Further Ways of Seeing

John Berger spends alot of time discussing the male gaze in art in Ways of Seeing. Recently I read What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt. It is a novel, whose characters are artists and intellectuals, and there is much insightful writing about art and encountering art, and also in how people talk about it. There is a conversation in the novel about a painting of a nude (a series of paintings acts almost as a recurring character in the book). I think what Erica says adds an angle of insight to the debate.

     "The truth is,...we all have a man and a woman inside us. We're made from a father and a mother, after all. When I'm looking at a beautiful, sexy woman in a picture, I'm always both her and the person who's looking at her. The eroticism comes from the fact that I can imagine I'm him looking at me. You have to be both people or nothing will happen."

Perhaps the idea I glean from this is that the male gaze in art is also shared by the female gaze, and the female nude is, in that sense, both male and female in that it represents desire, nakedness, sexuality, humanity, both for men and women.

As we know, sexuality is a complex blend of object and subject, gaze and being seen, power and passivity, and these are not determined by gender or preference, ie - it's never just one thing, one side, one stance - we experience levels of all of these dynamics in the sexual interplay, and also in our encounters with paintings of nudes.

10th March 2011