WHEN THE LIGHTHOUSE IS DARK BETWEEN FLASHES:

LOOKING AS A REDUCTIVE OR VAST EXPERINCE

MA2 report by Charlotte Thrane, September 2003

Super-Spectator

We are so familiar with seeing, that it takes a leap of imagination to realize that there are problems to be solved. But consider it. We are given tiny distorted upside-down images in the eyes, and we see separate solid objects in surrounding space. From the patterns of stimulation on the retinas we perceive the world of objects, and this is nothing short of a miracle.1

This essay is about looking and its construction. The concept of looking did not use to seem

very complicated. It seemed as straightforward as turning one’s open eyes in a particular

direction and paying attention.

Not long ago a successful curator explained to me that she has become so

experienced in looking at artworks that she now finds it sufficient to glance at them for just

an instant. This made me wonder if looking really is something one can learn to become

good at, like playing an instrument or riding a horse. Being good at something is always

defined according to very specific cultural and historic conventions and limitations. What

this curator seemed to suggest was that she is good at looking at art works because she is

able to reveal and verbalise the true nature or essence of them in a very short time.

Being the best athlete is understood as being physically the strongest, fastest or most

advanced at a certain exercise. Becoming a good athlete demands constant training. One has

to exercise the muscles, the level of fitness, acceleration, speed, endurance, jumping and

finishing. One also has to work on the body’s flexibility, balance and strength as well as the

style of each movement. Becoming a good athlete requires discipline, focus, a controlled

way of living and a strong will. An athlete has specific goals and targets to strive for. In a

result-oriented society sport is presented and consumed in the context of competitions

(games, cups, grand slams, Olympics, tournaments, championships) and so becomes

associated with training hard to deliver an extreme physical performance and demonstrating

it in a specific context. In other words, sports is mainly about comparing oneself to others

(be it individually or as a team) and doing better than them.

Looking does not produce measurable results like sprinting does; giving each

athlete a lapse time that can be compared to that of the opponents. Looking is a fixed

internal and personal experience - not an external performance - for it is not possible to

move from the position inside one’s head, from which one sees the world. Miran Bozovic’s

essay The Man Behind His Own Retina discusses this issue, using as example Hitchcock’s

film Rear Window, in which the mail protagonist Jeff, a sports photographer, has broken his

leg and is forced to stay in his room, overlooking the courtyard and several neighbour’s

windows, for weeks:

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Since Jeff is trapped in a darkened room, in his own eye, he is, strictly speaking, occupying the absolute point of view – the point of view on which he can no longer take another, exterior point of view: from there one can go nowhere; it is simply not possible to step back and observe the point of view from which we have just been looking. The absolute point of view is a point of interiority which can never be externalised, a point from which we always look from the inside out, a point we cannot possible leave, a point from which we are unable to see ourselves but can only observe others – in a word, a point at which we can be nothing but voyeurs.2

Looking cannot be measured or compared or even directly communicated and this is why it

is so difficult, if not impossible, to determine what makes a good viewer or observer. How

can one be good, better or best at something that cannot be compared? Stating that one is

experienced and thereby good at looking, is drawing a parallel between activities that do not

belong in the same realm of things.

The successful curator is successful, not because she is a gifted spectator, but

because she receives institutional recognition from the board of the public gallery where she

works. In front of them she knows how to specify, explain and verify why she likes and

prefers to exhibit the work of one artist to that of another. She is recognised as doing a good

job when a large number of people visit the gallery and she can document how these people

will benefit from their visit, be it in an educational, a personal or a rehabilitating way. Being

good at her job is being someone who can make sure that public and private money spent

produce visible (measurable) results and participation from vulnerable groups in society,

such as children, elderly and homeless people, refugees and low-income families. What the

successful curator might be doing well is finding what she is looking for, and this, I would

insist, is not the same as really seeing something. Her position as curator of a recognised

gallery seems to provide her with the authority to claim that she is an “expert viewer” or a

“super-spectator”, but it is questionable whether such a thing exists.

Looking is seldom recognised as an open-ended sensory and personal experience

but – as shall be shown - has become optimised and normalised in various ways historically

and socially, and now functions primarily as a means of achieving measurable and specific

results and verifying already existing ideas and expectations, be it in the field of art or sports

or at the market place. Looking is potentially both a surprising, multiple, chaotic and vast

experience but is, as I shall argue, most often closed down and reduced by being held in

abeyance to consumerist and result-oriented notions that swiftly translate the visual into

something that is fundamentally – not visual.

By investigating the history and some particular regimes of looking I hope to

demonstrate how vision is often confused with concepts such as consumption, social power

and meaning understood as a linear move from the indefinite to the definite. The language

of visual communication appears to be primarily visual but, as shall be shown, operate

according to a frame of mind that is anything but ocular. Window-shopping seems to be at

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the crux of looking but might be carried out in favour of a capitalist strategy, nursing

(collective rather than personal) notions and desires. The strategy of a narrative, linear

language and the modernist gallery and shop might play a central part in making us look for

what something represents, rather than seeing the thing itself.

An Archaeology of Vision

The definition of a viewer or observer has changed drastically through history, and vision

has been placed in realms as diverse as geometry, mechanics, psychology and physiology.

Briefly investigating and discussing how the position of the viewer has changed historically

might illustrate how (contemporary) notions of vision have been constructed and how we

ended up in what appears to be a visually dominated society, or a society of spectacles. I am

hoping to show how a new set of relations between the body on one hand and forms of

institutional and discursive power on the other redefined the status of an observing subject.

Jonathan Crary has already presented historical developments of vision through the

development of optical devices in his book Techniques of the Observer. I will do a similar

thing, focusing mainly on the development of the camera obscura, since I agree with his

thesis that optical devices can be seen as ‘… sites of both knowledge and power that operate

directly on the body of the individual.’3

More than two thousand years ago, Plato thought of vision as being due not to light

entering, but to particles being shot out of the eyes, spraying surrounding objects. Around

the same time Euclid suggested that the eye was a geometrical point from which rays of

light where shooting out towards objects. These theories were most probably based on

observations of everything going black with closed eyes. Considered as a philosophical

metaphor these early ideas illustrate how humans, interestingly, consider themselves the

centre of the universe and how something experienced inside one’s head is directly applied

to the surrounding environment.

Aristotle understood the basic optical principle of the camera obscura. He viewed

the crescent shape of a partially eclipsed sun projected on the ground through the holes in a

sieve, and through the gaps between leaves of a plane tree. The tenth century Arabian

scholar Alhazen of Basra had a portable tent room for solar observation and gave a full

account of the principle. In 1490 Leonardo da Vinci gave two clear descriptions of the

camera obscura in his notebooks. Many of the first camera obscuras were large rooms like

that illustrated by the Dutch scientist Reinerus Gemma-Frisius in 1544 (fig 2), for use in

observing a solar eclipse.

