WAYS OF SEEING

"Discuss how CONTEXT has a effect on our understanding, our perception of art, of MEANING."

The first chapter of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, I feel, is the most important for an artist to consider. Ways of Seeing suggest many different reasons why pictures were made, for example old oil paintings of female nudity were made for lust, some pictures were made as a show of your possession, pictures made for envy... Whatever reason these pictures were made for, the reading is telling me how to look at it, otherwise I may not have ever looked at the pictures this way. .. The meaning of the picture has been affected.

In the first essay John Berger explains how a work of art is affected by what surrounds it, by words, by other pictures next t oit, whether it’s in a magazine, slideshow, even what kind of music is in the background. He suggests that art rarely ever truly “speaks for itself”. There are examples of this being true throughout the book, like the second essay has one page with pictures of women shown next to pictures of meat; the women have now been given a disturbing meaning to me. And then, later in the book, the pictures of women are changed again: the third essay suggests that a good portion, if not all, oil paintings of women in nude were just for a man’s pleasure. You are then instructed to go back and look at all of the pictures of women and imagine a man in their place. Again, suddenly, all of the pictures I had previously looked at changed meaning. Even the last essay shows how corporations can obscure a picture, and use it to persuade people into buying their product. This can easily be related to our studies on “place”. How each of us interprets the different places depends on our past experiences, what surrounds the area, etc.

One piece of work can be interpreted an infinite number of ways.
So what does that mean for the artist? It means I have to consider my viewer when making a piece. I know how it feels to me, but how can I truly get that meaning across to the viewer? How can I display the Shoe Tree or the Daily Grind to them, the same way I see it and feel its meaning? If it’s on display, do I want it against a white background? Brick? Wood? Should I add words and symbols? This will all affect my picture and I can use such manipulative tools to help give the viewer the affect I want. I also need to consider how will my own picture be manipulated by others? How others see my picture, in the end, depends solely on their past experiences. Will I want to target one specific audience? Or try to keep it open for all to interpret?

A true masterpiece is one, as they say, can stand the test of time. After time, my picture will most likely end up meaning something very different. This is what makes art a living organism. A picture’s meaning is always undergoing constant changes and I will have to accept the inevitable, my piece will become contorted. A true masterpiece is not a picture that might be popular for a short piece of time, but something like a Picasso, a Da Vinci, a Michaelangelo; artist’s who are still famous centuries after their time, despite how often the meanings of their pictures have changed. That is a piece of artwork truly worth making.