visual culture: spectatorship, power and knowledge
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SPECTATORSHIP, POWER AND KNOWLEDGE
Jana Sterbak, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, 1987
A picture is worth a thousand words… but why?
Why do we put so much believe and power in the image?
Why we allow image to exercise power of indoctrination and persuasion over us?
What make images so fascinating and so attractive for the viewers?
Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
It is not enough to experience world around us.
We need to be able to represent it Cartesian (from Descartes) understanding
of the world emphasizes the power and centrality of the individual.
Subject or Individual is the central figure of modernity.
Mirror Stage
Jacques Lacan
Mirror StageSeparation between infant and his mother/caregiver.Acquisition of the sense of selfThe toddler is over optimistic about his abilities Result the conflict between the actual subject and the subjects sense of self.
Three implications of the Spectatorship theory
1. the roles of the unconscious and desire in viewing practices
2. the role of looking the formation of the human subjects as such
3. the ways that looking is always a relational activity and not simply a mental activity.
Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936
Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas, 1656.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
Significance of Las Meninas Unstable system of representation Gaze and power changes depending on the
position, and subjects awareness Gaze or look is always dialogical, e.g. the gaze
is always returned even by objects Proves the ideas of interpellation-through the
gaze or look the object can interpellate the human subject as message: a call, an address, an appeal.
Discourse and Power
Discourse =myth Discourse of madness Discourse of gender
Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon, 1791.Panopticon: All seeing eye
Michel Foucault described the implications of 'Panopticism' in his 1975 work Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison --
Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.
The inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.
To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so.
Gerardo Machado, Presidio Modelo,
Cuba, 1926-1931
Bernard Poyet, Radial hospital plan 1785.
Pavilion plan hospital
Power/Knowledge
Surveillance cameras
Biopower
Control and power over bodies
Corsets and biopolitics
Gaze and Otherness
Edward Sheriff Curtis, The North American Indian, ca. 1903.
Ethnographic/Anthropological Gaze
Jacque Derrida
The power of binary oppositionsWhite/BlackMan/WomanStraight/Gay
center / marginsnormal / deviantnatural / unnaturalself / othertruth / fiction
Western/Eastern divide as advertising campaign
Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, La
Grande Odalisque, 1814,
OdalisqueKeri Add:
Touchable Skin, 2006
Odalisque
The painting is an icon: a generic and seemingly timeless signifier of classical female beauty.
Guerrilla Girls, 2005.
Timeless Images
Outside of changing tastes and conventions
Timeless and recognized fact Absolute truth
Jacque Lacan
Mirror constructs the self The self as an organized and whole entity
imitates the image in the mirror. Mirror can be an image The self organizes its identity around the
images that are being shown.
Film =suspense of the disbelief Film is like a dream, when watching we
are allowed to project our forbidden feelings, desires
Identifications with the hero Eye and gaze are split Eye (I) is mistaking realization that one is
independent Gaze seeks unification with the other
Identification
The Gendered Gaze
Essay-Due March 6
The final paper (aprox. 8 pages plus bibliography) will analyze an object (artwork, advertisement, video, movie still, or film) not reproduced in the textbook and not covered in the lectures. The work will be discussed in terms of material covered in the course. You will be expected to bring in at least four other images, objects, or other materials that constitute visual culture with similar subject matter or function for comparison. At least one of your comparisons must date from before 1900, one must be from no earlier than 1950, and one must be from a culture other than Europe or the United States (Global North). Readings from the course and original research will be used to elucidate the subject you have chosen. Bibliography should include at least 7 academic sources excluding the textbook.