Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. In John Berger's Ways of seeing, he argues that a woman’s social presence is very different from that of a man. Men treat women as objects. Men survey women, and how a woman presents herself determine how she will be treated.
In European oil painting, nude is an ever-recurring subject that particularly manifests how women have been seen as a sight. In today’s discussion, we will take a closer look at some of these paintings and discuss how certain ways of seeing construct women's sense of themselves and the world.
⭐️Excerpts of the video
"To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A nude has to be seen as an object in order to be a nude. "
"There’s a great difference between being seen as oneself naked or seeing another in that way and a body being put on display to be naked is to be without disguise. To be on display is to have the surface of one’s own skin and hairs of one’s body turned into a disguise. It is a disguise which cannot be discarded."
“We have an image… off course we all have an image of ourselves and it’s a visual image. But I wonder how much this sort of classical european painting has shaped our image of ourselves. In my own case, I find it quite impossible to take them seriously when I look at the paintings that you show in your film. I cannot identify with them because they are always so immensely exaggerated. They fasten onto some secondary sexual characteristics, almost breasts and sort of great big bee sting bottoms you know and those huge things like that and they just aren’t real whereas with photographs you can feel that’s potentially, that’s possibly me although it probably isn’t. But these all the paintings you have shown are what is called idealized and they are to me very unreal in connection with any deep down image I might have of myself and in connection with any deep down pleasure I might have in looking at another female body. They don’t give me that pleasure at all. (I) can admire them as paintings but they don’t mean human beings to me.”
“The image I compare myself with is the photograph because it’s with photographs that I’ve been encouraged to think of myself in this way. It is essentially advertising for me that’s contributed to this. And consequently I find it extremely interesting to go back and think of nudes in this way because I’ve never done so. But having seen the film I have no doubt that the same thing applies.”
“In a way I think that we’re always dressing. We’re always dressing up for a part. (We) always are putting on a uniform of one kind or another and I think women do this almost more than men. Men have only begun doing it fairly recently. Women are always dressing to show the kind of character that they want to represent. The mother, the working woman, the pretty young chick. And nudity is a uniform in a way for I’m ready now for sexual pleasure you see. And … you can’t identify being nude with being free. ”
20:28
"I think that both men and women are narcissistic. But in different senses. Sometimes I have the impression that men and women are tremendously narcissistic and caught off from each other by their image and themselves. Whereas a woman's image of herself is derived directly from other people. The mirror you're talking about. A man's image of himself is derived from the world. That is, it's the world that gives him back his image because he acts in it. And women are drawn to him as a source, as a central activity. And as a source of worth.... Because their source of centers of narcissism are different. And the women's is essentially only related to the other person. She's in a more passive position than he is.
...
It seems to me what women envy in men is that they have a sense of their own identity. that there is something in them which is important to them other than simply what other people think of them. I think that that thing is the product of their interaction with the world, that is other things and other people. It is almost as if through this interaction they actually build up a store of worth, a sense of themselves, which is a constant. I mean it can't be lost. But because the woman doesn't go out and act, she doesn't go out and act. She doesn't create the store. She waits only for the present interaction with a man and that can go, that can just end at any moment."
⭐️Discussion
- What do you see in the paintings?
- Which paintings interest you?
- Which seem sexual? Which seem intimate?
- Do any part of the paintings make you uncomfortable?
- As a woman, can you identify yourself with the paintings? Why or why not?
https://cargocollective.com/cassiopeia/Venus-Cupid-Folly-and-Time
https://www.hansmemling.org/Vanity-C.-1485.html
https://www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/oeuvres/naissance-de-venus-98
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/jean-auguste-dominique-ingres-angelica-saved-by-ruggiero
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_Paul_Rubens_-_Helena_Fourment_in_a_Fur_Robe_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danaë_(Rembrandt_painting)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanna_and_the_Elders_(Rembrandt)
https://www.wikiart.org/en/edouard-manet/the-luncheon-on-the-grass-1863
10. Olympia By Manet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia_(Manet)
11. Woman Bathing By Mary Cassatt 1890-1891
https://www.nga.gov/global-site-search-page.html?searchterm=1963.10.253
12. La Toilette By Pierre Bonnard 1867-1947
https://www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/oeuvres/la-toilette-8065
https://www.nga.gov/global-site-search-page.html?searchterm=1963.10.257