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Fig 2

Around 1600 the camera obscura was equipped with a lens, making its images bright and

clear enough to be used by artists observing form and colour. The camera obscura was also

developed into a portable box device and thus became a popular drawing tool. In the 17th

and 18th century many artists were aided by the use of the camera obscura. Jan Vermeer,

Canaletto and Francesco Guardi are representatives of this group. In the novel Girl With a

Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier speculates on the events behind Vermeer’s painting. Here,

the year is 1664 and Vermeer is showing his camera obscura to the maid:

‘It is surprising, isn’t it? I was amazed as you the first time my friend showed it to me.’ ‘But why do you look at it, sir, when you can look at your own painting?’ ‘You do not understand.’ He tapped the box. ‘This is a tool. I use it to help me see, so that I am able to make this painting.’ ‘But – you use your eyes to see.’ ’True, but my eyes do not always see everything.’… ‘Tell me Griet,’ he continued, ‘do you think I simply paint what is there in that corner?’ I glanced at the painting, unable to answer. I felt as if I were being tricked. Whatever I answered would be wrong. ‘The camera obscura helps me to see in a different way,’ he explained. ‘To see more of what is there.’4

The science of vision in the seventeenth and eighteenth century was using geometrical

science exploring the mechanics of light and optical transmission and derived all knowledge

from observation and measurement. An ideal of knowledge as a move from the indefinite

towards the definite developed at this time. In science as well as in entertainment and mass

culture, there was an increasing focus on visual aspects and experiences. Chevalier’s story

of Vermeer illustrates a fascination with visual representation that makes the copy of the

original (the image in the camera obscura) seem almost more real than what is seen through

the eye alone. It is interesting to think about the fact that then, as well as now, many people

seem to prefer or find it easier to look at an exact representation of something rather than

observing the thing itself. Umberto Eco once remarked5 that we trust mirrors, glasses,

binoculars and any “prosthesis” that extends the body’s field of sensation, because we

consider them to be registering “truth” and presenting it to us, without translating it. We

imagine in this way, that we can get a glimpse of “how things really are”, from a source that

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is first of all not human and thereby supposedly objective. Preferring the copy to the original

(the appearance to the essence) refers to ideas of the society of the spectacle, which will be

discussed in the chapter regarding the obscenity of the visible.

In the 19th century, with improved lenses that could cast larger and sharper images,

the camera obscura room was invented. It was a combination of entertainment and education

and became very popular at the seaside and in areas of scenic beauty.

Fig 3 Fig 4

Jonathan Crary argues that;

… the camera obscura was not simply an inert and neutral piece of equipment or a set of technical premises to be tinkered with and improved over the years; rather, it was embedded in a much larger and denser organization of knowledge and of the observing subject. Historically speaking, we must recognize how for nearly two hundred years, from the late 1500s to the end of the 1700s, the structural and optical principles of the camera obscura coalesced into a dominant paradigm through which was described the status and possibilities of an observer.6

The camera obscura was the most widely used model for explaining human vision and for

representing the relation of a perceiver and the position of a knowing subject to an external

world. It also stood as a model in rationalist and empiricist thought of how observation leads

to a truthful notion of the world and in this way it represented a philosophical metaphor. The

relationship between the viewer and the world was seen as a fixed relation of

interior/exterior, allowing the viewer to observe from a (physical and psychological)

distance as if one big disembodied eye. Basing all knowledge and empiricist research on

observation introduced a fixation with the visual, an ocular centrism convinced that

observing something thoroughly would provide knowledge and control and thus eventually

enhance human progress.

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Fig 5

In the early nineteenth century Goethe investigated sensations of vision generated entirely

by the body of the viewer. These were mental images such as after images and physiological

colours that could be seen with closed eyes. Mental images were considered to be solely

created by and thus belonging to the body of the observer. Goethe’s studies were

physiological in nature and represented a fundamental break from the science of the

seventeenth and eighteenth century, which had not taken into account the body of the

viewer. The viewer now became the site and producer of his or her own visual experience,

not just a passive receiver, and therefore became an object of investigation. The status of the

observing subject was transformed and had suddenly become visible. Subjective vision had

been taken out of disembodied relations of the camera obscura and relocated in the human

body. The distinction between internal sensation and external signs became blurred, and

notions of visual truth (founded on the camera obscura) were challenged.

All this happened at a time of rapid industrial and cultural progress and

development and an expanding jumble of images, commodities, and stimulation. New

modes of circulation, communication, production, consumption and rationalization all

demanded and shaped a new kind of observer-consumer, which will be examined in the next

chapter. Crary argues that the “observer” was indeed composed at this time:

Thus knowledge was accumulated about the constitutive role of the body in the apprehension of a visible world, and it rapidly became obvious that efficiency and rationalization in many areas of human activity depended on information about the capacities of the human eye. One result … was to expose the idiosyncrasies of the “normal” eye … imposing a normative vision on the observer.7

Crary also remarks that the observer is actually just one effect of the construction of a new

kind of subject or individual in the nineteenth century, although the history of the observer

is not reducible to changing technical and mechanical practices any more than to changing

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forms of artworks and visual representation. For Baudrillard, one of the crucial

consequences of the bourgeois political revolutions at the end of the 1700s was the

ideological force that animated the myths of the rights of man, the right to equality and

happiness. In the nineteenth century, for the first time, observable proof became needed in

order to demonstrate that happiness and equality had in fact been maintained. Happiness had

to be measurable in terms of objects and signs, something that would be evident to the eye

in terms of visible criteria. The reliance on observation and measurable proof through

modernity developed a culture of opticality that trusted nothing more than it trusted visible

results.

In the late twentieth century, the superimposition and critique of notions of

modernity led to the emergence of the so-called postmodern. Writers and critics have

challenged and fragmented the modernist fixation with opticality in many different ways,

focusing mainly on the status of the viewer’s body and psyche. R.L.Gregory’s Eye and

Brain: the Psychology of Seeing from 1978, insisted that eye and brain are irrevocably

connected and seeing is the same as perceiving and understanding. Jonathan Crary has

written extensively on constructs of visuality and separation of the senses, insisting that

problems of vision are fundamentally questions about the status of the body and operation of

social power. In a lot of her writing Rosalind Krauss has made a stand against modernist

fixation with opticality, arguing that ‘[y]ou cannot concentrate on vision (or the act of

capturing something) without siting vision in the body and positioning the body within the

grip of desire.’8 Krauss argues for recognising psychoanalytic aspects (following traditions

of Lacan and Freud) as integrated in the viewer and claims (especially in The Optical

Unconscious), that unconscious desires have been repressed throughout modernity. She has

chosen what she calls ‘… a psychophysiological approach’9, which primarily questions the

opticality of modernism in art that is often associated with the writing of Clement

Greenberg, of whom she was once a student and follower. Brian O’Doherty is a peer of

Krauss who investigated what the highly controlled context of the modernist gallery does to

the art object and to the viewing subject, and how this context devours the object, becoming

it. He compared the modernist gallery to religious buildings, chambers of unchanging,

eternal display, appearing untouched by time, out of time, beyond time, designed to

eliminate awareness of the outside world. By censoring out the world of social variation, the

modernist gallery or white cube promotes its own sense of one sole reality, its own

endurance and thus its eternal rightness. In the white cube ‘we give up our humanness and

become the cardboard Spectator with the disembodied Eye.’10 The modernist gallery is

criticised for turning the viewing subject into a “viewing- machine”, devoid of humanness.

Michael Fried, another peer of Krauss, Crary and O’Doherty, has also written

comprehensively and critically on modernist ideas. Some of his early writing (highly

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informed by modernist ideas) will be discussed in the chapter concerning privileged

instants.

It seems as if issues of vision and visuality have had increasing precedence

scientifically, socially and culturally since the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Empiricist fondness for observation and measurable proof, as well as cultural and scientific

fascination with optical devices and technical possibilities, have played a central role in

forming the modern perception of the self and developing a collective fixation with vision.

These tendencies are – as I shall argue – closely linked with the development of

consumerism and capitalism. The autonomisation of sight, occurring in many different

domains in the nineteenth century (discussed in the following chapter), was a historical

condition for the rebuilding of an observer fitted for the tasks of “spectacular” consumption.

