"The Way of Seeing a Nude"
John Berger’s Ways of Seeing has been a intro art-class favorite since its conception in 1972, despite some arguing Berger’s Marxism opinionates the text too much. In its third chapter, Berger explores the portrayal of women in painting and photography, eventually concluding from their often nude depiction that ‘nudity’, in direct contrast to ‘naked’, means having yet another skin covering oneself while ‘naked’ means to be entirely exposed without presumption.
One common opinion on nude versus naked can be summed up from Kenneth Clark’s The Nude: A Study of Ideal Form:
“To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word 'nude,' on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed.”
Naked, then, is to simply be without clothes and with shame, while nude is a form of art, a way of seeing achieved through that art. Berger argues that this isn’t entirely true. He claims that “to be naked is to be without disguise.” Nudity is “a form of dress” for derived from being display in art, meaning “the surface of one’s own skin, the hairs of one’s own body, [is] turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded.” Berger then expands this concept to the women found in the nude tradition of European oil painting, who were -and Berger would are argue, still are- “seen and judged as sights.” One such example is Charles the Second commissioning a ‘secret’ (he later showed it to a select group of male guests) portrait of his mistress Nell Gwynne nude. “Her nakedness is not, however, an expression of her own feelings; it’s a sign of her submission to the owner’s feelings or demands.” When an artist paints or photographs a nude woman, he arranges it to appeal to male sexuality of the supposed viewer, not the female sexuality actually being portrayed.
Is this argument on nude and naked, object and possessor occurring in Muybridge’s photographs? I would think those ones of women draped, undressing, and bathing each other would count as Muybridge playing to eroticism and male sexuality. Furthermore, the women are depicted as individuals; they’re often unnamed and the physical reproduction of their image in those many frames devalues them. When an artist actually appreciates the woman for herself, Berger believes the spectator “is forced to recognize himself as the outsider that he is.” We never feel like an outsider when looking upon the women in Animal Locomotion because Muybridge photographs them to not just be sights but to be, in a Bergian sense, sights constructed for the male spectator.
One common opinion on nude versus naked can be summed up from Kenneth Clark’s The Nude: A Study of Ideal Form:
“To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word 'nude,' on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed.”
Naked, then, is to simply be without clothes and with shame, while nude is a form of art, a way of seeing achieved through that art. Berger argues that this isn’t entirely true. He claims that “to be naked is to be without disguise.” Nudity is “a form of dress” for derived from being display in art, meaning “the surface of one’s own skin, the hairs of one’s own body, [is] turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded.” Berger then expands this concept to the women found in the nude tradition of European oil painting, who were -and Berger would are argue, still are- “seen and judged as sights.” One such example is Charles the Second commissioning a ‘secret’ (he later showed it to a select group of male guests) portrait of his mistress Nell Gwynne nude. “Her nakedness is not, however, an expression of her own feelings; it’s a sign of her submission to the owner’s feelings or demands.” When an artist paints or photographs a nude woman, he arranges it to appeal to male sexuality of the supposed viewer, not the female sexuality actually being portrayed.
Is this argument on nude and naked, object and possessor occurring in Muybridge’s photographs? I would think those ones of women draped, undressing, and bathing each other would count as Muybridge playing to eroticism and male sexuality. Furthermore, the women are depicted as individuals; they’re often unnamed and the physical reproduction of their image in those many frames devalues them. When an artist actually appreciates the woman for herself, Berger believes the spectator “is forced to recognize himself as the outsider that he is.” We never feel like an outsider when looking upon the women in Animal Locomotion because Muybridge photographs them to not just be sights but to be, in a Bergian sense, sights constructed for the male spectator.
posted by Katie at 11:45 PM
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