Most art and film enthusiasts have heard of the ‘male gaze’ and the ‘colonial gaze’ and so on. These labels suggest that the gaze, way in which we approach looking, is not innocent. It is caught up with a whole set of presumptions and rules. These can boil down to what gender we are, where we come from, what we know and what we expect.

One key thing to remember is that when it comes to art, gazing is largely about power. It's rude to stare at a person for a long while but we can stare at a work of art for as long as we want. But then we need to consider the role and nature of the artist in his or her gaze and how that effects of understanding of what is being represented.

Introduction

To gaze is to look, specifically to look at which then means to look at in a particular way? How does that particular way affect what we see? When you’re hungry you’ll look at some delicious food in a different way from when you’re no longer hungry. But then, can an artist represent food in such a way that makes you feel hungry or remember when you were? These are nuances of the gaze, but there are also some delicate ideological concerns as well regarding race, nationality, gender etc.

A brief look at the various key philosophical positions concerning the gaze show that we seldom if at all just look. For our own part we bring to the image as many assumptions and expectations as there are within the artwork itself.

It is only by looking closely at this binary approach of imaging versus gazing that we can begin to ask where the art object is located. For what is seen is shaped by the viewer’s expectations, which are bound up with an intricate combination of social mores; add to that subjective expectations and the vicissitudes of feeling.

In the end the only answer is this: once the work of art ceases to excite responses, no longer elicits our gaze, once it loses its intrigue and the secret is uncovered, then as a object of contemplation it is exists only as something dried out, inertly expended like a filled-in crossword or a mastered computer game. The greatest works of art continually pose alternatives to our habits of image formation, or challenge the way we look at the world, or both.

A prime quality of looking at something that we know to be a work of art is that we know that there is something more to what we are seeing. When we see something, it is recognition, knowing.

When something is not formally recognized then it will be understood in terms of similar qualities already seen. There is no such thing as an innocent eye, nor is sight ever perfect. When art is successful it compensates for the inadequacies of our sight, perception and knowledge by rendering something visible in a way that is superior to mechanisms available to us in everyday life.

Art has the capacity to displace what in everyday life is a limitation, and to make things be seen as if shorn of what is habitual. Its presentational clarity typically poses itself as a mystery. So, we are back where we started: we have to look beyond what is before us.

The theories of looking with regard to art and society oscillate between these two poles of either accounting for the inadequacy of representation, or arguing that art at its finest exemplifies the deeper sight of looking, vision, which strips away the world’s artifice and gives us a deeper perception of the world that reveals itself to us gradually, like a lesson.

Prisoners of the cave

As introduced in the last chapter, Plato’s allegory of the cave makes us prisoners of the inadequacy of our gaze. The famous passage is in Book VII of the Republic:

Behold! Human beings living in an underground den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance […] and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

Condemned to see only shadows of the truth, Plato instructs us to distrust everything we see, a distrust that defines Western vision, which by nature distinguishes between different activities of seeing, based on the degrees by which something calls for interpretation.

Linguistic and phenomenological philosophies of the twentieth century have contested the validity of this distinction, since identifying something is by nature interpretative, though perhaps not profoundly so, and what we don’t identify or name we barely see, and it falls from our consciousness and memory.

The Kantian subject

While Kant retained the distinction between what he called things-in-themselves (noumenon) and things-as-appearance (phenomenon), he accounted for the incompleteness of our knowledge by arguing that we are limited to seeing the world through the formal boundaries of space and time.

How we see and what we choose to see are relative to these two perimeters. Although we may be limited in our apprehension of the world, we are nevertheless possessed of free will, and the sublime, the experience of what exceeds our understanding, is abstract proof of this.

Thus, the Kantian subject is no longer an object of understanding from elsewhere (i.e. God), but his or her own object of understanding, a free agent, capable of making independent decisions.

This independence opens a Pandora’s box that contains some of the problems inherent in Modernity itself: political, social and artistic. In the Romantics’ developments out of Kant (note again that they were not in line with Kant’s own intentions), the subject has a point of view that is indefinably his/hers, as opposed to what the philosopher Foucault (1926-84) referred to as the classical subject whose point of view was only an inferior facsimile of a unitary truth.

The Kantian subject is coterminous with the democratic subject who, by the middle to late eighteenth century, has the luxury of entitlement to an opinion and can self-consciously adopt an individual view of the world, or Weltanschauung.