Not only did the empirical isolation of vision allow its quantification and homogenisation

but it also enabled new objects of vision (whether commodities, photographs, or the act of

perception itself) to assume a mystified and abstract identity, sundered from any relation to

the observer’s position within a cognitively unified field. What entered the collective

consciousness was an inherently consumerist mode of perception and communication, based

on visible proof.

The Shaping of the Observer-Consumer

But almost simultaneous with this final dissolution of a transcendent foundation for vision emerges a plurality of means to recode the activity of the eye, to regiment it, to heighten its productivity and to prevent its distraction. Thus the imperatives of capitalist modernization, while demolishing the field of classical vision, generated techniques for imposing visual attentiveness, rationalizing sensation, and managing perception. … Once vision became located in the empirical immediacy of the observer’s body, it belonged to time, to flux, to death.11

In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin observed, quoted and reflected on the objects and

events – i.e. the new use of mirrors, glass and steel, the introduction of artificial lighting, the

architecture, railroads, arcades, panoramas, world exhibitions, art and wax museums,

botanical gardens, fashion, photography, advertising, brothels, casinos, crowds and streets -

of nineteenth century Paris and used his studies to map out how the observer in that century

was composed. He described and exemplified in numerous ways how these places and

activities for the modern man and woman were designed and constructed with the sole

purpose of directing the consumer’s attention, desires and actions. Presumably people in

Paris felt as if they had access to all the choice and freedom in the world, living in a city

where everything around them was competing to get their attention. Benjamin’s (detached)

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observations illustrate how capitalist modernisation is supposedly offering advantages and

luxuries to the masses, but is in fact structured according to specific agendas and with the

sole purpose of creating observer-consumers.

Most of the Paris arcades were built in the fifteen years following 1822. The first

conditions for their development were a boom in the textile trade and an increase in

industrial mass-production. The architecture and design of the arcade was far from arbitrary.

Fig 6

Building the arcades as glass-roofed corridors with shops on both sides, the boundary

between indoor and outdoor decreased. Potential customers circulated no longer in front of

or outside the shops, but found themselves almost automatically in their interior, having

entered the arcade. As an alternative to streets, arcades excluded distractions such as traffic

and bad weather and were perceived as offering a welcome protection from the noise, the

cold and the wet of the outdoors.

By displaying the great variety of everything that could be bought, all in one space,

the arcade extracted the overwhelming chaos of visual impressions of the “real” world and

came to function as a perfected, unified, cleaner and therefore more desirable version of the

well-known. Arcades were a central part of a developing modernist, utopian longing for a

clean, unified and efficient world. The extensive use of plate glass enhanced the impression

of all goods being shown in one space, thus giving the customer the feeling of entering a

coherent world, an easily overviewed and in many ways more appealing world than the one

outside the arcade. Within one apparently uninterrupted space, isolated from the world

outside the shop, dream worlds were created, transporting customers to distant places.

The main principle of what was later to become the department store was to let

floors and shops form one single, open space, so that they could ‘…be taken in, so to speak,

‘at a glance.’’12 The level at which a shop or event offered visual access to everything in

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every way at any time, determined its success. Customers flocked to the brightly lit and

sumptuously decorated shop windows that opened up towards the street, whereas the old-

fashioned, dark shops with few or no windows had hardly any customers and were forced to

adhere to the trend or close down. Benjamin describes how in the nineteenth century, the

use of glass, metal and mirrors was all about enhancing transparency and offering full visual

access. Shop windows became central, because they initiated contact between shop and

buyer and were expected to represent all of what was being offered in the shop. The concept

of window-shopping was introduced and recognised as an activity on its own right, and the

difference between consumer and desired goods, between looking and consuming was

rapidly decreasing. The direct translation of the French word for window-shopping “l’echer

les vitrines” is “licking the windows”. The underlying notion of consumption and display

relating to the bodily, the sensuous and the sexual does not become any more obvious than

this.

The Parisian shopkeeper of the nineteenth century made two discoveries that

revolutionised the world of shopping: the display of large stocks of goods on the premises

and the male employee. ‘The display, which leads him to deck out his shop from floor to

ceiling and to sacrifice three hundred yards of material to garland his façade like a flagship;

and the male employee, who replaces the seduction of man by woman … with the seduction

of woman by man, which is psychologically more astute. Together with these comes the

fixed price, the known and non-negotiable cost.13 Shops were indeed at the time referred to

as “street-galleries” or “street-salons”14 and Balzac called them a ‘…great poem of

display’.15

Emile Zola’s novel The Ladies’ Paradise, recounts the development of the

department store. The store is here a symbol of capitalism, of the modern city, and of the

bourgeois family; it is emblematic of consumer culture and the changes in sexual attitudes

and class relations taking place at the end of the century. Octave Mouret, a fictional store

owner-manager representing the revolutionary (and brutal) school of window dressing that

dominated the last two decades of the nineteenth century, masterfully exploits the desires of

his female customers. In his private life as much as in business he is a great seducer. The

women visiting the store feel the awakening of their desires and respond by engaging in the

commodification and consumption of what is on display. Simultaneously the women

themselves are commodified. Watching a salesman attempt ‘to put some blue silks next to

grey and yellow ones, then stepping back to see how the colour blended’, Mouret

intervened: ‘But why are you trying to make it easy on the eye?’ he said. ‘Don’t be afraid to blind them … Here! Some red! Some green! Some yellow!’ He had taken the pieces of material, throwing them together, crumpling them, making dazzling combinations

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with them … He used to say that customers should have sore eyes by the time they left the shop.16

The endless, the excessive and the superabundance were all central methods and strategies

of the modern shop. Fireworks of colours, shapes, material and texture were displayed with

the intent to arouse, seduce and overwhelm, and thereby prevent potential customers from

being able to resist what was on offer. The relationship between sales clerk and customer

was in fact a very aggressive one, which in many ways adhered to already existing social

and sexual power-relations between women and men.

The arcade is a street of lascivious commerce only; it is wholly adapted to arousing desires. Because in this street the juices slow to a standstill, the commodity proliferates along the margins and enters into fantastic combinations, like the tissue in tumors …17

In the writing of Zola and Benjamin several examples suggest that modernisation and

consumption are closely linked with the body, its physicality and sensuality. Comparing the

commercial development of Paris with a spreading disease, using words like “lascivious”

and “juices”, and describing a salesman in such a way that he most of all resembles a polite

rapist (someone who takes advantage of and exploits women financially and sexually),

suggest a close relationship between material desire and sickness; between sex and

perversion, all with the human body at its centre.

Benjamin compared the general fascination and admiration for arcades with that of

panoramas and displays in world exhibitions and wax museums, arguing that ‘… not only

does one see everything, but one sees it in all ways.’18 Showing everything in every way,

share obvious similarities with pornography; the genre supposed to show everything, to hide

nothing and register “all” with an objective camera, offering it to our view. Slavoj Žižek

describes the spectator of pornography as someone who is ‘forced a priori to occupy a

perverse position.’19 What is perverse is that the positions of the viewed object and the gaze

become messed up. The spectator comes to occupy the position of the object. The real

subjects are the actors on the screen trying to rouse us sexually, while we, the spectators, are

reduced to ‘a paralysed object-gaze’. Another problem of pornography, according to Žižek,

is the way is goes too far and thus misses what is concealed in “the normal”, non-

pornographic love scene. ‘If we proceed too hastily “to the point,” if we show “the thing

itself,” we necessarily loose what we were after.’20 As soon as we show “it all,” or “go to the

end,” what we initially desired can no longer be taken seriously. It becomes depressing,

disappointing and vulgar. When there is too much of something, and it is too loud, too

obvious and too cheap, it violates that otherwise ‘fine and sensitive feeling’21 and becomes

“bad taste”.

