If you have two hours to spare, spend them watching Ways of Seeing, a four part documentary by John Berger from 1972, ostensibly on how photography has changed the way in which we see art, but moving beyond that to examining the European tradition of oil painting, what its purpose was and how it’s reflected in modern day publicity.
For something itself now fiftytwo years old, from a time when colour television was still a novelty and no such thing as personal computers let alone mobile phones and social media existed, it’s still incredibly relevant. Just that first episode alone, looking at how a painting was changed from a still, silent image rooted to one unique location to something that can be chopped up, moved about, re-contextualised through the ability to photograph and reproduce it, is a revelation. Then in the second episode he takes a punt at how nudes, female nudes, are represented in oil painting: how these are not naked, truthful images of the women they supposedly portray but passive pictures to be consumed by the male owner of the painting. The female figure as a possession to be displayed. And then, echoing what he said in the first episode, that he too uses these painting to send his own messages, he acknowledges the absurdity of his the sole voice on the subject and hands over to a round table of women to discuss this further.
Episode three than looks at the real purpose of the oil painting as a medium, not the lofty ideals ascribed to it, and argues that it is about showing off your possessions as the owner/displayer. That in turn leads to the fourth episode where it juxtapositions publicity and advertisements with the oil painting tradition as a sort of mirror image. If paintings shows the things you already own and you in control of them, ads feed the dream of owning them, the aspiration.
A very heady mix of ideas here and no wonder it had such an impact. It is an interesting rebuttal to the far more traditional view of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969), to which this was in response. Art as a mystical, uplifting activity versus art as a capitalist tool that needs democratisation as much as any other such tool. In this context, the most interesting idea of all may have come from the end of the first episode, after he has argued that images are like words, but:
The images may be like words but there is no dialogue yet. You cannot reply to me. FOR THAT TO BECOME POSSIBLE IN THE MODERN MEDIA OF COMMUNICATION ACCESS TO TELEVISION MUST BE EXTENDED BEYOND IT’S PRESENT NARROW LIMITS.
Fifty years on we got this through social media; now we know that this democratizing dialogue has broken our modern elites’ minds.
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