Questions and Assignments for John Berger's "Ways Of Seeing," "On Rembrandt's Woman In Bed," And "On Caravaggio's The Calling Of St. Matthew."

QUESTIONS FOR A SECOND READING

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Berger says, “The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past”. And he says, “If we ‘saw’ the art of the past, we would situate ourselves in history. When we are prevented from seeing it, we are being deprived of the history which belongs to us.” As you reread this essay, pay particular attention to Berger’s uses of the word “history.” What does it stand for? What does it have to do with looking at pictures? How might you define the term if your definition were based on its use in this essay?

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ASSIGNMENTS FOR WRITING

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We are not saying that there is nothing left to experience before original works of art except a sense of awe because they have survived. The way original works of art are usually approached — through museum catalogues, guides, hired cassettes, etc. — is not the only way they might be approached. When the art of the past ceases to be viewed nostalgically, the works will cease to be holy relics — although they will never re-become what they were before the age of reproduction. We are not saying original works of art are now useless. (para. 60)

Berger argues that there are barriers to vision, problems in the ways we see or don’t see original works of art, problems that can be located in and overcome by strategies of approach.

For Berger, what we lose if we fail to see properly is history: “If we ‘saw’ the art of the past, we would situate ourselves in history. When we are prevented from seeing it, we are being deprived of the history which belongs to us.” It is not hard to figure out who, according to Berger, prevents us from seeing the art of the past. He says it is the ruling class. It is difficult, however, to figure out what he believes gets in the way and what all this has to do with history.

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Original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is. Even a reproduction hung on a wall is not comparable in this respect for in the original the silence and stillness permeate the actual material, the paint, in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures. This has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one’s own act of looking at it. . . . What we make of that painted moment when it is before our eyes depends upon what we expect of art, and that in turn depends today upon how we have already experienced the meaning of paintings through reproductions. (para. 61)

While Berger describes original paintings as silent in this passage, it is clear that these paintings begin to speak if one approaches them properly, if one learns to ask “the right questions of the past.” Berger demonstrates one route of approach, for example, in his reading of the Hals paintings, where he asks questions about the people and objects and their relationships to the painter and the viewer. What the paintings might be made to say, however, depends on the viewer’s expectations, his sense of the questions that seem appropriate or possible. Berger argues that, because of the way art is currently displayed, discussed, and reproduced, the viewer expects only to be mystified.

For this paper, imagine that you are working against the silence and mystification Berger describes. Go to a museum — or, if that is not possible, to a large-format book of reproductions in the library (or, if that is not possible, to the reproductions on the Web) — and select a painting that seems silent and still, yet invites conversation. Your job is to figure out what sorts of questions to ask, to interrogate the painting, to get it to speak, to engage with the past in some form of dialogue. Write an essay in which you record this process and what you have learned from it. Somewhere in your paper, perhaps at the end, turn back to Berger’s essay and speak to it about how this process has or hasn’t confirmed what you take to be Berger’s expectations.

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In “Ways of Seeing” Berger says,

If the new language of images were used differently, it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power. Within it we could begin to define our experiences more precisely in areas where words are inadequate. . . . Not only personal experience, but also the essential historical experience of our relation to the past: that is to say the experience of seeking to give meaning to our lives, of trying to understand the history of which we can become the active agents. (para. 68)

As a writer, Berger is someone who uses images (including some of the great paintings of the Western tradition) “to define [experience] more precisely in areas where words are inadequate.” In a wonderful book, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, a book that is both a meditation on time and space and a long love letter, Berger writes about paintings in order to say what he wants to say to his lover. We have included two examples, descriptions of Rembrandt’s Woman in Bed and Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew.

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MAKING CONNECTIONS

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Walker Percy, in “The Loss of the Creature” (p. 297 of the print book), like Berger in “Ways of Seeing,” talks about the problems people have seeing things. “How can the sightseer recover the Grand Canyon?” Percy asks. “He can recover it in any number of ways, all sharing in common the stratagem of avoiding the approved confrontation of the tour and the Park Service.” There is a way in which Berger also tells a story about tourists — tourists going to a museum to see paintings, to buy postcards, gallery guides, reprints, and T-shirts featuring the image of the Mona Lisa. “The way original works of art are usually approached — through museum catalogues, guides, hired cassettes, etc. — is not the only way they might be approached. When the art of the past ceases to be viewed nostalgically, the works will cease to be holy relics — although they will never re-become what they were before the age of reproduction” (para. 60).

Write an essay in which you describe possible “approaches” to a painting in a museum, approaches that could provide for a better understanding or a more complete “recovery” of that painting than would be possible to a casual viewer, to someone who just wandered in, for example, with no strategy in mind. You should think of your essay as providing real advice to a real person. (You might, if you can, work with a particular painting in a particular museum.) What should that person do? How should that person prepare? What would the consequences be?

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Both John Berger in “Ways of Seeing” and Michel Foucault in “Panopticism” (p. 178 of the print book) discuss what Foucault calls “power relations.” Berger claims that “the entire art of the past has now become a political issue,” and he makes a case for the evolution of a “new language of images” that could “confer a new kind of power” if people were to understand history in art. Foucault argues that the Panopticon signals an “inspired” change in power relations. “It is,” he says, “an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up” (p. 187 of the print book).

Both Berger and Foucault create arguments about power and its methods and goals. As you read through their essays, mark passages you might use to explain how each author thinks about power — where it comes from, who has it, how it works, where you look for it, how you know it when you see it, what it does, where it goes. You should reread the essays as a pair, as part of a single project in which you are seeking to explain theories of power.

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In “Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body” Susan Bordo refers to John Berger and his work in Ways of Seeing, although she refers to a different chapter than the one included here. In general, however, both Berger and Bordo are concerned with how we see and read images; both are concerned to correct the ways images are used and read; both trace the ways images serve the interests of money and power; both are written to teach readers how and why they should pay a different kind of attention to the images around them.

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