And as I have suggested already, the new rights of the Enlightenment may have had salutary consequences for politics but the democracy of the gaze engendered not one right way of seeing, but many.

The concept of external law gave over to internal consensus.

This dilemma was already located by Kant who stressed the limitations of the thinking being. As Slovaj Zizek comments about Kant:

man’s finitude is not the simple finitude of an inner-worldly entity lost in the overwhelming totality of the universe. The knowing subject is a substanceless point of pure self-relating (the ‘I Think’) which is not ‘part of the world’ but is, on the contrary, correlative to ‘world’ as such and therefore ontologically constitutive: ‘world’, ‘reality’ as we know them, can appear only within the horizon of the subject’s finitude.

When we relate this back to the gaze we deal with a certain lack which is both constitutive and the object of the gaze, which is the discovery of Lacan (1901-81) via the thought of Sartre (1905-80).

The gaze and the Other

Kant’s philosophy may be relevant to the shift in the agency of the individual subject in relation to what he or she sees and knows, but Sartre was the first philosopher to explore the gaze per se as a function of the way we position ourselves in the world.

What separates the gaze from just a look is that the gaze is active as opposed to passive and is performed with intent. In this dualism, there is the subject and the Other (capitalized in the English because unlike the French autrui, we do not have a special word for it).

Our understanding of ourselves, the self-reflection that defines us as subjects, is reflected in others. However, we become aware of the Other’s presence when we are subjected to the gaze, thereby noticing that someone external to us has the power to discriminate similar to ours.

The operable word here is power: in moments when we are startled, the presence of the gaze is the most pronounced.

Sartre gives the example of the start we have when hearing a branch crack behind us: the feeling of vulnerability begins with being the recipient, not the agent, of the gaze. One of the most remarkable aspects of Sartre’s observation is that the gaze is not necessarily beholden to sight. Some suspenseful movies are built on this very principle, as are cultural critiques by minorities, as I will show in a moment.

In one of his famous examples, Sartre relates the shame we feel when caught at spying through a keyhole that results in the gaze’s abrupt reversal. Only then, as on object of the gaze, does one become aware of the subjectivity that one had as holder of the gaze: ‘the person is present in consciousness inasmuch as he/she is the object of the Other.’

The shame that this realization engenders is

shame of oneself, being the recognition that I am well and am well and truly the object that the other gazes at and judges. I am only shamed by the loss of my freedom through becoming a given object.[…] And this ‘me’ that I am is only within the world where the Other has alienated me, […] [emphasis Sartre’s]

Sartre had taken the first step by stating that we are made conscious of ourselves as subjects by another subject who makes us the object of the gaze, at which point Jacques Lacan replies that the only acceptable positioning of the gaze is therefore on the side of the Other.

Lacan, the gaze and lack

Lacan agrees with Sartre’s insight that the gaze is not limited to sight, but he emphasizes that the look and the gaze are a split inherent in a drive that is manifested within ‘the scopic field’, an overarching zone of vision that is enlisted by desire or, in Lacan’s case lack, the cause of desire.

The gaze is a look driven by need. Without lack, there can be no gaze. But Lacan goes even further: without lack there can be no consciousness, as the gaze is the ‘underside’ of consciousness. Lack of what? The phallus, but conceived of by Lacan in non-literal, mystical terms: not limited to the penis, the phallus is what defines the split between the sexes. For men it is what they have but is incomplete, for women it is what they do not have and what they want. Both desire it, but women want it more.

I will return to this touchy point. In his discourse on the gaze Lacan sticks to the term object petit a, ‘a’ being the key term in the algorithm of the gaze, where ‘a’ is the essence of the gaze. It is what the gaze seeks—although we know now that seeking defines it—and what eternally eludes it.

Hans Holbein the Younger. Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve ('The Ambassadors'). 1533. The National Gallery, London. Via Artsy

In a wonderful ruse, Lacan calls upon Hans Holbein’s Ambassadors (1533), to illustrate the gaze itself as a process of eluding. He draws attention to the partly imperceptible thin diagonal form cutting across the foreground, a skull distorted by anamorphosis, a technique popular in Holbein’s time. Lacan makes the audacious suggestion that ‘Holbein makes visible for us here something that is simply the subject that is annihilated—annihilated in the form that is, strictly speaking, the imagined embodiment of the minus-phi [(-f)] of castration’.

