Note to readers: this is a chapter from a work in progress, called The Visual: How it is

Studied. It was originally posted on the website

www.jameselkins.com
Send comments, criticism, etc., to
jelkins@artic.edu
Links are provided to internet images, current as of 10.02.
3
T h e E n d o f t h e T h e o r y o f t h e G a z e
Once the gaze was virtually absent from descriptions of art, except as an arrow in the
quiver of ekphrasis. In the Imagines, Philostratus notes when gazes are returned or
reflected (as in the case of a painting of Narcissus), but he is not concerned with the
narrative potential of gazing. In the twentieth century the situation changed, and looks,
gazes, glimpses, and stares became indispensable to the understanding of figural art. In the
1980s and early 1990s, the gaze was the theory du jour; now it sounds like an asked-and-
answered question, largely because theorizing has slowed and the important texts are
beginning to look a bit dated. That is a deceptive situation, I think, because there is still
neither consensus about the gaze nor a better theory in sight.
There are at least eight starting-points for the twentieth-century revival of the gaze:
Alois Riegls descriptions of the Dutch group portrait; Jean-Paul Sartres theory of seeing-
as-being-seen; Merleau Pontys account of embodied seeing; Jacques Lacans Baroque
Chapter 3 - 2 - The Gaze
elaboration of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; John Bergers influential ideological critique of
Kenneth Clarks version of art history; the rise of feminism in film studies and especially
Laura Mulveys account of gendered seeing in cinema; Svetlana Alperss descriptions of
Northern lookers in paintings; and Michael Frieds theory of the painter-beholder.
Those are among the tools of contemporary visual theory when it comes to bodies in works
of art that see and are seen.
There are also several summaries of the gaze available. I think the most lucid and
persusasive is Margaret Olins essay, included in the volume Critical Terms for Art
History.
1
The gaze, as she puts it, is part of a larger attempt to wrest formal discussions
of art from the grasp of linguistic theory, to focus on what is visual about a work of art and
yet address the wider issue of social communication. In other words, the gaze is an
indigenously visual way of thinking about visual art, one that responds to the fundamental
acts of seeing that constitute every work and is attentive to the political and social
dimensions of visuality.
From the outset, there are difficulties in saying exactly what the gaze is. Olin
points out that there is usually something negative about the gaze as used in art theory:
It is rather like the word stare in everyday usage. After all, parents instruct
their children to stop staring, but not to stop gazing. A typical strategy of art
theory is to unmask gazing as something like staring, the publicly
sanctioned actions of a peeping Tom.
2
To see how this works, consider two Dutch paintings made in the same year: Emanuel de
Wittes Interior (1660-62), and Vermeers Girl Asleep at a Table from the same years
(plates 1, 2).
de Witte, Interior:
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~ah108/Amsterdam/Museum/genpaintings/harpsichord.htm
Chapter 3 - 3 - The Gaze
Vermeer, Girl Asleep:
http://www.mezzo-mondo.com/arts/mm/vermeer/VEJ001.html
In de Wittes painting a woman is watched, perhaps, by an unseen man. His cloak is
hanging next to the Dutch-style bed at the left, and in front of it he has put his coat, shirt,
and sword. Assuming, then, that the man is awake, he might well be staring at her
(staring in Olins sense). She doesnt look at him any more than she looks at us, even
though she could see us if she looked into the tilted mirror over her head. The picture
seems very scopophilic: its long perspective corridor gives a view of another woman,
and the man, from his vantage in the bed, can also see out the windows that we can just
glimpse.
Olin points to various efforts to widen the scope of the gaze so that, for example,
representations of women are not seen exclusively as objects of male viewers gazes.
Sartres almost paranoid treatment of le regard (the look) is no help, Olin implies, and
neither is Guy Debords dehumanizing account of modern capitalist spectators. Indeed,
she says, to conceive of the gaze as a threat, an invitation, or a communication implies a
similar conception of human relations in general. She proposes dialogic models, which
would make the seer and the seen more equal. Among sch models there is the lierary critic
Mikhail Bakhtins description of heteroglossiamultiple, equally valid speaking
voicesand the mutual gazes implied in Martin Bubers critique of the I-it relation,
which he wanted to supplant with a more human I-thou relation.
3
Another potential help
is the notion of the suture developed in film studies in the 1980s. (The suture is a way
of pointing to the fact that point-of-view shots in cinema cover over, suture, the feeling
that the image is presented solely for the male viewers pleasure, because they insist that the
view being shown is only the actors or actresss.)
Chapter 3 - 4 - The Gaze
de Wittes painting could also be seen as a more nuanced, less male-centered
picture. The invisible man, for example, could well be asleep. Then the woman might well
be thought of as the one who sees, instead of the one seen: she could keep an eye on the
man, look out the window, and even see us in the mirror. I mention this example to show
how easy it is to paint a negative picture of patterns of looking using the theory of the gaze,
and how tricky it is to loosen the grip of power relations even when the theory is relaxed
and made more dialogic.
