§35 Ways of seeing
“I am an eye.
A mechanical eye.
I am the machine that reveals the world to you
as only the machine can see it.
I am now free of human immobility.
I am in perpetual motion.
I approach things, I move away from them.
I slip under them, into them.
I move toward the muzzle of a race horse.
I move quickly through crowds,
I advance ahead of the soldiers in an assault,
I take off with airplanes,
I fall on my back and get up
at the same time that the body falls and gets up.
This is what I am, a machine that runs in chaotic maneuvers,
recording movements one after the other,
assembling them in a patchwork.
Freed from the constraints of time and space,
I organize each point of the universe as I wish.
My route is that of a new conception of the world.
I can make you discover the world you did not know existed.”
~ Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye Manifesto (1923)
John Bergers seminal “Ways of Seeing” recognized the impact of ‘reproductive machines’ on works of art. Photographs not only transported viewers to previously inaccessible locations and situations (as detailed by Vertov) but crucially for Berger radically altered the consumption of ‘European art in the 20th century’.
Stripped of scarcity, art’s ubiquity was countered with the authenticity of, and reverence to the original. To stand before a real Leonardo was a near religious experience of far more importance than simply gazing at a postcard bearing the same image. This worshiping, argued Berger, stripped Art of its true power and the ubiquity of its context. No longer were works welded to the physical structures and institutions that commissioned them (namely churches, cathedrals), now they could be seen in our own environments.
Berger wanted us to relearn these ways of seeing, to recognize the surroundings of a work’s creation and to re-engage in a childlike way, free from rarified reverence and pomposity and judgements largely informed by value and scarcity.
How might he have navigated Instagram and social media with its filters, graphics, and visual trickery? Facsimile robbed viewers of a moment in history but Instagram, a new machine not for reproduction but invention, robs viewers of a moment in reality. Whilst galleries might strip the casual consumer of any sense of the painter’s circumstances, social media strips the image of any sense of truth while occupying the form that is most associated with truth, the (amateur) photograph. Perspective, the European artistic concept that placed the eye at the center of any experience is now being challenged by the new machines, but these machines do more than simply overcome physical constraints, they now step beyond the physical into the imaginary. Context is relevant, but at the level of consciousness, not material. Although Instagram is not art, it’s impact and new ubiquity on our understanding of images has implications or at least parallels with the phony reverence that Berger’s Ways of Seeing called out. His work is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago. We must learn new ways of seeing.
Originally published at anowmedia.com on June 8, 2018.