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The arcades, events and objects of 19th century Paris were attempts to create

ordered environments that would appear easily perceived and overviewed, and would be

successful in a commercial sense by not allowing any room for contemplation or access to

the individual objects, by practically overwhelming the viewer. Everything seemed directed

towards creating a permanent state of distraction, a constant series of small shocks and

surprises that pulled and regimented the vision and thus the body of the consumer from one

attraction to the next.22

The Obscenity of the Visible

For the first time in history, with the establishment of department stores, consumers begin to consider themselves a mass. (Earlier it was scarcity which taught them that.) Hence, the circus-like and theatrical element of commerce is quite extraordinarily heightened.23

Perception for Benjamin was a very mobile thing. He made clear how modernity subverts

even the possibility of a contemplative beholder, since there is never pure access to a single

object. Under the conditions of modernity, vision is always multiple, adjacent to and

overlapping with other objects, desires and vectors. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

described modernisation as a constant process of “deterritorialisation”, a making abstract

and interchangeable of bodies, objects and relations.24 Modernisation is a process by which

capitalism uproots and makes mobile that which is grounded, clears away and obliterates

that which impedes circulation, and makes exchangeable that which is singular. This applies

as much to bodies, signs, images, languages, kinship relations, religious practices, and

nationalities as it does to commodities, wealth and labour power. Modernisation becomes a

ceaseless and self-perpetuating creation of new needs, new consumption, and new

production.

Living in a modern society is being confronted with so many impressions (attractions

shouting from shop fronts and windows, from posters and billboards, in newspapers and

illustrated magazines, moving on the sides of buses and on trams and on signs carried by

sandwich-board men, inscribed on buildings and even projected into the sky at night) that

they begin to erase each other. We have developed into a society of flaneurs; a self-

perpetuating mass of mobile consumers of a ‘…ceaseless succession of illusory commodity-

like images.’25 What seems the most problematic consequence of this condition, is hoping or

believing that full visual access provides access to the “true” nature of things and makes the

individual stay in charge of his or her life, when it might not be as simple as that.

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Theatre, film, circus, advertising, exhibitions and displays are all signified as being

staged visual representations of, rather than actual parts of, lived experience. Visual re-

enactments of the “real” function like mirrors; what they depict seems familiar but also

distant. In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (disapprovingly) describes the origins and

some of the consequences of the spectacle:

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.26

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but described here as ‘a social relation among

people, mediated by images.’27 The more the individual is exposed to visual representations,

the less it actually lives its own life and the less it understands itself. Eventually the

individual grows accustomed to recognising itself solely in representations. In the society of

the spectacle, representations themselves become objects of perception. The gestures of an

individual are no longer his/her own but belong to anyone else who represents them to

him/her. The spectacle takes over every space, so that the individual belongs – feels at home

– nowhere.

Baudrillard claimed that reality itself (separate from the signs of it) had vanished in

the information-saturated, media-dominated contemporary world. This condition he dubbed

“hyper-realism”. The hyper-real world of simulation is one where representation and the

reproduction of reality are no longer distinguishable from so-called reality itself. Baudrillard

remarked that what used to be the “society of the spectacle”, had become the “obscene

ecstasy of communication”.

Obscenity begins precisely when there is no more spectacle, no more scene, when all becomes transparence and immediate visibility, when everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information and communication.28

The obscene is to be understood as that which puts an end to every representation. It is no

longer the traditional obscenity of what is hidden, repressed, forbidden or obscure, ‘… it is

the obscenity of the visible, of the all-too-visible, of the more-visible-than-the-visible.’29

Obscenity, in this sense, is easily paralleled with Benjamin’s reference to malady as

inextricably linked with consumerism and bodily desire, marking the perversity of the

impulses of modern man and woman.

When there is no longer any stage, there is no distance between what is real and

what is imitation or representation. Simulacrum is all there is. The space is now so saturated,

so full of voices that want to be heard, that the individual cannot distinguish its own desires.

Impressions erase each other, so that one instinctively resists taking in anything. In both the

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case of Debord and Baudrillard, the individual becomes increasingly passive and less free in

a society that is dominated by visual representations. The individual is not unique any

longer; it becomes part of a collective cultural and social consciousness in which most

people share the same images and ideas. Nothing is mine; all that I am and all that I desire

come from somewhere else.

To illustrate this, I have chosen an example from a film, which is – ironically – not

part of my own experience but yet another visual representation… In Vanilla Sky, a remake

of Alejandro Amenabar’s Abre Los Ojes [trans. Open Your Eyes], the male protagonist

David Aames is a rich, beautiful and selfish bachelor until he meets his dream girl and

becomes involved in an accident that disfigures his face. As an escape from what has now

become a painful and lonely life, David decides to commit suicide, have a company keep his

body in a freezer, and live a continuous “lucid dream” where everything is perfect, having

been designed by his imagination. In the dream his face looks attractive and he lives happily

with the dream girl under beautiful Monet-like skies (from his mother’s favourite painting).

But things go terribly wrong – as they do in films – and David is asked to choose between

resuming “real” life 150 years late or return to his lucid dream. At this point, in conversation

with technical assistance on the roof of a skyscraper, he realises how his lucid dreams were

created:

And you sculpted your lucid dream out of the iconography of your youth. An album cover that once moved you [image of romantic situation with David and the dream girl walking down a deserted street one cold morning, fading to the cover of Bob Dylan’s album The Freewheelin’] … a movie you saw once late at night that showed you what a father could be like [scenes from an old black & white movie with Clark Gable and a young boy sitting together, sentimental music playing. David together with the sympathetic, fatherly psychiatrist of his lucid dream, to whom he tells his story]… or what love could be like [image of poster from Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, footage of a smiling and laughing Jeanne Moreau, the dream girl smiling and laughing in a similar way].

David chooses to go back to his “real” life, which offers a disfigured face, no money in the

bank and the dream girl long gone, and he throws himself off the skyscraper as to leave the

dream state. As he approaches the ground, leaving behind his former life and dreams,

entering the new, he sees images of his past life appear before him. The majority of the

images he sees, representing his memories and experiences, are images from popular culture

or mediated images in the form of private photographs and footage. He sees scenes from

cartoons, films, home movies and music videos, a drawing from a children’s book, book

covers, album covers, photographs of Martin Luther King, Frank Sinatra, Bruce

Springsteen, himself as a child, and footage of what appears to be friends and family. He

sees glimpses of film posters, the lips of his dream girl, the moment before the accident, an

old picture of Judy Garland, New York city and a Monet painting. David’s visual memory is

14

presumably almost identical to that of other people of his generation and culture (who shares

the iconography of his time), and this makes him a product of his situation, rather than a

creator of it. His personality does not seem to have had much affect on this final internal

film; it is as if he is being subjected to it rather than having composed it from personal

experience. Having lived his life in a modern, Western culture of representation, David has

in fact had very little personal experience.

Another example of a personal experience becoming confused with a mediated or

collective one is the difference between witnessing a public incident (such as a rail accident

or a terrorist bombing) and seeing it on the news later on. The experienced event is

something quite different from the represented event, and it is on television that, ultimately,

the event happens (is most likely remembered and perceived).

