Modernity: Spectatorship, the Gaze, and Power

Chapter 3

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Modernity

• Modernity: the historical period during which economic and social structures took shape
• industrialization
• the economic class system
• capitalist bureaucracy�
• Ideological shifts
• rise of secular humanism and scientific reasoning
• safeguarding individualism
• investment in science and technology
• Colonialism: the process of a nation extending its power over another nation, people, or territory

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Lewis Hine (1874-1940), 143 Hudson Street, New York, ground floor, 1911 

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Modernity

• Late modernity
• late 19th to late 20th centuries
• movement of Western population from rural communities to cities to work in factories
• Alienation: a condition of capitalism in which humans experience a sense of separation from the products of their labor and other aspects of life

"Glassworks. Midnight. Location: Indiana." Lewis Hine, 1908. From a series of photographs of child labor at glass and bottle factories in the United States by Lewis W. Hine, for the National Child Labor Committee, New York.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Interior of Selfridges department store, London, c. 1910

The blouse section of Selfridges department store is filled to the brim with mannequin busts that are headless displaying the blouses for sale. While each blouse is slightly different, the sheer number of them, filling the floor, brings to mind the faceless crowds of a city street. The individuality of each design becomes lost. They are the uniforms worn by female clerical office workers of the new city.

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

19^th c European and US Modernity

• Emergence of mass markets and audiences, national media cultures
• New class of workers – clerical “computers” who wear these ‘uniforms’
• Workers sought escape in new “leisure culture”
• factories dangerous, apartments cramped
• many consuming same products
• Skyscrapers built as monuments to progress and capital, dominated urban skyline

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Modernism

• Modernism (1860s–1970s): a group of styles and movements in art, architecture, literature, and culture

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• Modernist artists shared a belief with scientists that work should introduce new forms of knowledge and reveal universal truths.
• architects embraced form and function
• critique of modernity’s devotion to truth, progress, and universal design as a means to human betterment

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Still from the film The Crowd, dir. King Vidor, 1928 

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

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Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, 1942-3, Collection of the Musuem of Modern Art, NY

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Modernity and modernism

How did the rise of the city and the factory in modernity contribute to rise of the industrializing nation-state with its (negative) social effects?

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How did the styles and conventions of modernist art reflect late modernity’s industrialization and automation?

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Bottom: Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, 1942-3, Collection of MoMA

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Modernism

“Mondrian arrived in New York in 1940, one of the many European artists who moved to the United States to escape World War II. He immediately fell in love with the city and with boogie-woogie music, to which he was introduced on his first evening in New York. Soon he began, as he said, to put a little boogie-woogie into his paintings.”

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“a vital and pulsing rhythm, an optical vibration that jumps from intersection to intersection like traffic on the streets of New York.”

--https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78682�

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

The Concept of the Modern Subject

• Subject: (1860s–1970s): the available ways of being for humans in a given time period or context
• Epistemic: period-specific knowledge systems 

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• 18th-century concepts of the human subject as a binary form of mind and body were complicated in the 19th century.
• Psychoanalysis: theory of how the mind works that emphasizes the role of the unconscious and desire
• Mirror stage: phase of development in which the infant first experiences a sense of alienation

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

The Colonial Gaze

The structures of looking through which a colonial agenda maintains and legitimates power.

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determining colonial realities by assigning the right to look and the status of those who have the right to look and those who must be watched over, or who are the object of the look

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The establishment of a colonized group as ”subjects of” through separation of Us (colonizers, civilized ones who look) and Other (colonized, savage who are made the spectacle).

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London 1854). From The Great Exhibition of 1851, Jeffrey A. Auerbach (1999)

The phenomenon of the World’s Fair: Using collecting and display as a means of establishing and asserting colonial power

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

World’s Fairs / Expositions

• More than 100 in more than 20 countries globally
• Global mass spectacle putting on display the spoils of colonial conquest and national industry
• Functions: National Prestige, Imperial Propaganda and International Power Politics, Promote Mass Culture

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• “The world in the city”
• Architecture, Urban Construction and Mega-Events featuring monumentality, novelty, national advancement in technology, design, and art

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• About 415 million people visited the international expositions held in Europe between 1851 and 1958. 