Vermeers Girl Asleep at a Table in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is even
sublter. Because there is an overturned wine goblet in front of her, she might be drunk, or
perhaps shes just dozing. Either way, the painting of the cupid on the wall behind her, and
the mans coat hung up next to the door introduce the possibility of a story. (For a
seventeenth-century viewer, the luxurious carpet and still-life would also has suggested a
sensuous theme.) In the original version of the painting there was a man standing beyond
the doorway. A dog stood right in the doorway, watching the man. In that original sate, the
painting could well have been a very obvious love story: the man might have been just
coming back, and about to discover the woman napping. But even then, could this be
described as a picture made for male viewers, which plays out the male gaze? Probably not,
because we would have been shown both a man and a woman, and it might not have been
clear which we were supposed to identify with. In its final state the painting is even more
subtle, even less susceptible to a reading in terms of gazes. The open doorway promises a
visitor, but there is none. The emptiness itself has some presence, some power over our
thoughtsbut how much? Its a painting, so we dont keep looking back at the space
thinking someone might appearor do we? And the chair that replaces the dog also has
some claim on our attention: it blocks the way to the hallway, and like the girl it is also
turned away from the entrance to the house. But it also reminds us that someone has
leftsomeone who had been sitting there, perhaps. Hollander, who is very sensitive to
Chapter 3 - 5 - The Gaze
nuances in these paintings, says that even though the dog is gone, the chair still refers to
animal life, as if suggesting an alternative consciousness to that of the young woman,
because it has gilded finials shaped like lions heads.
4
So far I am suggesting two things. First, as Olin says, once the gaze is broached it
is tremendously difficult to ratchet down talk about unequal power relations and staring,
peeping-Tom kinds of interaction. And second, the subtleties of looking quickly pass
beyond certifiably staring figures. Some figures sleep in paintings; others dont look, but
could; still others are animals; and then there are the human-like objects that take up human-
like positions, and act in their own mute fashion without eyes at all.
This, at least, are the directions I would go in if I were to remake the concept of the
gaze.
5
What matters in this context is what can be made of the existing theory when it is
called to aid the project of visual culture. An initial problem is that there is still no
synthesis, no single adequate definition of the gaze. Bakhtin, Buber, Sartre, Lacanian
theories of suture the field is in tremendous conceptual disarray. Critical practices have
grown so various that the gaze is both overdetermined (burdened by contradictory theories)
and radically underdetermined (worn too thin to have much purchase on individual
artworks). I think it is possible to discern the shadowy outlines of at least three major
discourses at work in our idea of the gaze. They are the positional discourse that is
concerned with how depicted gazes situate the viewer with respect to figures in the film or
picture; the psychoanalytic discourse that imagines the gaze as a field in which the self
defines and redefines itself; and the gender discourse that emphasizes the differences
between male and female seeing. (Needless to say this really is just a convenient division,
and there could be many other discourses.) My sense of the literature is that these three are
interdependent, but not sufficiently unified so that there is a single concept of the gaze.
Each has its analytic possibilities and limitations not dependent of the others.
Chapter 3 - 6 - The Gaze
It is important that the concept of the gaze remain useful, because there is no major
alternative model to explain how people see and are seen in visual art. To that end I will
make three brief but I hope incisive readings into the three discourses. My purpose is to
suggest the limitations of each, both in theory and in existing practice.
Gender discourse
The gaze stands first and foremost for a charged kind of looking: an intense,
perhaps unpleasant act that carries with it much more than the passive, harmless
accumulation of light. It is taken to be the active projection of maleness and voyeurism,
defining entire genres of art in terms of male desire. Laura Mulveys definition remains the
most passionate. In her view the function of woman as viewed object, especially in
cinema, is to stand in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by the
symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic
command, by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as a bearer
of meaning, not maker of meaning.
6
Narrative cinema, Mulvey says, is fundamentally
about the human form: scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic, and film satisfies a
primordial wish for pleasureful lookingprincipally looking at the female form. In this
libidinal economy, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and
passive/female, so that women in film become particular kinds of objects whose
significance is their tobelookedatness.
7
Looking becomes a phenomenon that can be closely described and delimited. On
the one hand is the spectator in direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed
for his enjoyment, and on the other is the spectator, again male, who is fascinated with
an image of his like set in an illusion of natural space and who gains sense of control and
possession of the woman whom his screen surrogate sees.
8
The entire apparatus of
narrative cinema is structured to support the dynamics of that kind of seeing: even the male
Chapter 3 - 7 - The Gaze
cameramen, the male stage hands, and the concept of the cameras eye exemplify the same
dynamic of seeing male and seen female. The excision of female looking is emblematized
by the dissection of the iris in Un chien andalou, and by the films visual prosections of
female bodies.
In this account the gaze is an instrument of objectification and of psychological and
spatial control. From that center, gendered theories of the gaze move outward, as if through
the rings of a target, toward larger and more abstract domains. First, the gendered gaze
determines a difference between those who actively see, and those who are seen, a dynamic
well visualized in Barbara Krugers image Untitled (We Have Received Orders Not to
Move). Secondespecially in Sander Gilmans readingsthe gendered gaze is an origin
of the master/slave dialectic, inescapably allied with racism.
9
This reading follows from the
first because the model of agency and lack of freedom is finally Hegels dialectic, so that
once the gaze is imagined as a matter of control and freedom, Hegel cannot be far behind.
Thirdby a leap of abstraction from the real economy of human movements to the
schemata of geometrical configurationsthe gaze is crucial to the ongoing development of
perspective theory, with its unresolved thematic of the nature of seeing and being seen. The
gendered gaze is linked to the matrix of terms that have traditionally explained excellence in
art by metaphors of clarity, distinctness, reflection, perspicuitas, and legibility.
10
And
finally, as aggressive looking, the gendered gaze is associated with the force (and the
maleness) of theory and philosophy, and to their opposition in some strains of feminism.
11
In this fashion, moving out through widening gyres, the gendered gaze comes to be the
condition that underwrites the production of theory itself, including this text. Is it odd to
think of the gendered gaze as the very foundation of theory and philosophy, or is it
inevitable? A literal answer would be that it depends on the critical uses to which the
concept is put in any given case: but in abstract terms what matters is the propensity this
Chapter 3 - 8 - The Gaze
version of the theory has to widen itself, to abstract itself from human interaction, to
propose itself as an underlying set of possibilities for meaning.
