main content Watzek Arts Friday

Images bombard us. Images determine how we see ourselves and others, in gendered ways.

Over 50 years ago, John Berger’s manifesto Ways of Seeing confronted the tyranny of images. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Berger saw the ability to make copies of art—for example, posters and postcards of the Mona Lisa—as an opening. Copying made it possible not only to democratize, but to demystify art. Benjamin had celebrated the destruction of art’s “aura,” the demystification of paintings in museums. By questioning art’s aura, did Benjamin and Berger also destroy its pleasure?

Ways of Seeing argued against the Western European painting tradition’s obsession with the female nude, and against the use of portraiture to promote wealth and power. Berger drew on feminist discourses, and contributed to them, as well.

Ways of Seeing opened up more opportunities for skepticism and subversion, for play and irony, for the freedom to interpret, make, and re-make.

No longer would paintings seem like the privileged domain of experts. Anyone can look. Anyone can disassemble and re-assemble.

How liberating to see: and not to know. To ask questions, to wonder. These posters are inspired by Ways of Seeing and by writers who take investigative approaches to the topic of gender and aesthetic expression: authors like Wayne Koestenbaum, Maggie Nelson, and Rachel Cusk. The posters were made by Gender Studies minors and other students in Gender Studies 300, “Gender and Aesthetic Expression.”

They call the power of art and its traditions into question. Rather than destroy pleasure, though, they enjoy the ironic detachment such questioning affords. They don’t reject art. They play with it to enhance its subversive potential.