The Gaze and The Media

‘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’

Berger (1972)

• Women Internalise the gaze
• Women see themselves in the way they see other woman portrayed around them

Hans Memling 'Vanity' (1485)

A mirror allows us to look at the naked women because she is looking at herself

 

 

Is shown in contemporary fashion today, spying on the woman 

Alexander Cabanel 'Birth of Venus' 1863

Being invited in by the woman who is hiding her eyes but looking seductively away. 

Alexandre Cabanel ‘Birth Of Venus’ 1863

Most admired painting of the Salon that year

Kitschy / mythological / unchallenging / sentimental /unaggressive sexuality (looks away from viewer.

Sophie Dahl for Opium 

To overtly sexual 

When published it was turned on its side, to put more emphasis on the face 

Berger makes the comparison :Traditional nude- regarding us coquettishly

Woman made out to be a prostitute

 

VS Manet - ‘Olympia’

Olympia transforms a dignified goddess into the simple nakedness of humanity. Olympia does not belong to the world of mythology - Olympia stood “as the first nude to represent modern reality” because she is a prostitute rather than a godess figure

Shocked Modern society - Olympia is adorned with the trappings of success - jewels / bracelets etc, not the degraded prostitute of popular myth - Courtesan

Cat is symbol of individual femininity and independence. Olympia ignores the flowers presented to her, probably as a gift to her from an admirer

Guerrilla Girls formed in 1985 in response to the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture" which showcased 169 artists; out of those 169, only 17 were women. The curator's press release for the exhibition stated: "Any artist who is not in my show should rethink his career."

 

Asked to design a billboard for the Public Art Fund in New York, we welcomed the chance to do something that would appeal to a general audience. One Sunday morning we conducted a "weenie count" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, comparing the number of nude males to nude females in the artworks on display. The results were very "revealing."

The PAF said our design wasn't clear enough (????) and rejected it. We then rented advertising space on NYC buses and ran it ourselves, until the bus company canceled our lease, saying that the image, based on Ingres' famous Odalisque, was too suggestive and that the figure appeared to have more than a fan in her hand.

Manet, Bar at the foiles Bergeres (1882)

Shes not part of thr Paris society 

MANET - Bar at the Folies Bergeres

Again, self-portrait…

Skewed perspective.

Dissaffected from society, unhappy at work and not involved with the revelry - Marginalised members of this great new Modernist society

Role of women - disaffected, no longer the passively available, sexualised Nymphs

Locket around the hints at another life - escapism - a love token from another world

She is the only figure not reflected - Paris as a hall of mirrors - Superficiality

Detail

You are no longer the spectator - you are involved with the scene

Reference to the viewer

This image was then portrayed by Jeff Wall 'Picture for Women' 

 

Picture for Women was inspired by Edouard Manet's masterpiece A Bar at the Folies-Bergères (1881–82). In Manet's painting, a barmaid gazes out of frame, observed by a shadowy male figure. The whole scene appears to be reflected in the mirror behind the bar, creating a complex web of viewpoints. Wall borrows the internal structure of the painting, and motifs such as the light bulbs that give it spatial depth. The figures are similarly reflected in a mirror, and the woman has the absorbed gaze and posture of Manet's barmaid, while the man is the artist himself. Though issues of the male gaze, particularly the power relationship between male artist and female model, and the viewer's role as onlooker, are implicit in Manet's painting, Wall updates the theme by positioning the camera at the centre of the work, so that it captures the act of making the image (the scene reflected in the mirror) and, at the same time, looks straight out at us.

 

The camera in contemporary media has been put to use as an extension of the male gaze at women on the streets

The Look (1984) Coward. R 

Normalization of the nude body, its seen in everyday society  

The camera in contemporary media has been put to use as an extension of the male gaze at women on the streets

Coward. R 

 

The profusion of images which characterises contemporary society could be seen as an obsessive distancing of women… a form of voyeurism

There are examples where the male body is objectified in a similar way

The issue of male objectification is often raised in gender classes that I have taught. I have heard many men and women suggest that men are now equally objectified in popular culture. Many a people have focused on the Lucky Vanos ads of years past as a sign of advertisers recognizing the desire of women to objectify men in our society. But what is really happening in advertising? Can men be objectified as women? If so, in what frequency is objectification present in ads? The Ads: Consider the number of ads presented in this male trope as compared to other examples of female objectification. It is interesting that when I first began the Web site many years ago, the number of ads in this exhibit were small. Today, there are nearly 60 such ads.

Dr Scott A Lucas

 

Male nude as challenging the gaze

Gym- sports-power

Cult of fitness – male ideals of body image.