In Rhetoric of the Image, Roland Barthes discussed the semiology of images,

aiming to understand the overall structure of the image. He described three levels of

messages in images; the literal, the denoted and the connoted image. The literal is the

immediate and linguistic message. ‘It is at the level of the literal message that the text of the

image replies – in a more or less direct, more or less partial manner – to the question: what

is it?’30 The denoted is the perceptual, literal message; a message without a (cultural) code,

an “innocent” state of the image, cleared of its connotations. The connoted is the second

meaning, a symbolic, iconic, culturally coded message, suggesting something in addition to

the main meaning. It arises from experience and the information attached to it. Barthes

claimed that the viewer of the image receives the perceptual (denoted) and the cultural

(connoted) message at the same time; and that this confusion in reading is the function of

the mass image. The strategy behind the design of the nineteenth century arcades and a

culture of mediated images is quite similar; in both contexts the eye of the viewer-consumer

is sought imposed upon, confused, overwhelmed and regimented.

Vanilla Sky is about the place where the real meets the simulated, and about how

the imagined or dreamed and the real overlap and become indistinguishable. David is

wearing a mask (a grotesquely simplified, pale, emotionless imitation of his face)

throughout most of the film, even though he is unsure whether his face has in fact been

disfigured or if he dreamt or imagined that it was. He has lost the ability to tell the

difference between what is real and what is simulated. The world of modern experience

seems dominated by images, signs and simulacra; reality becomes inseparable from the

codes of representation through which it is constituted.

The world is dominated by its phantasmagorias –this, to make use of Baudelaire’s term, is “modernity”. 31

15

The Visual and the Verbal

Today, at the level of mass communications, it appears that the linguistic message is indeed present in every image: as title, caption, accompanying press article, film dialogue, comic strip balloon. Which shows that it is not very accurate to talk of a civilization of the image – we are still, and more than ever, a civilization of writing, writing and speech continuing to be the full terms of the informational structure.32

What appeared to be a society of spectacle, of visual simulations, might instead be a society

focused on linguistic messages and information. If this is the case, visual analysis and our

understanding of images might rely on a language model that closes down and simplifies the

experience of the visual.

In Exploring the Modern, John Jervis draws a distinction between two cultures or

worlds; a “culture of narrative”, or a “depth culture”, on the one hand, and a “culture of the

image”, or “surface culture”’, on the other.33 In the first, priority is given to written and

spoken language; to discourse. In the world of narrative, word counts far more than image,

narrative is superior to the visual. Life is considered a horizontal event, and a narrative is a

temporal structure, most often based on a linear idea of history and time, where the secret is

revealed at the end of the story. A linear, narrative culture ensures access to “truth”, which

is in some sense otherwise hidden. The second world is a world of images and appearances.

In this world picture has priority over text. The task of language is to serve the image, not to

direct or explain it. Time is no longer linear, it is rather the time of the present; time loses its

depth, and fragments into images that can be endlessly recycled in an eternal present. One

does not have to dig deep for truth; ‘There is nothing underneath or behind the image and

hence there is no hidden truth to be revealed.’34 As images are multiple, so is “truth”, in the

world of images. The whole point of the image here is to circulate. In the image culture,

crossing boundaries becomes more important than maintaining them.

The first world, then, both rests on, and reproduces, certain essential distinctions:

distinctions between reality and appearance, truth and ideology or mystification, world and

representation, authenticity and artifice. The narratives that this world constructs enable us

to learn the secret, get to the truth, and control the world. In the second world, however,

these distinctions become relativised, or collapse altogether. Perhaps the two different

worlds cannot exist separately; no one world can replace the other; maybe the two are to be

understood as opposing ideas that struggle to dominate the construction of vision, as one is

being superimposed on the other.

Benjamin’s the Arcades Project is an assemblage or montage of several hundreds

quotations, comments and reiterating thoughts. It is one of those books that does not prove

rewarding read from beginning to end; for that its structure is far too fragmented. One might

say that The Arcades Project is a piece of writing which – unlike more conventional books –

16

belongs in the second world, the image world, where time is not linear, but multiple and

fragmented.

The transcendence of the conventional book form would go together, in this case, with the blasting apart of pragmatic historicism – grounded, as this always is, on the premise of a continuous and homogeneous temporality. Citation and commentary might then be perceived as intersecting at a thousand different angles, setting up vibrations across the epochs of recent history, so as to effect “the cracking open of natural teleology.” And all this would unfold through the medium of hints or “blinks” – a discontinuous presentation deliberately opposed to traditional modes of argument.35

The Arcades Project can be understood as a continuous unfolding of “blinks”, in between

which there is darkness, so that each glimpse or flicker seems separated from the previous

one, each one representing its own angle. The blinks are not connected and do not form a

continuous, linear whole; they exist separately or as a separated, disconnected mass. They

do not move in one direction but along various tracks of which each one overlaps,

contradicts or directly opposes the others. They do not provide full access or the promise of

a concluding answer; rather they co-exist with the darkness between them and appear

similar to the rapid glance we see between each blink of the eye.

The Arcades Project demonstrates that the structure of writing as a language is not

inherently temporal and linear, but that choosing between the two worlds or cultures

depends on attitude rather than on a supposed fundamental difference between word and

image. Looking at an image (or the world) from a point of view of narrative or linguistic is

to be looking for a beginning and an end in a place where the two might not exist. It is to be

looking for what something means or represents, rather than seeing the thing itself. In this

way the presence of words becomes reductive, for they provide a promise of one explicit

meaning which will eventually be revealed as a final “truth”. This way of looking does not

allow the image to hold any secrets or blinks, rather it allows the spectator to maintain a

feeling of control while engaging in a highly reductive activity. An inherent notion of a

consumerist mode of communication (the looking-for-something) is that all modes of

address (words and images) are “directed” and bearer of some form of “message”, thus

illustrating something else.

By translating visual experience into a formalised language (which is structured by

a set of rules, in this case exemplified by expectations of a final truth), it can be evaluated

and compared. This system of evaluation is similar to judging an athlete by the way his or

her movements are being described verbally, or assessing the performance of a musician or

the artistic impression of a film solely based on another person’s review. Translating visual

experience into a linear and temporal unfolding is literally to change it into something else.

17

Privileged instants

Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events.36

Actuality might be understood as the thing itself; not what is behind or next to it. George

Kubler explains flashes of light (in between darkness) as delayed, old and weak “signals”

that emerge as past actions. The perception of a signal happens “now”, but its impulse and

its transmission happened “then”. ‘The nature of a signal is that its message is neither here

nor now, but there and then.’37 A signal is projected onto the present, but it is not part of the

present itself. Signals are not actual; only the darkness between them is. The nature of

actuality seems to be such that it can never be known directly, for we cannot fully sense an

event until after it has taken place and has become history. The actual is something

ungraspable that slips through time and through our hands. In many ways actuality is like

“blinks” that travel along numerous intertwined paths.

Gilles Deleuze introduces the idea of the “privileged instant” in his notes on cinema.

In his thesis on movement, Deleuze (analysing Bergson) suggests a fundamental difference

between one continuous Whole and a multiplicity of instants. Privileged instants are also

called “poses”, because they demonstrate something that represents the essence of a

Whole.38

In the essay Art and Objecthood, Michael Fried criticised minimal art (which he

named literalist art) for being “theatrical”. He based his argument on the assumption that

minimalist art is mainly preoccupied with time; with the duration of the experience of the

viewer. This preoccupation is paradigmatically “theatrical” and marks a difference between

literalist work and modernist painting and sculpture. Fried claimed that the experience of the

latter has no duration, because at every moment the work itself is ‘wholly manifest.’39 This

full manifestation or presentness allows a sense of

… instantaneousness: as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it.40

What here comes across is conviction of the existence of privileged instants, at which all the

pieces of the puzzle come together and from a united actuality or truth. Fried assumes that

such an instant exists and that “someone” is in fact capable of recognising it. Fried,

following other modernist thinkers such as Greenberg, insists that ‘everything can be seen’,

18

in other words that there exists some form of truth or actuality that can be revealed and

experienced by the right person in the right context.