It is twenty years since Mulveys essay first appeared, and at this point an
assessment of her claims might plausibly take one of three forms. It has been critiqued
directly, by investigating its uses of the Lacanian registers and Lacans concept of the
visual field. Of the many assessments, one of the best is Edward Snows Theorizing the
Male Gaze: Some Problems, which presents a plausible recuperation of the pleasure of
seeing for female viewers. Speaking of Tintorettos painting of Suzanna and the Elders in
Vienna, Snow describes a gendering process: what the paiting offers is
womans erotic allure, and the pleasure it affords menthough women, too, if
differentlybeing supplemented by and even modulating into the inner pleasurable
constitution of the self as subject, in and of representation.
12
Many such adjustments are possible, to take into account different senses of gender
(intergender, transgender) and different understandings of subjectivity and awareness.
13
Mulveys theory might also be considered historiographically, in order to review
the debates that it has provoked (including Mulveys own revision and the ensuing
reaction). A third kind of assessment, which I am proposing here, would consider the
reasons for its diffusion into more generalized doctrines of meaning.
The immediate justification for moving away from the specifics of Mulveys
argument rests on the extremely broad influence it has had in art history and criticism: the
male gaze has become a byword in cultural studies as a whole, and often enough it
appears without any of the psychoanalytic support that Mulvey intended. Conferences and
colloquia on gazes in visual art are sometimes satisfied to consider questions of seeing in
general, taking any random glance by a male as an instance of the gaze, and glossing the
differences between different kinds of picturing. The male gaze has also been widely
applied as a unified concept (as if all gazes are male, and all proceed from the same
Chapter 3 - 9 - The Gaze
Lacanian dynamic) and even as a key to Western picturing. Yet it can be asked how often
reference to the male gaze is sufficient, or even apposite, when figures in pictures look at
one another or at us. Even Titians paintings, which have many lecherous stares, are not
unequivocal instances of the gaze in Mulveys sense. Titians sense of the female form was
partly formed by the paragone, in which painters such as Giorgione vied to paint the most
fully visible female bodies (painting a Venus reflected three times, so as to leave no
remainder unseen), and by the Venetian concept of the spettacolothe ludic presentation
of pictorial narrative or low comedy.
14
More was at stake than a single pair of male eyes
gazing at a single womans body. When Titian was asked to repeat his formula painting of
a Venus being ogled by a male attendant, he raised the attendants gaze in successive
versions from Venuss crotch to her eyes (Plates 3, 4).
Titian paintings:
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/tita/ho_36.29.htm
http://www.abcgallery.com/T/titian/titian55.html
The change may have been intended to customize his product for the people who
commissioned the paintings, but it also shows more was happening than an
undifferentiated notion of the male gaze can capture.
The literature that adduces the male gaze without its context in Mulveys argument
has the strength of calling attention to visual relations of uniqual power, but also the double
weakness of its freedom from the Lacanian theory and its tendency to compress all forms
of seeing into instances of the gaze. Contemporary art historical writing valorizes the gaze
but does so in an atmosphere emptied of the strict conditions that Mulvey set out. It is, in
that respect, midway on a course that leads from the explicit theoretical frame of the
primary text to the abstract equation of gaze and theory, or gaze and meaning.
Chapter 3 - 10 - The Gaze
Positional discourse, I
If the gendered gale tends to become abstract, positional discourse about the gaze
tends to become too rigidly classified and subdivided. As an example I will take a few
passages from Brian Rotmans inventive book Signifying Nothing.
15
He begins a
discussion of the phenomenon he calls the closure of the vanishing point with an excerpt
from Norman Brysons Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, to the effect that the
first geological age of perspective saw the gradual clarification of the position of the
observer and the eventual confinement of the observer to the Gaze, a transcendent point of
vision that has discarded the body and exists only as a disembodied punctum.
16
In this
context it is useful to recall that this is as much late twentieth-century kind of description as
a fact about perspective. As Rotman knows, the punctum comes from Roland Barthess
Camera Lucida, where it has nothing to do with perspective. The notions that blindness
results from protracted seeing with a static eye, and that viewer of a perspective image is
reduced to a geometral point, are largely products of the early and middle twentieth
century.
17
From the fifteenth to the early twentieth century, the motionless viewer was
described more directly as the product of a geometrical construction. In the new discourse,
what was once a technical or mathematical question is reimagined as a matter of the
impossibility that an actual viewers body (or eyes) could ever behave as the geometry
prescribes.
Rotmans account of the closure of the vanishing point takes the form of a
fourstep sequence of the visual subject, running through Svetlana Alperss concept of
lookers (painted figures in Northern paintings), and culminating after the Renaissance in
Vermeers Art of Painting. Roughly the sequence is as follows:
Chapter 3 - 11 - The Gaze
1. [T]he Gothic subject whose mode of seeing is dominated by the iconic,
made up of what Bryson calls diffuse nonlocalised nebula[e] of imaginary
definitions
2. The perspectival subject, coded by the vanishing point, situated outside the
frame in a relation of imagined identification with the artists viewpoint
3. The looker, the figure of internal vision in Dutch art, an internalisation of the
perspectival subject, whose interior presence calls into question, and so
suggests the absence of, any exterior point of view
4. The metasubject, engendered by the punctum, able to signify what the
presence of the looker can only raise as an interpretive possibility, namely the
necessary absence of any externally situated, perspectival seeing.
18
Fra Angelicos Coronation of the Virgin is a good example of the first and second of these
(Plate 5).
