The Male Gaze

The Male Gaze was coined by Laura Mulvey in a 1970s feminist critique of film, but it has since been broadened into applying to all realms of visual art. The very basic idea is that throughout Western art, from the Renaissance painters through modern film, television, advertising, videogames, and comic books, there is an unspoken assumption underlying the vast majority of the work that the viewer/reader/consumer/player is male and heterosexual, because the creators have been and are, in the vast majority, male and heterosexual. And if a straight woman or a homosexual man wants to appreciate these works, she or he must at least temporarily assume the perspective of a straight man.

Mulvey states that in film women are typically the objects, rather than the possessors, of gaze because the control of the camera (and thus the gaze) comes from factors such as the as the assumption of heterosexual men as the default target audience for most film genres. While this was more true in the time it was written, when Hollywood protagonists were overwhelmingly male, the base concept of men as watchers and women as watched still applies today.

Mulvey’s essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema“, was written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. It later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other Pleasures, as well as in numerous other anthologies. Her article is one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework, influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz used psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema, but Mulvey’s contribution was to inaugurate the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis and feminism.

John Berger, in his book Ways of Seeing, stated that “according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome – men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”In Renaissance images nude women were painted almost exclusively for the male viewer. Women are often depicted with their bodies turned towards the viewer while their heads are turned away and gazing in a mirror. The woman is aware of being the object of the male gaze.

This ties into Lacan’s theory of the alienation that results from the split between seeing oneself and seeing the ideal. In Renaissance nude painting this is the split that comes from being both the viewer, the viewed and seeing oneself through the gaze of others.

 

 

Male Gaze

In going through the photographs, and thinking on how I was going to display them, and in particular what are the implications of (if any) whether the eyes are open or closed, averted or directed, and does that have a baring on my project. In trying to answer that I came upon the idea of the “male gaze.”

The male gaze opened out into a vista of interesting discussions that are indeed directly related to this project. The subject of Feminism and the “Male Gaze.”

Time to do some reading.

 

Geisha

A selection of the edited best…  Very pleased with the outcome of this shoot.

Gilly Photo Shoot: Geisha Girl

This is my interpenetration and recording of the disintegration of her mask “geisha.”

The process is easier to control, and I am much quicker in the setting up and the photography of the process. Whilst the process is fundamentally chaotic and random. I now do have some sense of where the shoot is going.

The set is inverted… not too sure why. So we start at the end and move to the beginning.

Two Faces

Katherine and her “Two Faces”

When asked.. Katherine said, “I have two faces,” so I said that is how you will be painted. Here we have two masks, and a tacit understanding from her that we wear masks for differing social, and work experiences.

 

 

 

 

Gregory Scott

Gregory Scott, Is a Painter and post modernist Photographer, He started off as a painter then became a photographer. He then combined the two disciplines. As you can see from the image below, he rejected the rules of modernism and composed the image unconventionally.  Mixing media to create a new version of reality…Or… making an observation on the assumed perceived reality of reality..

 

 

Post Modernism

The body of work that comprises the Chimera project, without conscious direction from me, has fallen into the category of Post Modernism. It is therefore important that I better understand what both modernism, and post modernism is.

Photography is a modern form of image making, contributing to the development of modernism. Modernist photography captures the essence of today’s going on, images with the modern thoughts entrusted into them, along with the modern character sensed in the images. Not a lot of rule breaking, not a lot of playing about with the image, in a way just presented the way it was captured. ie Ansel Adams.

Ansel Adams, I would argue is a modernist photographer as his images of landscapes are literal landscapes presented as black and white images. Although his use of filters to modify and enhance questions this assumption of the assumed reality.

Postmodernism is the name given to the defining artistic movement of the second half of the 20th century, it emerged as a cultural movement in the late 1960’s and 1970’s as a reaction to the ideals of modernism. Aspects of postmodernism in art and literature include surrealism, abstract expressionism, and the Theater of the Absurd. Postmodern photography is characterized by atypical compositions of subjects that are unconventional or sometimes completely absent, making sympathy with the subject difficult or impossible. Like other postmodern artists, the champions of postmodern photography contend that it is possible to ignore the “rules” and still create art.

Art critics and theorists gave the name “modernism” to the art, literature, and music created during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Modernism was characterized by a rejection of previous artistic trends, such as Romanticism and a tendency toward realism. Postmodernism took this further by questioning standard definitions of “art” itself. Modernism and postmodernism were both controversial within the art world, and even the meanings of the terms themselves are the subject of debate.

One of the approach to post-modern photography was the recombining of one or more elements from within the existing culture, in particularly the mass media. In this use of intertextuality, the early work of Cindy Sherman was notable in her references to the film stills of trashy Hollywood films but numbered “Untitled Film Stills #11” to suggest they did actually refer to a specific existing film. As one writer noted… “In this semiotic game, the audience is given reference which spirals off to yet another representation, not to ‘reality’. itself.”

By the early 2000’s, critics were finding that postmodernism had varnished or gone into hiding as the fickle world of what is in, in “cultural fashion” moved on.  In many ways, it could be argued that postmodernism has gone mainstream and is everywhere, though combined with a neo-modernism or post-post-modernism (or popomodism) or whatever critics/art historians will eventually come up with.

However, photographers have continued to explore ‘photography as narrative’, ‘ banal / deadpan’ , ‘the ordinary and everyday’, ‘intimate photography’ and ‘ post-modern revivalism’. 

Cindy Sherman Revisited

Instead of painting other people, Cindy Sherman paints herself. Her work resonates with my own on many levels.

Masquerading as a myriad of characters, Cindy Sherman invents personas and tableaus that examine the construction of identity, the nature of representation, and the artifice of photography. To create her images, she assumes the multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, and stylist. Whether portraying a career girl, a blond bombshell, a fashion victim, a clown, or a society lady of a certain age, for over thirty-five years this relentlessly adventurous artist has created an eloquent and provocative body of work that resonates deeply in our visual culture.

Grundberg in his essay ”The Crisis of the Real” also uses Sherman as  a good example of post-modern photography, in particular her series “Untitled Film Stills”, questioning the notion of personal identity and cultural stereotypes. Cindy Sherman is an example of the one end of the post-modern spectrum. Sherman reverses the terms of art and autobiography, using art “not to reveal the artist’s true self, but to show the self as an imaginary construct. There is no real Cindy Sherman in these photographs; there are only guises she assumes.”

The notion of the multiple selves, and that we are a collection of multiple performances is profoundly important to this body of work. In understanding this the final part of the contextual report is focused on this concept of masks projecting a chosen reality.

The stripping away of the layers in the project is analogous to the photographers attempt at exposing the ‘real’ person. It is possible however, to view the ‘real’ as yet another facade, another mask. An illusion. Postmodernism suggests that the self is a pliable construct. We are not the coherent independent individuals of modernist theory. The ‘real’ is a collection of ways of being that is contingent on relationships and connections with multiple people. We fabricate a persona ourselves, and are moulded by others in response to the outside influences that bombard us in our daily lives. The postmodern self is not ‘real’ but the product of a “liquid” performance.There is no core reality, no permanent self, but many realities of moving boundaries constantly being negotiated between others and ourselves. The identity of self is “those images and masks.”

Cindy Sherman in her series “Untitled Film Stills” questions the idea of personal identity by impersonating cultural stereotypes. Her self-portraits become a mask that obscures her true self and reveals her “as an imaginary construct. There is no real Cindy Sherman in these photographs; there are only guises she assumes.” In the same way my ‘paintings’ also perform the disguise of performance. They are a construct of a reality and expose the concept that reality is nothing more than a performance, and that the performance points at the “limited nature of the visual world.”

The project has sought to avoid the formal photographic portrait, and instead has sought to question the terms of reference by which an individual can be photographed. The body of work has deliberately sought out a duality of disintegration and ambiguity. Exploring the implicit contradictions of the photographic process as a means of representation. In the painting, photographing, and in the disintegration of my painted images a drama unfolds, exposing the process of representation as pure construction. The body becoming “metonymic of self, of character of voice, of presence.”

Rorschach- Quick Edit