If we are to see the phallus, to be in its presence, it can only be at the expense of its own extinction and the anullment of the gaze itself, hence the death of the one who sees; the stretched skull is the symbol or better, proxy, for a black hole. It is through this confrontation with ‘the anamorphic ghost’ that the gaze is then able to imagine itself ‘in its pulsate, dazzling and spread out function’.

The painting locates precisely what Lacan says any picture is ‘a trap for the gaze’. Since pictures are not people, we can gaze at them, stare at them no less, without fear of reprisal, embarrassment—shame.

In looking closely and at length at a picture we are not just looking at features of representation and description, rather our love of illusion is what both empties out the gaze, sucks it up, but as much momentarily satisfies it, makes it replete.

Feminist revisions: the male gaze

The two major rebuttals to Lacan’s influential theses came with his former student, Luce Irigaray (b. 1930) and the film theorist, Laura Mulvey (b. 1941). Irigaray is one of the great feminist minds.

She mounted an assault on Lacan’s centredness of the phallus and posed the alternative of the gap or cut, but also problematized binarization itself, which is the cornerstone of Western logic and power, since binarization seldom admits of parity. In dominant discourse Woman is the other that defines Man.

But for Irgaray, Woman does not inhabit this binary; she is not an alternative to man but a wholly different configuration, possessed of a different kind of body and operating along different emotional and intellectual lines.

The phallus may be elusive, says Irigaray, but the feminine eludes the phallus. What we universally define as thought is properly called male, or phallocentric thought whose persuasiveness comes at the expense of excluding the feminine. Irigaray’s project is to reclaim a space for the feminine through highlighting alternative values and avenues of thought.

At roughly the same time as Irigaray, Laura Mulvey coined the term ‘the male gaze’ in her 1973 essay ‘ Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ to define the condition of the way in which women were viewed by postwar Hollywood cinema.

Mulvey points to a ‘sexual imbalance, [wherein] pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female’. This dichotomy controls the narrative structure, reducing women to the status of vulnerability as always being the receptors of the gaze.

Taking up the Lacanian assertion that the gaze is threatened by the very thing it seeks—since to found something only affirms what the gaze lacks—Mulvey states that the male gaze is subdivided into two seemingly incompatible stereotypes, for which the feminist shorthand is madonna/whore.

The first is ‘fetisihistic scopophilia’ (scopophilia—‘love of looking’) in which women are beauteous items for visual delectation; the second, ‘voyeurism’, is the obverse, a sadism that ends in submission and defeat of its object/victim. More insidious still, as Mulvey argues, narrative film forces women viewers into ownership of the male gaze as well, since they see on behalf of the male protagonist who is supported by the ostensibly universal, but actually male eye of the camera.

The artist who epitomizes the subjection of the female by the male gaze is Cindy Sherman, particularly in the work that launched her career, Untitled Film Stills (1977-80) which look like they have been extracted from classic film noir. Although staged, with the artist the centerpiece in different roles and costumes, one cannot help but be disarmed by their air of authenticity.

The one constant is the manner in which the nameless woman is steeped in vulnerability and sexual availability, in expectation of the male presence of which she is a mere symptom. With her mime of defenselessness and subordination, Sherman maneuvers her viewers squarely into the shoes of the male gaze.

Historical precursors

In light of Mulvey’s essay it is possible to say that the salient historical precursor to the male gaze is found in Baudelaire’s flâneur. Flâner is to amble or stroll, but as a result of his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), Baudelaire (1821-67) all but takes theoretical ownership of the word.

The flâneur is the eternal observer of the modern city, the detached, possibly bohemian (and therefore nobly indifferent to both the lower and middle classes), consumer of the spectacle of the delightful, ever-changing, dangerous, teeming city.

The Surrealist writer Louis Aragon (1897-1982) would later take up this idea in his novel-cum-prose poem Paris Peasant (1926), in which the writer-narrator seeks out an array of encounters with city paraphernalia, odd people, motley scenes, singling out jarring juxtapositions that average city dwellers take for granted.

But as feminists have shown, the Baudelairean flâneur is in confident possession of the male gaze, not to mention the male body. In nineteenth century cities women were not as free to wander the streets. Their susceptibility to the gaze was a regular indication of their limited freedoms in comparison to men.