Fra Angelico, Coronation of the Virgin
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/courbet/ornans.jpg.html
The top portion of the scene takes place in heaven, and Fra Angelico gives the heavenly
figures flattened splaces, so that they look like overlapping playing cards. That is a pre-
perspectival, pre-Renaissance style, and Fra Angelico adopts it intentionally. If
preperspectival conventions are proper to heaven, then worship on earth must take place
according to the stricter regiment of mundane space, and Fra Angelico plants his very solid-
looking donors on a perspective pavement. The upper half answers to Rotmans and
Brysons sense of diffused gazing, while the lower portion is a network of precisely
directed gazes. To Rotman, the sign of the possibility of directed looking is the implied
Chapter 3 - 12 - The Gaze
vanishing point, which he calls a metasign. Before the metasign, there was only
vaguenessa negative condition, awaiting the focus of perspective.
In the third stage the looker stands within the fictive space and sees things we
cannot see (Plate 6). In this painting the lookers gaze at the image on the altar, an
invisible picture within the picture.
Saenredam, Interior of the St. Bavo Church
http://www.buehrle.ch/index.asp?lang=e&id_pic=165
Their very presence lessens our awareness of our own bodies, blurring our experience of
the work in such a way that it becomes plausible, in Alperss reading, to imagine ourselves
wholly in the image. In Rotmans words this is an internalised metasign, and it is only
another step to abstract or reduce it into a punctum, a point or moment in the picture that
signifies the complete dispersion or impossibility of the viewer. (This usage of the
punctum is closer to Barthess than the one I quoted first, and the segue between geometric
and metaphorical uses is also characteristic of recent theorizing on perspective.) The notion
of entirely erasing or negating the viewer is taken literally, so that the image has to display
some necessary proof that the localized, potentially actual viewer is not possible.
Foucault reasoned that way in describing the fragmented and displaced viewers implied by
Las Menias, and Rotman cites a painting by Vermeer that he says implies there is no
external viewer.
19
Rotmans is a syncretic account, blending or juxtaposing Bryson, Barthes, Alpers,
earlier perspectival discourse, and Martin Jays theories of scopic regimes (periods in
which vision is construed in a certain manner). For Rotman the gaze has become a case
with its own vicissitudes leading from the unrepresentable originary moment to the
necessary clarification of conflicting possibilities in the metasubject. The schema is
Chapter 3 - 13 - The Gaze
faithful (in the manner of any escerpt) to its sources, and its clarity seems appropriate for a
concept that finds its constitutive moments in linear perspective. Yet it is also necessary to
question the value of clarity in a field as uneven as the history of scopic regimes and the
ontological status of the viewer.
Bryson distinguishes between the deictic mode of Chinese and Japanese painting,
in which the image cannot be taken in all at once, tota simul, since it has itself unfolded
within the dure of process, and the aoristic mode of Western painting, where the
mastery of the stroke lies in painting out the traces that have brought the strokes into
being. The former implies a carnal, corporeal body, with its gestures and physical
presence, and the latter decarnalises the body and reduces it to a cold, geometric point.
Brysons word for the first is glance, and for the second, Gaze.
20
The schema is
entirely clearbut under what conditions does such clarity fit the historical record or the
needs of critical analysis? When does it cease to be helpful to characterize Western painting
in general as a decarnalized, disembodied, deictic negation of the moving glance? Or
to present Chinese and Japanese painting as examples of an opposite kind of seeing, in
which the body is intimatelyand, by implication, uniformlyinvolved in the creation of
the marks?
Brysons dichotomy and Rotmans set of four stages possess exemplary conceptual
clarity, but run into difficulty when it comes to individual pictures. The paintings by Titian
and the Northern Song painter Juran that Bryson juxtaposes both partake strongly of the
character of the other. Jurans marks are strongly hierarchical, so that it is possible to take
in the entire landscape by scanning for, or becoming aware of, the overall pattern of hemp
fiber or axe cut brushstrokes. It can be argued that the overall effect serves the
monumental, empathic response that the contemporaneous Chinese theorists describe. To
adopt Brysons terms, then, the painting is more than an impure example of the glance: it is
so deeply involved in the Gaze that its very structure would have to be described as a
Chapter 3 - 14 - The Gaze
dialectic between the two. The roster of named brushmarks, the relevant senses of
landscape views, and the customs of viewing are all involved in undermining any account
of the picture as primarily an occasion for the glance. In the Titian the glance is
everywhere implicated in the Gaze because of the presence of nameable techniques, color
choices, palimpsesic marks, decipherable layers of paint, and so forth. The argument I am
suggesting here would depend on these specifics, but its force would not be restricted to an
adjustment of the overall theory. Instead the clarity of the theory is itself in question
whenever the issue is individual works or acts of viewing.
In fact all four of Rotmans stages are present at once in Saenredams painting (see
Plate 6): in the diffuse, nonlocalised nebula of positions implied by the figure of Jesus
painted on the organ door, in the clear presence of perspective consistent with Albertian
perspective, in the looker, and in the historically unnaturally high angle of view,
incommensurate with what would have normally stood as a signifier for human vision.
There are also several forms of looking that are off Rotmans scale. What is our relation to
the startled soldier who hoists his spear as Christ rises in front of him: does a viewer even
belong in his universe? And what about the man, his face halfconcealed, who talks to the
woman in the gallery: how are we positioned in relation to him? I am not so much arguing
that schemata of the gaze are susceptible to more nuanced description, as that there are other
constructions of the viewer. When I look at Saenredams canvas I am very far from that
halfawake soldier: outside the scene in Jerusalem, beyond the confines of the painting, far
below it, but not in the space of the churchI am pushed outside, away, ahead in time,
until I have only the trace of a connection to that figure. My relation to him is not a matter
of ontology or distance or interiority but of pushing. He forces me away, and I do not
know how far I might go. The halfhidden man is at a certain distance and height both
from the looker, from the imaginary position of Saenredam in the church, and from my
probable position in front of the image. But again it is not distance that sets the tone of our
Chapter 3 - 15 - The Gaze
relationship: it is hiding. He conceals himself, no matter how I imagine things, and no
matter where I might be.