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

McNeven, J., The Foreign Department, viewed towards the transept, colored lithograph, 1851, Ackermann (printer), V&A. The interior of the Crystal Palace in London during the Great Exhibition of 1851.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Palace#/media/File:Crystal_Palace_-_interior.jpg

Maximizing display with natural light (glass structure), centralized hall design, open walkways making two levels visible from all points

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

World’s Fairs Italian Style, Cristina Della Coletta

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Dates April 29 - November 19, 1911.�Attendance - 7,409,145.�International Participants - 37 nations and colonies.

Focus: labor and industry, as against the focus on history and art in Florence and Rome world’s fairs of the same period�Site Acreage - 247 acres in gardens of Valentino Castle along River Po.�Ticket Cost - 0.50 lira.

�Photo: Official guide of the Turin 1911 exhibition, 1911, Expo Authority.. 

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

International promotion

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TURIN EXPOSITION INTERNATIONALE 1911 Advertisement/poster�AUTHOR: JULES CHERET�YEAR: 1911�Litograph 116x84

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

 Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also through ideology.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

World’s Fairs Italian Style, Cristina Della Coletta

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Ephemeral architecture and the invention of a national style

Della Coletta

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Carlo Moriondo on the fair

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Replica of Argentina, Turin 1911

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Replica of Argentina, Turin 1911

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

“designed by Hungarian architects Emil Töry, Maurice Pogány, and Dénes Györgyi. An eclectic building, combining Art Nouveau elements with the features of National Romanticism, the Pavilion of Hungary covered 6000 square meters, and was considered "the pearl of the exposition."

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Mannequins created by Pierre Imans for exhibition in Turin in 1911, Grand Prix winner. Page from catalogue called Les Cires de Pierre Imans produced in Paris, c 1930

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

People on display in a traveling display that began 1904 St Louis World’s Fair – the Igorot Village

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Spectatorship and the Gaze

• Theories of the gaze and spectatorship are theories of address that consider the ways an image invites certain responses from a particular category of viewer.
• Spectatorship: provides an understanding of looking where it is enacted in an interactive, multimodal, and relational field
• Gaze: shows the viewer’s embeddedness in a social and contextual field of looks, objects, and other sensory information

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor), 1656 (oil on canvas)

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Las meninas?

A girl from a noble family brought up to serve at court.

(Oxford Concise Spanish Dictionary)

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Menina: Portuguese for girl.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Content

A room in the Madrid palace of King Philip IV, ceiling to floor, wall to wall.

In/beyond the room are positioned 9 (or 11) figures, some looking out towards the viewer.

The royal child Infanta Margarita is in foreground with her maids of honor, a chaperone, two dwarfs, and a dog.

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Content

The painter Velázquez himself is in the painting. He is the figure working at a large canvas at your left, looking out toward the viewer.

A mirror hanging in the background reflects two people. These are the King and Queen.

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Content

At the rear in the open doorway,

framed by diffuse white light:

Don José Nieto Velázquez, the

Queen's chamberlain

and head of tapestry works,

stands on stairs, pulling

back a curtain.

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Notice the spaces of the painting

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Silvio Gaggi: "a simple box that could be divided into a perspective grid with a single vanishing point”

The open door at the rear evokes another space than the room itself.

The mirror evokes a third space, the rest of the room in front of the scene of the painting.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

The gaze: who is looking at what in the painting?

• 5 figures look directly out at the viewer. Do their looks, along with the mirror reflection, affirm that the royal couple is standing outside the painted space looking in?
• Is the mirror image a reflection of the canvas on which the artist works in the painting?
• Is the artist painting the royal child?

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Why does it matter where the royal couple stands?