The Paris in Baudelaire’s thrall was the Paris that evolved as a result of the vast redevelopment at the hands of Napoleon III’s minister of public works, Baron Hausmann, who tore up the tangle of rank old streets which were narrow enough to be the potential shelter to barricading revolutionaries.

In their place he installed the large sweeping boulevards for which Paris is now known. With this the concept of public space were born, and with it a new visibility. Such spaces opened up new zones of sociability where en masse people were able to indulge their joy of seeing, which is still one of the charms of the great cafés of Europe.

‘The artist, the true artist’, as Baudelaire proclaimed in his Salon de 1845, ‘will be the one who can extract what is epic from modern life’. The expanded parameters and status of roving, free (male) seeing is a chief characteristic of Modernity and was integral to the birth of Impressionism, where, if one looks closely, delineates between private and public space, the interior and the panorama.

Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann. By Gustave Caillebotte. 1880. Via Artsy

The cliché that Impressionists were obsessed by light oversteps the issue of their responsiveness to all kinds of spectacle, high and low. The emphasis on visibility reflected in the painterly technique of Manet and the Impressionists is inseparable from the complex form of social visibility that developed out of shifting social organization that resulted from increased urbanization (the mass migration from country to city that occurred around 1870) and the birth of the modern metropolis.

Impressionism was also the first movement in art that publicly encouraged the success of women, namely Marie Cassatt (1844-1926) and Berthe Morisot (1841-95). In an approach analogous but more historically extensive than Mulvey’s, Griselda Pollock compares their works with the great male artists of the time, such as Manet (1832-83), Pissarro (1830-1903), Degas (1834-1917), Monet (1840-1926) and Caillebotte (1848-94), and observes a difference in the subject matter, the deportment of the figures and the spaces they occupy, prompting the question as to whether there really is a female vision.

Both Cassatt (who never bore children) and Morisot (who did) concentrate a large part of their output on women, girls and children, particularly the mother-child relationship. Pollock convincingly shows how the strictures enforced on the middle-class female are mirrored in pictorial spaces which are in many respects enclosed, whether through tight compositions, the deportment of the female figures themselves, or through privileging the domestic interior.

Concluding an analysis of a work by Cassatt, Pollock states the artist ‘manipulated space and compositional structure to endow what women did in the home with respect and seriousness, while at the same time being able to make us recognize the limitations resulting from the confinement of bourgeois women in the domestic sphere alone’.

The Child's Bath. By Mary Cassatt. 1893. Via Artsy

By contrast, in paintings by men there is a greater oscillation between inside and outside space, with emphasis on the latter. As Pollock notes, the everyday gendering of space—women inside, men outside—affected pictorial representation. It is an open question, however, as to whether this gendering of vision is essential or conditioned.

The Colonial subject, Orientalism and the Imperial Gaze

When it came those to which the active Enlightenment subject trained his gaze, women were still treated as objects, as were non-Western peoples, who were the objects of knowledge.

Evidently the modern, European subject believed himself to be the only viable one, and until others were converted to their way of thinking, they could not be treated as subjects. ‘Primitive’ cultures—African, North American, South American, Indonesian, Pacific Islander, Australasian, in short, the rest of the world—took their name because they were considered by the Western eye to be in a state of arrested development.

The appropriation of the East—a vast generalization in itself, covering everything from Turkey to Siam (Thailand) to Madagascar—began in earnest with the imperial wars between Holland, Portugal, Spain, England and France at the end of the sixteenth century. In art it is evident in the Moorish influence came much earlier and is everywhere in the architecture of Venice and in paintings such as those of Jacopo Bellini (c.1396 – c.1470).

In France in the seventeenth century many vestiary silks, wall coverings and tapestries bore the mark of a new titilatory style, ‘Chinoiserie’, which was about as generically unspecific as a packet of dried ‘Asian’ flavoured noodles.

Well might the designation of Asian have entered into today’s popular speech, but its crassness as a generalization—still worse France continues to employ the anachronism ‘Orient’—lies in the fact that it can be extended to over eighty percent of the world’s population.

Edward Said, who coined the term ‘Orientalism’, explains that it is an idea that asserts Europe’s self-assured dominance:

In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.