Sometimes it is not appropriate to describe relations of distance and position,
simply because they depend on the conceptual field generated by perspective. Regardless of
what position I may wish to take in relation to Rotmans schema, or to Alperss claim in
The Art of Describing that northern picturing is somehow nonAlbertian, the terms she
uses are still perspectival: place, gaze, distance, viewer are all matters of spatial adjustment.
But notice the emptiness of Rotmans description of the first phasea diffuse
nonlocalised nebulaand note too the necessity of inventing so many positional
termslooker, punctum, artists viewpoint, perspectival subject, meta-subject. We may be
employing perspectival metaphors both before and after they are historically pertinent.
Thinking of hiding and pushing is just a way of recasting the act of viewing and the
positions of viewers, as a matter of intimacy and ultimately of seduction. In that reading,
Saenredams painting is still a matter of certain spatial adjustments and repositionings of
viewers, but it is also a drama of refused intimacy and isolation. As I look at the man in the
gallery, I do not think: Where am I in relation to him?instead I think how well hidden he
is, so that I can never see him. From this standpoint the forms of refusal, from outright
pushing to mere hiding, are expressed by the spatial constructions rather than the other way
around, and any talk about the perspectival repositionings and erasures of the viewer is
mere metaphor. At least that would be one way to soften the overly crisp classifications and
distinctions that seem to spring from what I am calling the positional discourse of the gaze.
Positional discourse, II
Positional discourse ramifies into ocular regimes, four-part schemata, and
theories of glance and Gaze. It also has a tendency to remain solidly binary: the viewer and
his gaze, the figure being viewed and her gaze. (Taking the usual genders.) I want to go on
Chapter 3 - 16 - The Gaze
a little about positional discourse to show what happens when the diad of viewer and
viewed is questioned.
The account that Michael Fried has been developing around the concepts of
beholding, absorption and theatricality reaches a pinnacle of complexity in his description
of Gustave Courbets Burial at Ornans. I have written about it at length elsewhere, but I
want to revisit it briefly because I think it remains the most exacting analysis of the gaze in
art history or film theory.
21
In the book, Courbets Realism, the general theme of the
choice between absorptive and theatrical modes takes the form of a specific impetus on
Coutbets part to abjure the theatrical presentation of figures and to explore an especially
corporeal form of absorptive response to pictures. In particular Fried defines a set of related
properties of some of Courbets paintings that point in the direction of Courbets desire to
somehow be merged in a single quasicorporeal identity with his paintings.
In Courbets Realism Frieds term, painterbeholder, names the dual functions
of this aspect of Courbets activity: both as painter and as observer, he wishes to cross the
threshold that divides him from the figures and scenes he creates, and ultimately from the
painting itself.
22
(Frieds term was anticipated in Meyer Schapiros book on Van Gogh,
which has an account of the painter-spectator.
23
But there is a huge difference between
beholder and spectator: the former is enraptured, or potentially so. Spectators can
slump or even see in their imaginations; the archetypal beholder stands, and has a
determinate relation to the work.
24
) Painter and beholder are sometimes one, and other
times separable entities. The properties that give evidence of Courbets desire include
excavated and filledin spaces in some pictures, a certain pressure of figures toward the
picture surface, and a permeability of the lower border of the picture (suggesting that the
painterbeholder might slip into the picture, or the painted figure continue outward).
25
Chapter 3 - 17 - The Gaze
In the Burial at Ornans all that, and more that is not susceptible to summary, is
brought to bear on what is taken to be an especially complex structure of beholding (Plate
7).
Courbet, Burial at Ornans
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/courbet/ornans.jpg.html
It consists in a division between two ways of construing the potential viewer of the picture.
On the one hand, a viewer is posited about onequarter of the way along the picture from
the left side. There are four principal reasons why such a position is implied by the picture:
1. The open grave is skewed, as if it were seen from the left
2. The figure who carries the crucifix looks directly out of the picture, an act that
conventionally implies the presence of a viewer to return the gaze
3. To the left of the crucifixbearer, a choirboy has nearly collided with one of the
pallbearers, and one of a beadle (a man in red) and the kneeling gravedigger
notice the eventand all of this draws renewed attention to the crucifixbearer
4. Between the cur and the coffin there is a deep and narrow spatial cleft of fold
that leads the viewers eye to the far distant end of the procession, where
Courbet painted the profile portrait of his close friend Buchon.
All four of these are commensurate with an implied viewer opposite Buchon. Fried
identifies this first implied position with the painterbeholder, and contrasts it with another
viewer who is centered with respect to the canvas. There are also several reasons why the
painting can be said to imply that second viewer, whom Fried calls the beholder tout
court:
1. The procession snakes forward from Buchons location and culminates on the
center foreground of the painting
Chapter 3 - 18 - The Gaze
2. [I]t appears the center of the composition has deliberately been kept
blankthe gravedigger and the dog turn their heads away from it, and there is
a barely modulated expanse of black pigment looming between the
gravediggers and the two veterans of 1793
3. The grave opens into the lower margin of the painting, as if to excavate a place
for a viewer.
26
Thus the painterbeholder and the beholder tout court exist in unresolved tension with one
another.
