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GAZE AND GLANCE: Norman Bryson's Vision and Painting critiques realism in painting because its apparent invisibility as technique and as meaning in a social formation appeals to an ahistorical, disembodied, programmatic "gaze." In contrast, he describes the "glance" as anchored in history, in body, in desire, and in improvisation. The latter is preferable because it allows for an aesthetics of disruption. The terminology has become quite fashionable and can be found nearly anywhere. See also essential copy, perceptualism, social formation. Cf anchoring gaze. Jacques Lacan's use of the word "gaze" is more abstract and psychological, describing the fact that individuals are caught up in the scopic field of others (see scopic pulsion). The gaze is thus fundamentally different from the eye because the former is a network of relations while the latter is simply one point. Moreover, that one point is a scotoma, so individuals are blind to themselves. For Lacan, a "picture" -- especially one which uses traditional linear perspective -- is a kind of trap for the gaze, inasmuch as it puts the viewer into the hypothetical position of the eye, even as it is also inevitably social and psychological. He invented the phrase dompte-regard (as a play of sorts on trompe l'oeil) to describe this function of the picture as a gaze-tamer. Images which deform perspective, as in anamorphosis, fail to trap the gaze and thus are more revealing of desire. Not surprisingly, the famous skull in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors becomes, for Lacan, a phallus.
GEISTESGESCHICHTE: The history of ideas, or intellectual history. Wilhelm Dilthey argued that if the natural sciences explain events as the results of causal laws, cultural science should explain events in terms of the meanings and intentions that people give them. These meanings and intentions, however, are informed by historical and social change, particularly the total global outlook peculiar to a given period (see Weltanschauung). Geistesgeschichte made inroads into art history in Max Dvor�k's Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Art. Dvor�k saw Medieval art as the visual manifestation of a particular attitude towards Christian spirituality, rather than simply as an effect of contemporary theology. I.e., theology did not cause changes in art; art and theology were both caused by the Weltanschauung. See Zeitgeist.
GENDER: J. P. Chaplin's Dictionary of Psychology lists "gender" simply as "sex -- male or female," while "gender identity" is given as "one's sense of being male or female." In contemporary artwriting, "gender" usually means the latter of these two. This is almost always given additional spin by allusion to the ideas of Michel Foucault (see Foucauldian), who described gender not as biological identity but as the result of various processes of socialization.
VermiciousKnid · Mon May 23, 2005 @ 07:15am · 0 Comments |
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