University Press For titles covered by Section 112 of the US Higher Education Opportunity Act, please visit www.oup.com/us/he for the latest information about pricing and alternate formats. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sturken, Marita, 1957- author. | Cartwright, Lisa, 1959- author. Title: Practices of looking : an introduction to visual culture / Marita    Sturken, New York University; Lisa Cartwright, University of California at San Diego. Description: Third edition. | New York : Oxford University Press, 2017. |    Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016052818 | ISBN 9780190265717 Subjects: LCSH: Art and society. | Culture. | Visual perception. | Visual    communication. | Popular culture. | Communication and culture. Classification: LCC N72.S6 S78 2017 | DDC 701/.03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016052818 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by LSC Communications, Inc. Printed in the United States of America http://www.oup.com/us/he https://lccn.loc.gov/2016052818 stu65717_fm_i-x.indd v 05/30/17 02:44 PM I v acknowledgments ix introduction 1 chapter 1 Images, Power, and Politics 13 Representation 18 Vision and Visuality 22 The Myth of Photographic Truth 24 Myth, Connotation, and the Meaning of Images 29 Semiotics and Signs 32 Images and Ideology 37 Image Icons 41 chapter 2 Viewers Make Meaning 51 Producers’ Intended Meanings 55 Aesthetics and Taste 60 Value, Collecting, and Institutional Critique 66 ReaPRAISE FOR HOW TO SEE THE WORLD “Traveling to the moon and back, across continents and between eras, Mirzoeff nimbly and effectively narrates the visual regimes that regulate what we see, how we see, and what remains completely hidden from view. Indispensable reading for the twenty-first century.” —Jack Halberstam, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies, and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California and author of The Queer Art of Failure “This book will transform the way you see the world—and how you want to change it. Eloquently written, it offers new insights on everything from selfies as a new global art form to impressionist art as evidence of global climate change. It is simply brilliant.” —Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Professor and Chair, Modern Culture and Media, Brown University “Nicholas Mirzoeff connects images and practices of looking to political struggles, up to and including the survival of the planet. In clear, powerful prose, Mirzoeff shows how visuality is at the very center of struggles for social justice, at moments of both domination and resistance. An essential introduction for anyone who wants to understand visuality today.” —Jonathan Sterne, James McGill Professor in Culture and Technology, McGill University and author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format “A lucid and accessible introduction to how images shape our lives and effect change, political and social . . . [How to See the World] offers numerous insights into ‘reading’ the significance of images in the world today and is filled with intriguing, insightful nuggets. A challenging and provocative inquiry into how we see the world.” —Kirkus Reviews “Beautifully written, with a broad sweep of examples that speak to the power of images and encourage us to see and think in new ways, How to See the World is the go-to book for scholars and students in fields ranging from political science and anthropology to art history.” —Suzanne Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Chair of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University Also by Nicholas Mirzoeff: An Introduction to Visual Culture The Visual Culture Reader The Right to Look Copyright © 2016 by Nicholas Mirzoeff. Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group First published in the United Kingdom by Pelican Books, an imprint of Penguin Books. Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107. Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For mMarilyn Monroe. publicity photograph Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema LA U R A M L VEY This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and I. Introduc· tion A. A Political Use of Psycho- analysis how the fascination of film is reinforced by preexisting pattern s of fascination already at work within the individual subj ect and the social formations th at have molded him. It takes as starting point the way film refl ects, reveals., a nd even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sex ual difference that controls im ages , erotic ways of looking, and spectacle. It is helpful to understand what the cinema has been , how its magic has worked in the past, while attempting a theory and a practice that will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon , demonstrating th e way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form. The aradox of Qballocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on ~ ima&e oUhe castrated ~~ to. givf: order and meaning to its_w...Q r d . An idea of woman stands as lin chpin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallu s as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallu s signifies. Recent writing in Screen about psychoanal ysis and the cinema has not sufficiently brought out the importance of th e re presentation of the female form in a sy mbolic order in which, in the last resort, it speaks castration and nothing else. To summarize briefly: the fun ction of woman in forming til e patriarchal unconscious is twofold ; she first symbolizes the castra- tion threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved , her meaning in the process is at an end , it does not last into the world of law and language except as a memory that oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack. Both are posited on nature (or on anatomy in Freud s famous phrase ) . Womans desire is subj ected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound ; she can exist only in relation to castration arld cannot transcend it. She turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis (the condition, she imagines, of entry into the symbolic) . Either she must gracefull y give way to the word , the ame of the Father and the Law , or else struggle to keep her Reprinted from Screen 16 , no. 3 (Autumn 1975 ) : 6 -18. This essay is a rewo rked version of a paper given in the French Department of the University of Wisco nsin, Madison , in Spring 1973. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 361 B. Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon child down with her in the half-light of the imaginary. Woman , then, stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasie