Art expresses generalized meanings of the world through concrete images. But seeing these images is different for each of us.
John Berger, art critic and Booker Prize winner, in his book How We See, focuses precisely on how people see works of art and explains what influences our attitudes toward them today. Using the examples of painting and advertising, Berger shows that images, along with their subject matter, carry a certain ideological meaning.
Vision precedes words. A child begins to see and recognize objects even before he learns to speak. After we begin to see, we become aware that we are also seen. Through this we determine our place in the world around us. But the connection between what we see and what we know will always lack certainty.
In Berger’s book lies the idea of the difference between seeing and seeing. Eyes give us the ability to look, but seeing also involves understanding context and theme. Our vision is active, holding objects in space and defining all that exists around us.
Berger believes that our ways of seeing often lack spontaneity, because they are conditioned by many external conditions. The way we see art of the past allows us to reason about the changes in the social and political arrangements of today. The past and the present are closely linked. From the past, as a source, we can draw certain conclusions and act upon them.
The idea that vision is a political act is evident in Berger’s essay on the female body in historical perspective. The author focuses on the concept of gender difference, which since the Renaissance has been based on the idea that the one looking at the picture is a man. Whereas the woman depicted is the object to which the male gaze is directed. Here Berger draws a parallel with the mechanisms of operation and influence of advertising in the modern world and finds that it similarly suggests looking at the female body as an object, as well as making extensive use of visual images of women from works of art of the past.
All images are man-made. At first they were created to reproduce the image of a missing object or being. Over time, it became clear that images show what the object or creature looked like before – how they were once seen by other people. Images are more accurate and richer than monuments or texts.
When an image is recognized as a work of art, the way people look at it is influenced by a range of internalized ideas about art. What we see depends on where, when, and under what conditions we are at the moment.
With the invention of the camera, the way humanity sees has changed. The visual took on a different meaning and was reflected in painting. Before the invention of the camera, every work of art was the unique center of the universe. And afterwards, it turned out that there was no single center.