The analysis, already unusually complex (especially when it is read together with
Frieds earlier writing on the general ennabling concepts of absorption and theatricality),
becomes astonishingly so once these two beholders have been posited. Fried suggests that
the crucifixbearer looks out at the painterbeholder, but that the painterbeholder looks
past the crucifixbearer and finds Buchon. That nearmiss, allegorized in the nearmiss
between the choir boy and the pallbearer, affectsand here it is necessary to quote Fried
exactly
a separation between what might be described as the paintings gaze out at the
beholderinthepainterbeholder and the
painterinthepainterbeholders gaze into the painting.
27
This way of imagining the structure of beholding lends itself to unusual analytic
elaboration. The place in Frieds text where these chained, italicized neologisms suddenly
appear is one of the most remarkable moments in the historiography of the gaze. Though it
seems that there is nowhere to go from here (and indeed his account breaks at that point and
moves quickly to its conclusion), the account has not reached a necessary ending; and in
fact it can be argued that it is not subtle enough. What is at stake is not really the
paintings gaze out at the beholderinthepainterbeholder, since the painting as
a whole does not necessarily return the beholders gaze. Instead that gaze is returned (or
Chapter 3 - 19 - The Gaze
rather, missed, since Buchon looks away) by a particular figure for the painterbeholder,
so the phrase would more accurately be painterbeholderfigures gaze out at the
beholderinthepainterbeholder.
And even this does not exhaust the internal logic of the painter-beholder and the
other terms of Frieds argument. It would be possible to go on and begin to characterize the
relationships that other individuals, pairs, groups, and even featureless areas of paint also
have to the painted figure for the painterbeholder. For example, to the extent that the
avoidance of reciprocity between gazes between the crucifixbearer and the
painterbeholder resembles the nearmiss between the choirboy and the pallbearer, the
choirboy is also a figure for the crucifixbearer, and the pallbearer for the
painterbeholder.
28
Fried says the two pairs resemble one another, one marvel of nuance
confirming the other, but the choirboy is more than just another instance of the function
provided by the crucifixbearer, because he is also a figure for the primary figure for the
crucifixbearer: he is, to put it in another formula, a figure for the paintings gaze out at
the beholderinthepainterbeholder. And things become more involved with the
pallbearer, whose function is analogous to the painterbeholder, but who is also
represented in the painting. He would be one of the paintings figures for the
painterbeholderfigures gaze out at the beholderinthepainterbeholder.
Because both pairs of gazes are nearmisses, they are both actually triads: the first
triad is the painterbeholder, the crucifixbearer, and Buchon, and the second is the
choirboy, the pallbearer, and the candle (or the hat) that has been tipped. It would therefore
be possible to characterize the candle or hat as a figure for Buchon. Possible, and also
necessary: I do not mean these elaborations as a joke, even though they would have to be
expanded and reworded to avoid the concatenation of hyphenated identities. The very
existence of Frieds text implies that much more has to be done to explore the fuller
structure of beholding even in this one painting.
Chapter 3 - 20 - The Gaze
Positional analyses of the gaze are in their infancy. To my knowledge, for example,
no single painting of Watteau has yet received a careful account in terms of the gaze.
Watteaus paintings are symphonies of flirtation and coyness, glancing, glimpsing,
blinking, looking away, looking askance and awry, ogling and swooning. A truly
exhaustive analysis might dislose patterns of seeing and structures of beholding that move
far beyond the lonely twosomes we still prefer.
Psychoanalytic discourse
Third of the discourses is psychoanalytic, and especially Lacans theory, the
original source for Mulveys essay. Lacans account of the gaze is arguably one of the most
difficult passages in the Seminars: so difficult, so obdurate and opaque, that I think it has
yet to be given a full and satisfactory reading. It has been inspiring for several generations
of readers, but it has not been fully elucidated. For that reason I am skeptical about all
accounts that cite Lacan, or lean on his concepts.
The passage on the gaze is embedded in the seminars collected as Four
Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis, where it figures within the section later titled
Of the Gaze as Object Petit a, and specifically in the single lecture on The Line and
Light.
29
The lecture sets forth the idea of the annihilation of the seeing subject in the act of
seeing, the function of pictures as traps for the gaze, and the claim that the investigation of
optics is the investigation of the philosophical subject. The lectures centerpiece is the story
of the sardine can, and afterward Lacan elaborates the crossed or chiasmatic theory of
vision.
(The sardine can story, briefly: Lacan was out on a boat with some fishermen; they
saw the sun glint off a floating sardine can; they joked to Lacan, the young intellectual from
the city, saying that the can was looking at him; and he says he realized the truth of what
they saidthat the sardine can was a kind of eye, a looking thing.)
Chapter 3 - 21 - The Gaze
These few pages (and some preceding pages concerning anamorphosis) have been
used for many purposes, and read in widely divergent ways. Here I want to concentrate on
some conditions for interpretation in general. Beyond the initial problems of Lacans
syntax, his allusions, and his terminology, there is a more fundamental problem of the way
he reasons. In particular the mode of reasoning (by which I mean, among other things, the
strictness of the logic, the connectedness of the claims, the precision of the terms, and the
rules of their combination) changes several times without warning or reason, and those
moments set the irreducible limits to the kinds of interpretation that can claim to be faithful
to the text. There are many such moments in Lacan, and they deserve a full study; here I
will just point out three that happen just after the story of the sardine can.
A great deal of rhetorical finesseincluding cajoling, corn, anecdotes, repetition
and reminders, poetry, and deliberate non sequitursgoes into the dramatic entrance of the
sardine can story. The purpose of the story, in the most immediate sense, is to introduce
the chiasmatic or crossed nature of vision: the way that the gaze proceeds from the subject
and also to the subject from outside.