Everyone returns the gaze unlike how many woman are portrayed in advertisements

 

Mulvey notes that Freud had referred to (infantile) scopophilia - the pleasure involved in looking at other people’s bodies as (particularly, erotic) objects. In the darkness of the cinema auditorium it is notable that one may look without being seen either by those on screen by other members of the audience. Mulvey argues that various features of cinema viewing conditions facilitate for the viewer both the voyeuristic process of objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic process of identification with an ‘ideal ego’ seen on the screen. She declares that in patriarchal society ‘pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female’ (Mulvey 1992, 27). 

  

Dark room means we are allowed to fanatise on our own, in private 

Pollock, G

•Women ‘marginalised within the masculine discourses of art history’

•This marginalisation supports the ‘hegemony of men in cultural practice, in art’

•Women not only marginalised but supposed to be marginalised

Women artists whose work challenges the male gaze.

Barbara Kruger

‘Your Gaze Hits The Side of My Face’

(1981)

Tracey Emin 

 

 

Caroline Lucas was asked to stick to the dress code if she wished to continue the debate

Green MP Caroline Lucas has been told to cover up a T-shirt displaying the slogan "No More Page Three" in large lettering during a Commons debate.

She wore the white T-shirt at the start of a debate on media sexism.

Chairman of the session, Labour's Jimmy Hood, interrupted her and told her to "put her jacket back on" and comply with Westminster's dress code.

Ms Lucas picked up a copy of The Sun and waved Page Three, but said she would comply with the ruling.

She added: "It does strike me as a certain irony that this T-shirt is regarded as an inappropriate thing to be wearing in this House, whereas apparently it is appropriate for this kind of newspaper to be available to buy in eight different outlets on the Palace of Westminster estate."

During the debate, the MP for Brighton Pavilion argued The Sun newspaper's Page Three, which features topless models, should be consigned to the "rubbish bin where it belongs".

Lucy-Ann Holmes, who founded a campaign to end the publication of topless "Page 3 Girls" in The Sun newspaper last year, told the BBC that while she had also received death threats, she had not been subject to the level of "sustained attack" experienced by Ms Criado-Perez.

"I'd say it's a constant undercurrent, when women write about feminist issues or are exposed in a lot of media for speaking out about sexism they tend to get a barrage of abuse and threats," she said. (www.bbc.co.uk)

aroline Criado-Perez (born 1984) is a British journalist and feminist activist. She has been involved in high profile campaigns for women to gain better representation in the British media

Mary Beard- eminent classicist, The Guardian's Hadley Freeman, the Independent's Grace Dent and Time magazine's Catherine Mayer all said they had received identical bomb threats on Wednesday.

Social Networking is used to perpetuate the male gaze/ the gaze of the media

 

FB normalises voyeurism

  Male or female posting doesn’t matter.

One hundred and 93 thousand young people ‘like’ or relate to this image

Media and male gaze are one , as Rosalind Coward says in ‘The Look’

Susan Sontag (1979) ‘On Photography’  

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed'

The act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging what is going on to keep on happening'

 

Pap images steal shots for personal financial gain

The publication of these shots creates a market for their passive consumption (mags and newspapers)

We contribute to the perpetuation of this cycle buy buying the mags, we create the market for our own voyeuristic pleasure

Our desire is to see the mask of celebrity lifted, and ordinary life exposed.

 

Reality television  

•Appears to offer us the position as the all-seeing eye- the power of the gaze

•Allows us a voyeuristic passive consumption of a type of reality

• Editing means that there is no reality

•Contestants are aware of their representation (either as TV professionals or as people who have watched the show)

Big Brother 

Male females to gaze upon.

Chair is designed for maximum exposure

Voyeurism becomes everyday

Original idea was that all would be exposed but ten years on we accept that the programme is edited.

Fantasy that they cannot see us but they are constantly picturing themselves, in mirrors etc and speculating about how the public wil percieve them (they are professionally aware of this)

They know the premise of the show and the viewing figures.

They effuse to be looked at ness.

Ultimate passive viewing experience. 

Fantacy that they cant see us, we are in our dark room at home looking through the 'peephole' 

Looking is not indifferent. There can never be any question of 'just looking'.

Victor Burgin (1982) 

Further Reading

 

John Berger (1972) Ways of Seeing, Chapter3

Victor Burgin (1982) Thinking Photography

Rosalind Coward (1984) The Look

Laura Mulvey (1973) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Griselda Pollock (1982) Old Mistresses

Susan Sontag On Photography (1977)