The Gaze

The Optical• Mirage-like, avoids depiction of three dimensions/hard

outlines• Does not acknowledge its status as a painted object• Unites subjectivity of artistic vision with objectivity of

external world• Opticality function independent of the object seen.

Does not consider the conditions of spectatorship

The Tactile

Physical, extension weights three dimensionality

Demands acknowledgment of physical presence as object world

Tactility implicates the body of the perceiver

Optical Tactile

Michael Fried Art and Objecthood

• Literalist/minimalist art acknowledges the conditions of reception; it has the inauthenticity of theater/acting for an audience

• Associated with tactility and body/matter TACTILE

• True art creates a timeless state – presentness OPTICAL– Associated with opticality and spirit/intellect

TACTILE Spectatorship

One category: The gaze:

• Concerns pleasure, knowledge, the manipulation, desire

• Articulated by Laura Mulvey in the article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and later revised by her and other theorists

Cinematic viewing is an interplay between

Narcissistic identification– Recognition of self in other. For Lacan, this

occurs during the mirror stage – individual strives to live up to ego ideal

Erotic Voyeurism or Scopophilia– Pleasure of looking:

• active– diminishes the threat that it’s object poses to the viewer; guilt of woman discovered and punished

• fetishistic– worship of woman; idealization

• .

To counter these stances, Mulvey advocates

• Acknowledging the presence and materiality of the camera and audience

• Characters, subjects address the viewer

• Altering the conditions of viewing:– Viewers can be seen by those outside

Hollywood 1950s films• Men are shown in dramatic action; they occupy deep

space;men bear the gaze

• Women are shown as objects on display; they do not advance the narrative; women are objects of the gaze; possessions of the gaze

• The treatment of women as objectsis analogous to the way we treat commodities/objects in the 20th century

• Commodity fetishism

• Both kinds of fetishism fill imaginary lacks. Their status as commodities is covered over by a rhetoric that treats them as quasi—religious objects

Picasso Manet

• Suture: how the audience is made unaware of the constructed quality of the gaze

• In cinema, we look through the gaze of another. Our own gaze is denied,– Shot reverse shot places us within the

perceptual space of another

• The gaze has long been feared, from Medusa through Sartre

Lacan’s interpretation

Prelinguistic: mirror identification• Identification with the mirror image causes child to

identify with an external image of itself. (what others see when they look at the child)

• Misidentification – ego split, courts image of itself comes from the outside

Linguistic: desire for completeness through the law of the father

• Split between the eye and the gaze: • gaze desire for self- completion through another. Gaze is the

unattainable object of desire that seems to make the other complete.

• The gaze is the object a that comes from outside• Le petit a is a lure for the spectators desire

Walker Evans’ portrait Sharecroppers Wife