The privileged instant might offer an explanation to why someone would call

themselves an expert viewer, implying that they see more or see deeper than most people.

Seeing everything as one continuous whole, allows one to make sense of it easier, just as

homogenising one’s experience of the world makes perception a less chaotic activity. While

“normal” people are believed to perceive one big mass, the privileged expert viewer

understands how to decipher the mass into its constituting parts and expose the important

instants. The successful curator’s definition of her abilities as viewer is closely connected to

notions of temporality and linear narrative; she argues that finding it sufficient to look at an

artwork for just an instant indicates her abilities as “expert viewer”. Not only is she an

expert viewer by the way she understands how to find the privileged instants and get to the

core of the thing; she is an expert of experts by the way she confidently and immediately

decodes what she sees. Finding it sufficient to look at something for an instant in order to

decode or read it is regarded as more advanced than scrutinising it thoroughly.

People like the notorious curator imply that they like to see themselves as belonging

to the group of the chosen few, who can decipher those all-important privileged instants and

expose the “true” nature of things. Only the professional, the connoisseur, the grown-up, the

literate and the aesthete can perform specialist viewing of this kind. The chosen few seem to

be able to grasp the ungraspable and see light when the lighthouse – to the rest of us – seems

dark between flashes.

Framework

Neither “blinks”, hints, image worlds, immediate worlds nor the instant of darkness between

flashes readily offer to help us get hold of actuality, for they are all inherently ungraspable

and mobile. Ironically, actuality (truth, certainty, authenticity) which seems constantly

desired, exists only as an in-between and is therefore out of reach, continuously refusing to

become well-known.

Placing something in relation to something else or in a familiar context, allows one to

get to know it. The familiar can be controlled, unlike the unknown or unfamiliar which

seems a constant threat. Seeing things as continuous is to place them in context, put them

behind glass or frame them in order to make sense of them and control them. To frame

something is to adhere to a fundamental idea of linear narrative, eventually reaching a final

solution. Umberto Eco’s meditation on prosthesis’ as lenses registering and presenting

19

“truth” to us, might also have to do with what is here referred to as framing. We are in a

sense trying to present what we see, objectively and unmediated to ourselves.

For many, the clarity and transparency of glass express the values and virtues of

modern art and life. The idea of being modern, in a phrase, is to show your paintings behind

glass. The increasing use of plate glass and mirrors in nineteenth century Paris illustrates the

modernist longing for unity, clarity and efficiency that led to an enhancement of visual

access and display. The modernist gallery and shop window are two obvious examples of

how placing something within a frame, makes it appear clearer, unified and thus less

threatening. Displaying and gaining full visual access might be an attempt to get to the core

and get hold of some form of truth or actuality. What is framed and reflected is seen and

thus potentially clarified and understood. But the frame often become far more elaborate

than the work of art itself.

As an example, the clean, streamlined architecture of MOMA represented a break

with the surrounding rundown and shabby neighbourhoods of New York, and ‘set up an

opposition between a present still haunted by a backward, Victorian past and a future of

clarity, rationality, efficiency, and functionality…’41 The building came to illustrate utopian

modernist ideals, by the way its clear, simple lines pointed towards a promised future and

symbolised the exaltation of a technological future.

The museum interior was turned into antiseptic, laboratory-like spaces – enclosed, isolated, artificially illuminated and apparently neutral environments in which viewers could study works of art displayed as so many isolated specimens.42

The most important purpose of the white cube, as O’Doherty pointed out, is to appear as a

neutral space, which then promotes its own sense of one sole truth and its eternal rightness.

The modernist gallery indeed re-enacts the rituals of a culture or world of narrative and

linear temporality, by arguing from the indefinite to the definite, presenting its own version

as the “proper” one. Isolating and ensuring full visual access to artefacts makes them appear

fully manageable. Glass is a great metaphor for this tendency; it eliminates both sound,

smell and tactility.

Glass is also by some considered ‘a technology of desire. By staging a constant

interplay of proximity and distance, glass keeps desire in play by refusing to deliver what

the consumer wants. “Look but don’t touch” is the motto describing the foreplay of the

designing merchant.’43 The typical shop window has an appealing and seducing effect that is

very much like the one of the modernist gallery. A window display presents a small, unified

version of the world, a version that does not invite doubt or speculation, but beguilingly

confirms and exhibits a rather simplified and often highly romanticised account of the

world. In the world of the window display, everything appears easily accessible,

20

straightforward and cheerful. No signs of complications, potential conflicts and doubts are

present in the wonder-world of the shop window. In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the female

protagonist and shop-a-holic Holly Golightly explains to her best friend Paul how she finds

refuge in going to Tiffany’s department store to look at beautiful things when she gets “the

mean reds”: ‘”The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid and you don’t know what

you’re afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?”’ … ”When I get it the only that does any

good is to jump into a cab and go to Tiffany’s. Calms me down right away.” … “If [only] I

could find a real life place to make me feel like Tiffany's … ”’

Framing is an apparently useful device but also, as I am arguing, a limiting one. The

tendency to contextualise and represent is apparent in a culture that is truth-seeking in its

visuality, since framing allows a conclusion to be made within the frame. If there was no

frame, how could there be a sense of closure? The consumer-observer is a product of an

urban (modern) environment and is someone who has become accustomed dealing with an

increasing circulation of visual stimuli and communication. In order to stay on top of the

constant flow of what is being offered and imposed, looking becomes like a reflex

attempting to penetrate the subject, quickly emptying it for its apparently “true” content

(once again, think of the super-spectator; the curator).

Fig 7

R.L.Gregory describes the human system of perception mainly in relation to the brain and

the nervous system, and thus compares the act of looking with a physical or psychological

reflex:

Perception is … seldom ambiguous: we can live by trusting it. Fortunately these ambiguous figures [optical illusions, see fig 7] are not typical objects. Ambiguous figures put our perceptual system at a curious disadvantage: because they give no clue of which bet to make, and so it never settles for one bet. But the great advantage of an active, searching-for-truth system of this kind is that it can often function in the absence of strictly adequate information by postulating alternative realities.44

21

Written in the late twentieth century, it is significant how Gregory’s ideas resemble

seventeenth and eighteenth century mode of thought, in which scientific discoveries and

observations were believed to reveal “truths”. To describe the perceptual system as a

“searching-for-truth system” is curiously closely linked to Newtonian ideas of an ultimate

truth that can be revealed to humans and then quantified (as illustrated in fig 5). Claiming

that the perceptual system is seldom ambiguous and that there in fact exists ‘strictly

adequate information’ seems so dated that it is hard to believe in the argument as genuine. A

“searching-for-truth system” is none the less closely linked to the idea of looking as a reflex

or an act that instinctively aims to decode and strip bare its subject. The modern,

consumerist mode of looking suddenly seems outdated and inappropriate.