It is a double-standard that is played out to this very day with Western tourism. We have the means to explore countries that are both constricted by and dependent on our own, whose people have meager means of survival let alone the ability to travel.

It was by the nineteenth century that this dominance became entrenched, by which time the ‘Oriental’ was a style had permeated from the arts into fashion and interior decoration. The academician Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) made a career of turning out crisply painted canvases of Middle eastern and North African scenes—snake charmers, harems, slave traders—the men swarthy, brutish and usually indolent, the women underclothed, nubile and frequently pallid, the boys lithe sexualized ephebes.

In short, the Oriental ‘other’ is made into a fetishized stereotype that reflects the Western male’s desires rather than observes considerations of cultural respect.

The Snake Charmer. By Jean-Léon Gérôme. 1879. Photograph: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Via The Guardian

Nonetheless, the exotic other had a definitive role to play for the European avant-garde, and even in extraordinary cases such as Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) or the German Expressionist Erich Heckel (1883-1970), who had direct contact with the peoples who influenced their art, the upper hand is still there.

The Seed of the Areoi, oil on burlap by Paul Gauguin. 1892. The Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Via Britannica

For the ‘Primitive urge’ as it is expressed within late nineteenth and early twentieth century painting rests upon a contradiction. The ‘primitive’ other is elevated to an eminence that sets him/her/it above the European.

By virtue of being ‘primitive’, such peoples were/are viewed as having a vigour which the European thinks he has lost. By making use of the ‘primitive’, the European is given a special boost to truth.

So, the superiority of the ‘primitive’ is a chimera, determined solely according to the use to which the Westerner can put him. Moreover, the appropriation of the ‘primitive’ is selective, without much concern for the ritual meaning and uses of the motifs; the keynote is that the ‘primitive’ is manipulated to make a new Western style whose art is superior to the art or artifacts which it borrowed (stole).

In recent decades feminist scholars have rightly pointed out that the contradiction was/is the same for men’s use of the female form: Woman may be idolized, but this idolization is not positive as it drains her of life; she is symbolic, inert and objectified for the purpose of fulfilling particular uses and desires specific to men.

The objectification of the ‘primitive’ and of Woman converges in paintings by Picasso, particularly in those during the time of his co-discovery of Cubism around 1907. Here women are made the receptacle of all of the artist’s harshest, darkest passions. Nameless and characterless, they are a grade up from beasts, forces of nature given shape, ugly and angular.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. By Pablo Picasso. 1907. Via MoMA

Circumstances of the presumptuous Imperial gaze may have shifted to a more self-critical conscience within the academy, but they have not for tourism or advertising which are ready to exploit anything with exotic appeal.

(Note the woolly definition of exotic; and is something appealing for being exotic or is something exotic appealing?)

A problem with the fraught legacy of colonialism is that resetting the mark cannot be achieved ideologically or without due reflection. In other words, the Orientalist critique cannot be mounted to discredit writers and artists wholesale.

When we delve deeper into Gauguin’s experience for example, and read his letters, and look longer at his later testimonial paintings, we sense palpable disappointment at the plight of the Tahitians at Western hands, an honest joy taken in their ritual, and a gratefulness at them for teaching him ways of relating to the world differently. He was too sensitive not to know that his own presence was a symptom of the scourge of Europeanization (that brought smallpox and venereal disease) that was ravaging the indigenous populations, and which consumed him as well.

His final masterpiece, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-8) is a spiritual allegory composed in the spirit of peace and transcultural sympathy.

Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 1897-8. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The gaze, knowledge and power

In the 1961 the philosopher Michel Foucault published the first of a series of influential books about how dominance, power and control is organized within Western society and thought since the seventeenth century. Madness and Civilisation, recognized as an intellectual milestone when it came out, dealt with the new phenomenon of incarceration of abnormals that occurred in the ‘age of reason’ after the Middle Ages.

Foucault’s reasoning seems almost self-evident: for the idea of reason to hold sway it required qualifying contrast with an opposite, unreason. But unreason could only be defined in terms of what reason cannot define.

Madness was the social typology to fit into reason’s too-hard-basket, conflating social misfits and mental illness.