30
At first, Lacan says, it seemed as if vision could be
adequately described as a triangle, with the geometral point at the right, the object at the
left, and the image between, as it had always been in linear perspective (Table 1, upper
left).
Chapter 3 - 22 - The Gaze
Table 1
After considering the sardine can, Lacan decides that it was looking at me at the
level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated, and
that leads to the inverted triangle, with the subjectLacantransformed into a picture,
looked at by a point of light (Table 1, right). This is the first move I want to consider. It
is an eminently surrealist intuition, comprehensible in the atmosphere of uncanny visual
apparitions, pathetic fallacies, and belligerent anthropomorphisms that Lacan sometimes
shared with the surrealist theorists and painters. It is a perfect paradox in the sense that it
provides a sense of completion, logic and symmetry where none had existed, at the cost of
Chapter 3 - 23 - The Gaze
virtually the entire rational content of the perspectival schema. It creates an answer where
there had been no question, and makes it seem as if there had been something incomplete
about perspective by stifling the kind of perspectival construction of meaning that would
render the invention meaningless. So far, and within these very strict confines, this is an
effective and persuasive invention.
The second anomaly follows immediately, as Lacan identifies himself not with the
picture but with the screen: And if I am anything in the picture, it is always in the form of
the screen, which I earlier called the stain, the spot.
32
This is a second change in the mode
of reasoning because it allows for combinations of functions: the picture can be assimilated
to, or combined with, the screen. The way of manipulating concepts that would make this a
sensible move is itself incommensurate with the ways of reasoning that produced the screen
or that made the initial inversion permissible.
The first anomalous element, the first alteration in the mode of reasoning, is the
screen that is then added to the inverted triangle. It parallels the image in the original
schema, so that the triangle and its inversion can both have median bisectors, but its
function cannot be an inversion of the function of the image. In my reading, the few
paragraphs surrounding the introduction of the screen are the most difficult in The Line
and Light: before them, Lacan is preparing for his story by stressing the traps of vision;
and after them, he is using elaborating in the meaning of the inverted schema by exploring
Roger Cailloiss thoughts on mimicry and camouflage. What comes before prepares the
ground for the inversion; what follows is concerned with chiasmatic seeing. But the
screen does not make sense in the same way as those other passages make sense: it is
neither geometry, vision, phenomenology, nor biology. The screen is the reverse not of the
image but of geometral, optical space: it denotes the untraversable opacity that always
implicates blindness in seeing.
31

Chapter 3 - 24 - The Gaze
Hence there is an unaccountable mobility of kinds of reasoning in these paragraphs
that abruptly ceases when Lacan goes on to explore the biological parallels of the notion
that the subject might function as a picture. Roger Cailloiss texts, which Lacan then
adduces, are ample support for what he wants to claim about subjects functioning as hidden
stains in pictures of the world (so that they avoid predators), or as points of light that
stand out against the world (so that they frighten predators).
As Lacan himself observes, there are many ways of being wrong about the
function of the subject in the domain of spectacle, and it is not difficult to construct
arguments against portions of his text. Yet it seems to me that the internal logical of these
passagesmore precisely, the breaks between blocks of argument that depend on different
standards of logic and evidenceneed to be addressed before it is possible either to mount
either a broad critique or to build an application to some specific regimen of seeing.
Lacans account of the gaze is arguably the most important and influential in the
entirely of visual studies. It is tremendously suggestive but virtually impossible to read: it
is not possible, I think, to arrive at a single, reasonably self-consistent interpretation that is
more than a matter of just picking out lucid or inspiring fragments. Lacans seminar on the
gaze is like a deep well for visual theory: people draw on it, but no one really knows what
is down there. Texts that rely on Lacan can often be best read by taking the Lacanian
references more as scholarly gestures than integral parts of the argument.
Nonwestern gazes
The issues I am raising here, I hope, make it more difficult to apply existing
concepts of the gaze. They do not vitiate the concept itself, or even its importance in figural
art. I will close with a final problem, which is on the the horizon for any application of the
gaze, and that is its Westernness. Every one of the primary texts for the study of the gaze
are Western, and virtually all are American, French, or French Canadian. All of them
Chapter 3 - 25 - The Gaze
postdate Riegl, and most were written from 1970 to the present. Those facts alone should
give pause to any writer who intends to apply the gaze more widelynot only to
premodern Western art, as I have been suggesting, but also to nonWestern art.
Two brief examples, as envois to a territory that is still untheorized. Where do the
eyes on the Temple of the Sun at Teotihuacan stare? Should we say they look
sidewaysbut then to what purpose? Do the flanks of the temple need special protection?
If we chose to say they look outward, but in no particular direction, or that they signify
vision without themselves seeing, we are only describing the limits of our own way of
understanding the gaze: that is, we describe an unfocussed eye as a defective gaze.
Multiple eyes have always posed interpretive problems. Margaret Olin has
suggested that Alois Riegls interest in the Dutch group portrait sprang in part from his
suspicion that his contemporaries were put off by too much staring.
33
Faced with rows of
identical stares, Riegl concluded that staring itself was at issue: rather than considering the
successive force of individual gazes, he thought of the single significance of assumulated
stares. The same difficulty occurs in any number of nonWestern artifacts. Chinese ritual
bronze vessels are sometimes crowded with multiple versions of the uspecifiable mythic
animal called the taotie, and when individual taoties dissolve into meanders of eyes there
can be hundreds of eyes on each side of a vessel (Plate 8).