A vast experience

Seeing the world in glimpses or “blinks” is an altogether chaotic experience. It seems very

close to the idea of “mental fluttering”:

… I would like to tell you about a children’s book I once read. In this book, a swan asks a butterfly how to flutter. The butterfly replies: “First you have to let your thoughts flutter, then you do it yourself”. “Like this,” says the butterfly, “You think about honey, mmmm yummy honey, then go straight to bark and then hippo, duckweed, a stool, sand, scissors, roses – it doesn’t matter what, just as long as you always think of something else the moment you think of something…” The swan learned how to be skittish, to be fuzzy, to give up wanting to know things for sure. This mental fluttering is actually my way of working. It’s very close to looking. For me, looking is nothing like analysing, which is generally just talking about things with the benefit of hindsight.45

To think about something else the moment you think about something is to avoid attempting

to understand or form opinions about it. It is to accept what appears without passing

judgement on or making sense of it, and ultimately it results in every element or blink being

equally important or unimportant.46 Mental fluttering is acceptance of an unpredictable,

multiple and contradicting condition rather than one of attempted control and mastery. It is

to enter a state where there is no linear connection between elements, and no sense of

progression and closure. Mental fluttering is a conscious refusal to look for something

behind or beyond the image, and to be looking at the image instead. When an image or

experience is accompanied by linguistic information, certain aspects are consequentially

highlighted. But linguistic meaning cannot exhaust the image’s ineffable richness.

When you are looking at a work of art, you always see so many things at the same time. That’s what’s special about vision… Looking can be a vast experience. But the

22

moment you start talking about a work of art, you have to make choices. You can’t discuss everything at once. Talking is like analysing. You have to start somewhere, choosing one aspect of the experience you had while looking at that work of art …47

The individual living in nineteenth century Paris, and the consumer-observer living in the

society of the spectacle, came to exercise a mode of vision that was inherently not visual,

but based on consumerist, modernist and narrative or linear ideals. Pointing a critique at

these modes of looking is not simple, and suggesting alternative ways of keeping vision an

open and multiple experience seems even more complicated. Fine art is first of all a visual

language. It is a mode of expression and communication which allows for contemplation,

potentially allowing the viewer to become present with the work and look at it without

having to search for answers or meanings. Of course, the field of art is as complex and

divided as any other field, and it would be erroneous to claim that various interpretations,

readings of and meanings about art were even remotely comparable. It would also be a

mistake to claim that art can solve the problems inherent to the construct that is looking. Art

can only suggest alternative ways of looking, by way of its “uselessness” (its inherent

capability of evading purpose and meaning).

Although problems of looking in this essay were introduced within the field of art

(by the example of the curator), they might potentially be resolved or dealt with through art

as well. To counterbalance notions of looking that are anything but looking, it might be

useful to consider works of art that appear to be sole exercises in the act of looking. Bearing

in mind the irony of adding linguistic information to images, I thought I might add a few

words to an artwork…

Fig 8

Weather Forecast is a film installation by Dutch artist Marijke van Warmerdam. A

freestanding bathtub stands alone in a misty, window-less, domestic room, which could be a

bedroom or a living room. As soon as the mist has lifted the sun breaks through, it starts to

23

rain, to thunder, and then all of a sudden an iceberg falls into the bath: numerous different

weather conditions in six minutes. The image of a square, four-paned window of light is

thrown onto one of the red-painted walls and travels in quick pace across the room. The

movements of the camera confirm that this is in no way a “natural” phenomenon or

occurrence being studied by a somewhat passive observer. The camera glides high, low and

sideways towards and away from the bathtub; it moves a bit like it was a living creature,

with no real logic but rather intuitively, as if curious to find out what is going on. Now and

then it zooms in on a seemingly random spot such as a crack between floorboards, the base

of the bathtub or the pattern of light on the wall. Even though it is constantly moving as if to

discover something, the camera does not reveal more than what is shown in the first frame

of the film. The scene does not become any more familiar or less strange, even though one

watches it loop several times. The individual elements (the room, the bathtub and the

weather conditions) are common and well-known, while their particular combination seems

surreal and illusionary. All that has been changed is the usual setting of elements – the order

of things – and the actual time they take. The movements of the camera, the unusual

placement of the bathtub and the different “natural” phenomena, seem to have appeared

from “nowhere” (somewhere beyond the frame of the camera that the spectator cannot see)

and seem both familiar and artificial. The selected and framed view marks out a coherent

pictorial space, which does not seem like a part but more like a whole, and does not invite

questions about what is behind or beside it.

During a recent talk given by van Warmerdam, someone remarked that she must

have little or no impact on technical decisions and details, when employing a technically

experienced crew on her films, thereby avoiding the traditional “hands-on” role of the artist.

To that she replied that when she is making work she wants to concentrate solely on

looking, and that if she had to be involved in the technical decisions and processes of a film

she could not do that. With this comment in mind, one can think of Weather Forecast as an

exercise in looking, an observation of a situation, but not a reading of or a comment on it. It

is a way of observing change and connections between elements, but it is not a conclusive

way of looking, a looking-for-something. Van Warmerdam’s film does not make sense in

the traditional sense, for it is not finding out more or concluding anything (moving from the

indefinite towards the definite), neither is it commenting (passing judgement on) what it

sees. It is simply scrutinising and observing an occurrence from many different viewpoints,

unlike a curator impatiently attempting to get to the core of an artwork or an empiricist

scientist looking for quantifiable results. This is why Weather Forecast never finishes. It is

present as a constant negotiation between eye and environment, and comes to exist as a

series of (unresolved) visual impressions. Van Warmerdam’s use of repetition (within each

work but also by showing her films as loops) seems to be insisting that the viewer should

24

engage ever more closely with the endeavour, carefully scrutinising it, and delve deeper into

it. Thinking about van Warmerdam referring to her practice as “mental fluttering” and

‘being very close to looking’, supports this way of thinking about Weather Forecast and

other film works such as Le Retour du Chapeau (The Return of the Hat), 1998, Skytypers,

1997, Chasing Colours, 1996 and Douche (Shower), 1995.

‘Things catch my eye, not the other way around.’48 This comment by van

Warmerdam describes the act of looking as responsive rather than as a looking-for-

something. Here the eye does not catch things and swiftly go through their content,

determined to reveal an unambiguous core, it stays open towards that which surrounds it.

Looking – in this case – is not a consuming mode of looking but a receptive and open one

which is paying attention to the possibility of whatever might be catching the eye. The

consumer-observer that has evolved historically, socially and culturally through modernity

might be too busy chasing that ungraspable instant of actuality to realise that he or she is

actually the one who is in the dark.

Van Warmerdam’s artworks and statements offer us a chance to appreciate that we

have the choice of changing our attitude as viewers, admitting to the fact that looking is a

discipline in itself; a mode of work that requires focus, discipline and effort.

25

Endnotes

1 R.L. Gregory, Eye and Brain: the Psychology of Seeing, London, Weidenfeld and

Nicholson, 1990, p. 9. 2 Miran Božovič, ‘The Man Behind His Own Retina’, in Slavoj Žižek (ed.), Everything

You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan: But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, London, Verso, 1992, pp. 161-177, p. 164.

3 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge Mass. and London, MIT Press, 1990, p. 7.

4 Tracey Chevalier, Girl With a Pearl Earring, London, Harper Collins Publishers, 2000, p. 63.

5 Umberto Eco, Om spejle og andre forunderlige fænomener, Roskilde, Forum, 1989, p. 37.

6 Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, p. 27.

7 ibid, p. 16. 8 Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Blink of an Eye’, in David Carroll (ed.), The States of “Theory”:

History, Art, and Critical Discourse, New York and Oxford, Columbia University Press, 1990, pp. 175-200, p. 197.