Foucault followed similar trajectories in his subsequent ‘archaeologies’, as he called them, of the clinic and of prisons. The birth of the clinic at the beginning of the nineteenth century was coterminous with the system of diagnosis in which doctors came to enjoy special privileges based on their ability to discriminate, to see the signs that erred from good health.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault focused on the prison reform of Jeremy Bentham, the inventor of the panopticon, an architectural device of surveillance that exposed prisoners to an omnipresent gaze.

After the student riots in May 1968, Foucault’s questions about the substance of power and who wields it gained in momentum. ‘Who owns the gaze?’. The owner of power and knowledge.

Yet power and knowledge can never be said to have their permanent source in one quality or thing. This means that whilst it is important to locate the gaze in order to determine the locus of power, the holder of the gaze is neither reducible to that power, nor is he or she ever in complete possession of it.

Power and the gaze for Foucault is a configuration like a kaleidoscope: any discernible pattern is one among many; the pattern changes, along with the effect. ‘The question of power remains a total enigma’ says Foucault. Power is ‘not in the hands of those who govern’, and governance itself is a ‘fluid’ notion. ‘It is often difficult to say who holds power in a precise sense, but it is easy to see who lacks power’.

Las Meninas, 1656 (detail) by Diego Velázquez. Photograph: The Gallery Collection/Corbis. Via The Guardian

Foucault’s insight that power is fundamentally irreducibile finds its equivalent in art in his examination of Velasquez’s Las Meninas (1656) that opens Les Mots et les choses (1966, translated as The Order of Things). He draws our attention to the reflections of King Philip IV and his spouse in the mirror at the rear of the room.

Their blurred image serves Foucault’s thesis perfectly: the ruler’s presence is only a reflection, and so, being a painting, a representation within a representation, stands outside of the picture, a mere shadow.

Meanwhile it is the artist—working on a painting we cannot see or perhaps the painting we are now seeing, and who gazes directly at us—that has the greatest presence, signifying a possession of the gaze made possible through artistic invention. The sources of power in this picture find themselves continually displaced: for Velasquez the artist, because it is mediated through representing self-presentation (becoming both subject and object), and for the king and queen, through a double mediation which drives home the truth that the king’s power is bestowed by his subjects.

The power of each is interdependent and finite; like the king, the artist’s power depends on the viewer’s recognition.

The idea that power is everywhere and nowhere has a potentially destabilizing effect on foundational philosophies such as Marxism and positivism, and consequently excited bitter antagonism, preeminently in the German Hegelian Jürgen Habermas for whom power’s indeterminacy in Foucault’s thought only defers efforts to discourage solutions to power’s abuses.

The Postcolonial and Postfeminist gaze

Once Foucault’s critique of the centralization of power in the modern age is applied to the Western male Orientalist, it raises a gamut of apposite yet thorny questions.

Who has ownership of the gaze and what are its entitlements? If an indigenous society happens to approve of an outsider’s vision of them, artistic or otherwise, does their chorus of opinion make it right? Can a woman have the male gaze?

If you resemble the peoples of one culture and grow up in another (Indians in England, Turks in Germany, Chinese in Australia, Koreans in the U.S.) does this give you a special advance on your access to the culture whence your family came? To what extent does identifying with a culture have to do with genetic material?

In the absence of sure answers, these questions and others crave reassessment on a periodic basis. In stable countries, identity is the catchcry for artists and curators who fear the scourges of globalization.

Whereas the Orientalist gaze of a superior us seeing an inferior them, there is now as much the case of a ‘me’ seeing my own for the delectation of a curious ‘them’. While many artists who identify with minorities make worthwhile statements of what it means to feel oppressed and subjected, just as many use parts of their background because it has become fashionable to do so and lubricates their possibilities to get into exhibitions; for there is never a shortage of exhibitions that sentimentalize identity.

As events since the Cold War have shown, the imperial impulse has not abated, especially evident in the tergiversations of American foreign policy.

Yet America and Western Europe’s ability to dominate other nations is sporadic and its inadequacies expose their local agendas and patchy cultural understandings.

Nations under the weight of gratitude to international aid—for damage that imperialism has wrought in the first place—such as many in Africa can still be said to have what Homi Bhaba has called ‘the threatened return of the look’, a gaze that, while subjected, is still forcefully active as reproach.

