The Art of Seeing

 I’ve been reading John Berger’s Ways of Seeing,  as a road into undertanding art, and art history. I'm a complete novice in this subject, but I've always loved wandering around galleries, discovering sculpure in suprising places  being allowed to hold small works of art, or craft. Another small start is watching programmes, usually on BBC Four, about artists, some of which can also be found on Youtube (including Ways of Seeing). 

Berger in the 70s

Berger was a writer, performer and photographer. He died at 90, a year or so ago, still revered. Ways of Seeing started as a TV programm and became a book. A critic commented: This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings ... he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures. Inside its cover, Jonn Berger says...Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words It is seeing which establish our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled. 

I was lent this book by a friend who is also an artist. She considers it an influential book and an exciting route into understanding art, telling me that Berger drives right through to the orthodoxies, breaking down the mystique and 'liberating paintings'. It's quite old now, and on Youtube, John Berger looks youthful in 1970's checkered trousers and shaped shirt, with a shock of black hair. 

Berger in 2016, copyright The Guardian

I found it a difficult work for me to get a hold on.  I was put off by the odd format of the text and the bold print, also by the way it seems to start in the middle...or do I mean muddle...of something. The random black and white illustrations, mostly reproductions of art works, are scratchy, hard to get a resonance with. 

I got hot under the collar with how the book comes up with bold statements without reference…images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that wasn’t there… I felt sure that was wrong. I wanted to reference him to the hand prints found in caves, created sometimes up to 40,000 years ago in the so-called 'creative explosion' of early Homo Sapiens. This was something that was extremely concrete, a statement of identity Humans, or possibly Neanderthals, began painting on cave walls before or shortly after their arrival in Europe. In a Telegraph article, it is suggested that the very first wall paintings were abstract and could have laid the foundations for what we now think of as "modern art”…Dr Paul Pettitt, a cave art specialist from Sheffield University, said: "These earliest images do not represent animals, and suggest that the earliest art was non-figurative, which may have significant implications for how art evolved.”… 

A Sunday Times critic commented on the book: This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.” Even though I was resisting this, it was begining to be true.

 Berger says…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 or the painter’s immediate gestures…  

I was drawn to one picture  – The Fur by Rubens.  This picture communicates brilliantly Berger's thinking on 'the nude',,,men act and women appear. Men look at women and women watch themselves being looked at…

I could feel her eyes on me, too though.  I felt I could happily take a guess at what both model and painter were thinking, even saying.
It's clear that the picture is foreshortened,. Berger says the thighs are ‘nine inches out’. I did spot that her arm ‘looked all wrong’, but couldn’t work out why.  Berger continues…Rubens probably did not plan this…I could not help but think, well, there they go again, trying to own a work of art. However,  I’ll stick my neck out and say that maybe Rubens did do this deliberately, or at very least, saw his error and allowed it to remain, because of what it communicated to the viewer.

I searched for other books that might help me undertand how to 'see' art. Ossian Ward's, Ways of Looking:How to experience contemporary art is in 8 chapters, examining art as…entertainment, confrontation, event, message, joke, spectacle, and meditation. The categories seemed quite random and arbitrary, and I thought Ward was saying is that no one needs neither an encyclopaedic knowledge nor a degree to enjoy art. and that we don't need categorise as we did in the past (Cubism, Impressionism). Ward recommends we drop labels, categories and tags, declassifying modern art and widen the global map by starting again with no prejudices, no preconceptions – a blank slate– a tabu rasa. To aid the novice art viewer further, he creates a mnemonic from this –

TABULA—an acronym for: 

T - time, Take a few moments to stand still and take stock, what am I looking at here? Hold on, don’t turn my back. Stay  for a few minutes before deciding.

A - Association. Find an entry point, look for the tone, story, theme or image that strikes a chord.

B - Background. How is the artist intending it to relate to the looker? How do we relate to this art work. Does knowing things help...country, culture, influences; title, personal history?

U - Understated. There aren't rules for how to experience art, it is recognised that it’s highly subjective and we will all have our personal, subtle reactions. By this stage we might have a better understanding of the work and if not…

L - Look Again. Every art work deserves a second look.

A - Assessment. Now we are finally allowed to be subjective and form an opinion about a work.

This immediately resonated with me because I love ciphers and keys that can open doors and this seemed like one. But before I put it into practice, I first had to think about the idea of the clean slate. Was Ward suggesting that my own thoughts, feelings and memories should be wiped away as I viewed new art? Using the TABULA showed me that isn’t so; we must bring our own conceptions to each viewing.

source; Tate.org.uk

He begins with Thomas Demand’s Tavern 2 (2006) which appears to be a view of an ivy-covered house. In fact it’s a photo of a beautifully created paper collage of  a photograph a bar where a murder was committed. Tavern 2 seems innocuous until you understand the history and creation. I wasn’t sure if Demand wasn’t saying that we like to take our horror stories, such as a murder in a tavern, at one remove, to keep ourselves safe from the immediacy and the associated emotion of the event. What was clear (by simple looking) is that it’s easy enough to spot the artificial perfection of the ivy once one knows.

http://www.geomythkavanagh.com/
single-post/2017/08/09/
Lea-Sautin-a-paper-myth-of-exhibited-beauty

 This reminded me, in less sinister way, of Lea Sautin’s “Through the Paper Window”,  which I viewed in Cardigan. Sautin started with wire and paper models of creatures from the book of Welsh Myth, the Mabinogion then took her models and used photography and woodcuts, dry and photopolymer etching to make the finished piece of art. These are so finely produced as spoke directly to me, as I've always loved these myths; you can read more about them here and here.

Ossian Ward, was interviewed by Amelia Abraham https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ppmxez/art-critic-ossian-ward-amelia-abraham-112 Sep 2 2014, 3:00pm in an article entitled,  Contemporary Art Doesn't Have to Be Pretentious and Confusing…Contemporary art does occasionally shout at you from across the room and it can be provocative, challenging and even scary. I have found myself in rooms kitted out to look like murder scenes, brothels, or a terrorist's stronghold. Confrontational art is certainly one of the ways that artists aim to grab our attentions nowadays…We shouldn't fear the complexity, abstraction, or randomness of contemporary art, but embrace them as reflections of our culture…it is about our reaction and our interaction with a work."How long should I stay? Where do I look? Do I take part?" These are all elements involved in figuring out contemporary art, and they shouldn't be barriers to the enjoyment or understanding of art.

What do you think? How do you see art? Don't forget to let me know.