9 ibid, p. 199. 10 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, San

Francisco, Lapis Press, 1986, p. 9. 11 Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth

Century, p. 24. 12 Quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin

McLaughlin, Cambridge Mass. and London, Belknap Press, 1999, p. 40. 13 ibid, p. 52. 14 ibid, p. 17, 44 and 53. 15 ibid, p.15. 16 Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, trans. Brian Nelson, Oxford and New York, Oxford

University Press, 1995, p. 48. 17 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 42. 18 ibid, p. 531. . 19 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Looking Awry’, October, no.50, 1989, pp. 31-55, p. 36. 20 ibid, p. 37. 21 Quoted in Christoph Grunenberg, ‘Wonderland: Spectacles of Display from the Bon

Marché to Prada’, in Frankfurt and Liverpool, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and Tate Liverpool, Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, Hatje Cantz Publishers, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002, pp. 17-39, p. 24.

22 The history of window dressing, window-shopping and the observer-consumer is, of course, much more complex than a brief account of this kind allows for exploring. The status and style of display as “too much” was indeed repeatedly questioned and challenged throughout its development, and attempts were made to restrain the level of display and rescue shopping from the association with vulgarity and bad taste with which it at one point became increasingly associated. The idea that the relentless onslaught of visual impressions would cause nervous exhaustion and even madness was feared at the time. For a detailed account, see ibid, pp. 26-31.

23 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 43. 24 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guittari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.

Robert Hurley et.al., London, Athlone Press, 1984, pp. 200-261. 25 Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth

Century, p. 21. 26 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Detroit, Black & Red, 1983, section 1.

26

27 ibid, section 4. 28 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, in Hal Foster (ed.) Postmodern

Culture, London, Pluto, 1985, pp. 126-134, p. 130. 29 ibid, p. 131. 30 Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, selected and trans. Stephen Heath, London,

Fontana Press, 1977, p. 39. 31 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 26. 32 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p. 38. 33 John Jervis, Exploring the Modern: Patterns of Western Culture and Civilization,

Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 1998, p. 304. 34 ibid, p. 304. 35 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p.xi, translator’s foreword. 36 George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, New Haven and

London, Yale University Press, 1962, p. 17. 37 ibid, p. 17. 38 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson et.al.,

London, Athlone Press, London, 1995, p. 4. 39 Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’ in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art, Berkeley

L.A and London, University of California Press, 1995, pp. 116-147, p. 145. 40 ibid, p. 146. 41 Alan Wallach, ‘The Museum of Modern Art: The Past’s Future in Art’ in Francis

Frascina and Jonathan Harris (eds.), Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, London, Phaidon in ass. with the Open University Press, 1992, pp. 282-296, p. 285.

42 ibid, p. 286. 43 Mark C. Taylor, ‘Duty-Free Shopping’, in Frankfurt and Liverpool, Schirn Kunsthalle

Frankfurt and Tate Liverpool, Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, Hatje Cantz Publishers, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002, pp. 38-53, p. 42.

44 R.L. Gregory, Eye and Brain: the Psychology of Seeing, p. 222. 45 Marijke van Warmerdam, artist’s talk at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, 2002. 46 Marijke van Warmerdam has made a work called ‘Very Good. Very Bad.’ It consists of

two stickers; one white with black text (‘Very Good’), the other black with white text (‘Very Bad’). She has also made a piece called ‘Good Days, Bad Days’, consisting of several brightly coloured posters with the given text, filling all the walls of a gallery. These works can be seen in the catalogue: Marijke van Warmerdam: Single, Double, Crosswise, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1997.

47 Marijke van Warmerdam, artist’s talk at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, 2002. 48 Quoted in Kees van Gelder, ‘The Cheerful Truth of Movement’, in Stedelijk Van

Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Marijke van Warmerdam: Single, Double, Crosswise, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1997, p. 18.

27

Illustrations Fig 1 See cover. Marijke van Warmerdam, Your Eyes Only, 1991, offset, perspex, aluminium, 10 x 18.5cm, private collection, Amsterdam. Fig 2 Reinerus Gemma-Frisius, drawing of a camera obscura, 1544. Fig 3 Photographer unknown, postcard of camera obscura room on the jetty at Margate, 1898. Fig 4 Photographer unknown, detail from postcard of camera obscura room on the jetty at Margate, 1898. Fig 5 James Barry, An angel revealing the physical nature of the universe to a group of natural philosophers and mathematicians, 1795, the Wellcome Trust, London. Fig 6 Photographer unknown, Passage Jouffroy, Paris, 1845-1847. Fig 7 Optical illusion. ‘This figure alternates spontaneously, so that sometimes it is seen

as a pair of faces, sometimes as a white urn bounded by meaningless black areas – the faces. The perceptual “decision” of what is figure (or object) and what ground, is similar to the engineer’s distinction between “signal” and “noise”. It is basic to any system which handles information.’ Gregory, R.L, Eye and Brain: the Psychology of Seeing, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1990, p.13.

Fig 8 Marijke van Warmerdam, Weather Forecast, 2000, film installation, Baltic, Newcastle.

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Bibliography

Barthes, Roland, Image, Music, Text, selected and trans. Stephen Heath, London, Fontana Press, 1977. Battcock, Gregory (ed.), Minimal Art, Berkeley L.A and London, University of California Press, 1995. Benjamin, Walter, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, trans.

Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz, New York, Schocken Books, 1986. Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge Mass. and London, Belknap Press, 1999. Carroll, David (ed.), The States of “Theory”: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, New York and Oxford, Columbia University Press, 1990. Chevalier, Tracy, Girl With a Pearl Earring, London, Harper Collins Publishers, 2000. Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge Mass. and London, MIT Press, 1990. Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle, Detroit, Black & Red, 1983. Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson et.al., London, Athlone Press, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guittari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley et.al., London, Athlone Press, 1984. Eco, Umberto, Om spejle: og andre forunderlige fænomener, trans. Thomas Harder, Roskilde, Forum, 1989. Foster, Hal (ed.), Postmodern Culture, London, Pluto, 1985. Foster, Hal (ed.), Vision and Visuality, Seattle, Bay Press, 1988. Frascina, Francis and Jonathan Harris (eds.), Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, London, Phaidon and ass. with the Open University Press, 1992. Gregory, R.L, Eye and Brain: the Psychology of Seeing, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1990. Jervis, John, Exploring the Modern: Patterns of Western Culture and Civilization, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Krauss, Rosalind, The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge Mass. and London, MIT Press, 1998. Kubler, George, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1962. O’Doherty, Brian, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, San Francisco, Lapis Press, 1986. Žižek, Slavoj (ed.), Everything you always wanted to know about Lacan: but were afraid to ask Hitchcock, trans. Martin Thom, London, Verso, 1992. Zola, Émile, The Ladies’ Paradise, trans. Brian Nelson, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1995. Exhibition catalogues Frankfurt and Liverpool, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and Tate Liverpool,Shopping: A

Century of Art and Consumer Culture, Ostfildern-Ruit, Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002.

Venice, Biennale di Venezia, Post-Nature: Nine Dutch Artists, Eindhoven, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 2001. Warmerdam, Marijke van, Marijke van Warmerdam: Single, Double, Crosswise, Eindhoven, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1997.

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Periodical articles Krauss, Rosalind, ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition’, October, no.18, 1981, pp. 47-66. Žižek, Slavoj, ‘Looking Awry’, October, no.50, 1989, pp. 31-55. Other sources Breakfast at Tiffany’s, dir. Blake Edwards, Paramount Pictures, 1961. Vanilla Sky, dir. Cameron Crowe, UIP and Paramount Pictures, 2001. Warmerdam, Marijke van, artist’s talk at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, 2002.