Karina Eileras develops this notion with reference to the images by Marc Garanger, photographer for the French army in 1960-2 at the time of the Algerian revolution. In the photographs of women who submitted to being photographed, Eileras notices a healthy pattern of tacit resistance in covert markers such as pursed lips, uneven deportment, skewed looks, all signs of displaced submission.

A photograph of an Algerian woman in a French regroupment village. 1960. Marc Garanger. Via TIME

Attentive analyses like hers are helpful in exposing the lack of neutrality of the image, and the way that the gaze can intercepted and deflected in a way that does not combat the West’s way of gazing, (which, so the theory goes, would only duplicate its negative power-play) but rather in a manner that comes at it from the back door.

But speaking on behalf of the Western white male, can there be said to be a post-Orientalist gaze? This image, Affliction of the Protestant (2005), by Phillip George indicates that the question can be answered in the affirmative.

Affliction of the Protestant. By Phillip George. 2005.

George has captured three black hawk helicopters hovering over a mosque under construction thereby deftly repositioning his own cultural baggage as a Western observer through the visual decoy of observing the considerably more dominant eye of the U.S. observing the East.

This is amplified by the work’s colour, the eerie emerald monochrome of night vision, a metaphor for the covert intrusiveness of military surveillance. The title considers the Western ignorance toward Muslims as more illness than attitude.

This and this next work reveal the lengths that artists go to combat the tortured legacy of the Orientalist gaze. The two stills below are from the two channel video installation, Turbulent (1998), by the U.S.-Iranian artist Shirin Neshat (b. 1957). It is a poetic yet disturbing work that singularly recasts the stereotypical position of the mute Muslim woman.

Shirin Neshat – Turbulent, 1998, black-and-white video installation. Via Public Delivery

The work opens with a moving song from a man in a white shirt; facing him on the opposite screen is the back of a woman clad entirely in black. When he finishes, the woman turns and begins her own song, a plaintive, wordless lament.

During each song words roll over the images, for the man in Latin and English, for the woman, Arabic and Persian, enforcing the dichotomy. The man, who is in the company of a male audience, sings in an illuminated room, whereas the woman, alone, sings in darkness.

Neshat drew inspiration for this work from a blind girl performing in the street in Istanbul, which made her reflect on Iran’s disregard for female expression, since under the Khommeni regime, women were expressly forbidden from performing.

For all its profound references, when physically experienced, Turbulent lives up to its title; when he finishes his song, a quizzical expression appears on the man’s face as he ‘watches’ the woman takes her turn on the opposite screen.

The wordless hymn is like a desperately sad chant welling up from out of a crack in a hard surface, be it the barrier of Western expectations or the wall of male laws. Even with her eyes closed, we as viewers nevertheless feel the weight of her gaze, as some form of corrective to delinquent Western assumptions about what Middle Eastern women are, or should be.

The Prosthetic gaze

With the invention of photography came a whole new kind of observer, as well as an eruption of conjecture about pictorial truth and evidence. ‘Evidential’ is a stock term in photography to designate a category rather than an essential quality. Critics of photography rightly observe that its truth is qualitative: photographic truth.

The French word for the photographic negative, cliché, is a convenient place to start when thinking of the uses to which the photographic apparatus (analogue and digital both) is commonly put. Surely we too have at one point set out to make a good photograph—seeing in terms of an anticipated outcome—rather than just plainly seeing.

The apparatus determines to varying degrees what and how things are seen—this will be explored more in the next chapter.

As we have seen already, it is hard if not impossible to locate the gaze when it is refracted through a mediating lens whose power to augment is at the expense of less perceptible constraints and limitations.

Take the touristic gaze: the camera renders the gaze passive; the gaze is annulled for the sake of the static reproduction: the event in situ exists for the sake of the dour replica.

But when we think of two films about photographic vision, Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) or Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), the prosthetic gaze of the camera is the defining element in what is seen and understood, which singles out the unassailable fact that each are films from the first, a medium with its own particular forms of orchestration, manipulation and deception.

In a pioneering work of performance art, Following Piece (1969), Vito Acconci had himself photographed randomly following people in the streets of New York.

Following Piece (1969). Vito Acconci. Via MoMA

At first, we are carried along by the ebb and flow of the images’ ongoing movement determined by the trajectory of the people whom the artist is following. We initially assume that it is Acconci who is the owner of the gaze, but it quickly dawns on us that his gaze is solely at the behest of whom he follows.