Detail of the mirror

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

The Gaze and Power

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Spain was the leading power of the European nations during the 16th-17th century

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The King and Queen are the embodiments of power in the Spanish Empire

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Identifying the viewer’s standpoint with the standpoint of the King and Queen puts the viewer in a position of power

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

This little part of the picture says Power?

How do we come to identify with the position of the royal gaze?

Isn’t it blurry?

Small?

Tucked away in

a corner of the picture?

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

A more obvious “gaze”?

Why not argue that we

are invited to identify

with Infanta

Margarita?

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Why not the painter’s gaze?

Velázquez

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Or the other Vélazquez…

Don José

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Key points about the Gaze

The gaze is a term that refers to a RELATIONSHIP of looks.�

It is not one LITERAL or depicted look.

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It is not strictly embodied in one figure.

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SO, what are the elements that lead the viewer to “identify” with a look?

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Clarifying two meanings of “the Gaze”

• gaze as look: The literal depiction of a figure looking

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• gaze as a relationship of looking: this is implied within a visual field

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

The gaze as look

• The royal couple “gazes” out of the painting (gaze is used here in the informal sense)

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

The gaze as a relationship of looking

• Their look exists within a “gaze”

Meaning in this case:

a network of looking relations

depicted and actual

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

The gaze as a relationship of looks, depicted

Who looks where?

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Depicted gazes (looks)…

Track sight lines

separately

and then together

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Spectatorship and the Gaze

• Perspective: a range of techniques for representing space on a 2D plane

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• What makes the spectator’s position in Las Meninas ambiguous?

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Power and the Surveillance Gaze

• Modernity characterized by rise of social institutions that manage populations through visual classification to discipline and control people and nature

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• Surveillance: the act of keeping watch over a person or place, one tactic used to control others
• In the workplace, surveillance relies on the worker performing as though the gaze is always present.
• Surveillance practices have historically targeted “othered” bodies and subjects.
• The modern state maintains and regulates citizens to function properly.

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon penitentiary design, drawn by Willey Reveley, 1791.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Power and the Surveillant Gaze

• Panopticon: used by Michele Foucault to describe modern social subjects’ regulation of their own behavior, borrowing from 19th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s design for a prison in which all prisoners are visible from a guard tower with blacked-out windows

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

The Other

• “The Other”: a category of subjectivity set up in binary opposition to a culture’s dominant subject category
• originally used to describe consciousness as a power struggle
• used by some theorists to describe alienation in late modernity

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• Postcolonial theory: a body of scholarship that analyzes how Western discourses have constituted the human subjects of non-Western locations as lacking agency or voice

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

“There is no Homeland (mafeesh Homeland)” graffiti on Homeland set by The Arabian Street Artists (Heba Amin @hebamin, Caram Kapp @dot_seekay, Don Karl aka Stone @Donrok)  

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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

The Other

• Orientalism: the ways that Western cultures conceive of Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures as other

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• How does The Arabian Street Artists’ intervention on the set of Homeland call out the show’s “orientalism”?

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• For whose gaze is their graffiti meant?

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Gender and the Gaze

• Gender and sexuality studies scholars have developed concepts of the gaze that interpret the politics of visuality and countervisuality.
• Psychoanalysis plays an important role in understanding spectatorship and the unconscious processes supporting looking practices. 

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• Laura Mulvey proposed that popular narrative cinema conventions reflect a patriarchal unconscious.
• Scholars working on race, ethnicity, class, and queer theory complicated Mulvey’s work by looking at an intersectional gaze.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Cutting, 1993 (chromogenic print, edition of 8, 40 × 30”) 

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Gender and the Gaze

• What are the intersectional concerns expressed in Self-Portrait/Cutting?

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.

Gaming and the Gaze

• Video games raise important questions about the player’s gaze and gender and subjectivity in the larger field in which games are designed, marketed, played, and discussed online.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Third Edition. Oxford University Press.