A selection of taotie images:
http://www.logoi.com/notes/beast.html
http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Art/BronzeMetal/taotiepic.htm
http://www.smcm.edu/art/arth104/shang/TTdrawB.html
How are we constituted as viewers in the light of such an onslaught of seeing? Riegl once
felt this possibility, as Olin has remarked, when he saw hundreds of eyes between the
Chapter 3 - 26 - The Gaze
trees in Jacob Ruisdaels peaceful Village in the Forest Valley.
34
Is the Chinese vessel also
a theater full of eyes? Is it an occasion for what Bryson has termed the characteristic
paranoia of the gaze?
35
Or do we need an entirely different way of responding to so many
eyes?
Summary
I have argued differently about each of the three discourses of the gaze. Because the
argument is complicated, Ill sum up as systematically as I can.
1. Theories of looking that stress gender are prone to widening abstraction, where
either (a) androcentric or androlatric (idolatrously male-centered) seeing or (b) an
intergender, combined gender, or gender-projection model, becomes the model for
philosophy itself.
2. Theories that emphasize the viewers position tend in two directions: some
ramify into classifications such as ocular regimes, and others condense into dualities of
viewer and viewed. About the first I argued that the classifications can be too rigid to fit the
historical facts; about the second I proposed that critiques of the simple duality
viewer/viewed tend to be too broad to match the particular properties of paintings (such as
Courbets or Watteaus).
3. Theories that emphasize psychoanalysis tend to rely on Lacan, and when they do
they are compelled to take fragments from his text because the text as a whole still lacks a
good reading. Lacan cannot legitimately be taken as a source for theories of the gaze: rather
he is a source for individual ideas that are already partly disconnected from one another and
often disconnected from the uses to which they are put by contemporary theorists.
4. And finally, I argued that theories of the gaze are demonstrably both modern and
Western, so its extensions to non-Western and pre-modern work should be viewed with
circumspection.
Chapter 3 - 27 - The Gaze
All this makes the gaze a treacherous concept: indispensable for the kinds of
analyses that still matter in visual theory, but ambiguous, self-contradictory, occasionally
too rigid, too abstract, too general or loose or thin or simply unhelpful.
Chapter 3 - 28 - The Gaze
Notes to Chapter 3
1
Gaze, in Critical Terms for Art History, edited by Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 208-18.
2
Gaze, 209.
3
Gaze, 216-17.
4
Hollander, An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century
Dutch Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), forthcoming, 98.
5
My own work is mainly in The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1997). See also Kaja Silvermans work, for example The
Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996); and Silverman, World
Spectators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
6 Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, originally published in Screen
16 no. 3 (autumn 1975), reprinted for example in Feminism and Film Theory, edited by
Constance Penley (New York: Routledge, 1988), 5768; Visual and Other Pleasures
(Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14-26; and most recently revised in
Feminist Film Theory, edited by Sue Thornham (New York: New York University Press,
1999), 41228. Here I quote the 1999 reprint, p. 413.
7 Mulvey, ed. cit., 416, 418.
8 Mulvey, ed. cit., 421.
9 Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness
(Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
10 Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and
Medicine (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1991); see also Contrapposto: Style and Meaning
in Renaissance Art, The Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 336-61.
Chapter 3 - 29 - The Gaze
[Notes, continued]
11 The Hlne Cixous Reader, edited by Susan Sellers, with an introduction by Jacques
Derrida (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Mikkel BorchJacobsen, Jacques Lacan, The
Absolute Master, translated by Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1991), which has excellent reflections on photo-ontologythe relatio between reflection
and thought.
12
Snow, Theorizing the Male Gaze: Some Problems, Representations 25 (1989): 30-
41, quotation on p. 39.
13
See for example Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and
Feminist Film Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988).
14 For the paragone see for example Marion Boudon, Le relief d'Ugolin de Pierino da
Vinci: une rponse sculpte au problme du Paragone, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 132
(1998): 1-18; Erin Campbell, The Gendered Paragone In Late Sixteenth-Century Art
Theory: Francesco Bocchi and Jacopo Pontormos S. Lorenzo Frescoes, Word & Image
16 no3 (2000): 227-38. For the spattecolo see Arnadlo Bruschi, Bramante (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1977).
15 Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (New York: St. Martins Press,
1987).
16 Bryson, Vision and Painting, The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1983), 107, quoted in Rotman, Signifying Nothing, 3233.
17 This is argued in my Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
18
Signifying Nothing, 40.
19 Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York:
Pantheon, 1970).
20 Bryson, Vision and Painting, 9495.
Chapter 3 - 30 - The Gaze
[Notes, continued]
21 I have taken up Frieds text in my Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History
as Writing (New York: Routledge, 2000), 246-52, and in The Failed and the Inadvertent:
The Theory of the Unconscious in the History of Art International Journal of
PsychoAnalysis 75 part 1 (1994): 11932.
22 Fried, Courbets Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 131.
23
Schapiro, Van Gogh ([ ]).
24
For Frieds sense of the upright beholder see Courbets Realism, p. 308, n. 11.
25 Courbets Realism, 5384, 125, 128, 13233.
26 Courbets Realism, 13637.
27 Courbets Realism, 139.
28 It cannot be the other way around, since the choirboy most nearly faces us, and the
pallbearer has his back to us in the way that an imaginary painterbeholder has when facing
the canvas.
29 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis [Sminaire de Jacques
Lacan, vol. 11, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse], translated by
Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 91104.
30 Four Fundamental Concepts, 106.
31 Four Fundamental Concepts, 96.
32 Four Fundamental Concepts, 97.
33 Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegls Theory of Art (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 16162.
34 Olin, Forms of Representation , 161.
35 Norman Bryson, The Gaze in the Expanded Field, in Vision and Visuality, edited by
Hal Foster (Seattle, 1988), 87108.
Chapter 3 - 31 - The Gaze
[Notes, continued]