This week we will read a few classic articles about vision, gender and power.
Critics and Art Historians Linda Nochlin, Laura Mulvey and John Berger all made a huge impact with these three pieces in the 1970s:
Linda Nochlin, ? (originally published in Artnews in 1971)
Laura Mulvey, Originally published in 1975 in Screen. This illustrated version from Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York and Boston: New Museum of Contemporary Art, in association with Godine, 1984), pp. 361-373.
Ways of Seeing by John Berger, 1972 . Web text version of .
Sturken & Cartwright: “Gender and the Gaze” 120-131. (Nochlin, Mulvey and Berger’s essays are also discussed here).
For your journal this week, I want you to read ALL of the above and at least one of the following:
Maura Reilly Cindy Shermans Untitled Film Stills (you can also watch this
Hatt / Klonk chapter on from Art history: A critical introduction to its methods Eds. Michael Hatt, Charlotte Klonk (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
Jack Halberstam hotography and Subcultural Lives from The visual culture reader / edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff. (London ; New York : Routledge, 2013).
In your journal please DISCUSS:
–Nochlin’s thesis: why did women not become “great” artists in the past?
— According to Mulvey, how do classic Hollywood films like those by Alfred Hitchcock (that she mentions) place the movie viewer in a gendered position? How (according to Mulvey) does this relate to “visual pleasure”? Is this still the case in films you are familiar with?
–How has the idea of a white male “gaze” been disrupted in the past few decades? Use examples from the optional readings and/or the Sturken and Cartwright section.
Rubric