Since he has no other motive but to follow them, it is they who possess the gaze; the artist’s surveillance trick sustains itself only upon the act of pursuit.

We too are complicit in this arbitrary magnetic game, since we are the only ones who gaze upon both pursuer and pursued. But—to end the loop—the artist has intended this to happen, so by default he has the last laugh, binding us up in his work’s logic. Everyone is the object of another’s gaze, none escape it.

These shifts and gaps are what caused Jacques Derrida to write Droit de regards (‘right of inspection’, or ‘right to gaze) written to accompany the photographs by Marie-Françoise Plissart. Plissart’s suite of images half-narrates a story involving lesbians, a child in commedia dell’arte make-up and finally an interloping male.

I say ‘half-narrates’ because what preoccupies Derrida are the lacunae, the mid-spaces that force the viewer’s assumptions. The kinds of transactions that occur within the images convolute the self-consciousness of the gaze.

In other words, we do not know in what capacity we look—as man or woman—and whether we are entitled to look at all or at what. Derrida goes so far as to claim that the photographs are neither referential nor evidential but rather embody a wish, they are symbols or phantoms of what we want to see but is not ‘really’ there.

Taking up from Lacan, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Derrida’s ambling excursus, also with its implicit subtexts of stock photographic theory and from French poetics, is more memorable than the photographs themselves. He locates a critical area in which the gaze is fractured and multi-layered.

The global and sci-fi techno-gaze

When we get to cyberspace this split of the gaze is constant and intricate. There is a chain of mediations whose source is difficult if not impossible to locate. With Spyware, surveillance, intrusion takes on a new and sinister face.

The gaze can become small and local and, in the next breath, macrocosmic and global, as with Google Earth which is a commercial offshoot of ‘Digital Earth’.

The ‘Digital Earth’ project as it has come to be named was an initiative of Al Gore begun in 1998 via NASA and was envisioned to bring together disparate communities, a ‘grassroots effort’ as Gore described it that would be the next great innovation of the web. It was part of the deregulation of digital technologies in the 1990s designed to stimulate a range of economic and social activities.

But consonant again with technology that vaunts itself too strongly as progressive (utopian?), its present uses are markedly different from initially intended. As would maybe be expected, the outcome is decidedly cynical. Digital Earth technology serves the corporate entities that made the technology possible from the start, for the viewer will always be part of the network, absorbed within it like a worker bee within a hive.

As Lisa Parks remarks in her essay on this subject, the promise of recentralization obscures a media infrastructure which is itself decentralized. Whereas the models that Digital Earth propagates are linear and smooth, the spaces it traverses are not. It proposes to reduce a domain that encompasses the social, global, inner, outer, local and national, corporate and individual, to a common denominator.

As Parks asserts, Digital Earth conceals the struggles taking place within the world and ‘instead naturalizes these spaces as the rightful property of the spectator/navigator’.

The viewer assumes false ownership of the world with the help of interfaces like Work Bench which enable anyone to zoom in and twirl the world at will. In short the viewer is lulled into a false sense of agency with the power to lord over the hemisphere like a pagan god, when in reality he or she is dupe to the medium, where the distinctions between real and virtual are obscured forever.

These prostheses of the gaze end up becoming imperceptibly incorporated within the gaze. We cannot imagine an alternative, believing ourselves bereft, incapacitated or non-functional without them.

What is the ‘Gaze’ in Art?

Introduction

Prisoners of the cave

The Kantian subject

The gaze and the Other

Lacan, the gaze and lack

Feminist revisions: the male gaze

Historical precursors

The Colonial subject, Orientalism and the Imperial Gaze

The gaze, knowledge and power

The Postcolonial and Postfeminist gaze

The Prosthetic gaze

The global and sci-fi techno-gaze

Further Reading

What is the ‘Gaze’ in Art?

Introduction

Prisoners of the cave

The Kantian subject

The gaze and the Other

Lacan, the gaze and lack

Feminist revisions: the male gaze

Historical precursors

The Colonial subject, Orientalism and the Imperial Gaze

The gaze, knowledge and power

The Postcolonial and Postfeminist gaze

The Prosthetic gaze

The global and sci-fi techno-gaze

Further Reading

What can Adorno & Walter Benjamin Teach us About NFTs & Art

Monet and the Impressionists