The Gaze in the Media - 21/10/2011

Women carry the idea in their mind of being looked at, they cannot escape from being seen as objects.

Women watch themselves being looked at.

Hans Memling - Vanity

the painter displays the female form for us to see but places a mirror in the figures hand to invert that. the viewer is invited to look at the female form, while in a moment of cointemplation of her own image. Justifies the self regarding object.

A. Cabanel - Birth of Venus

female form, semi concious, eyes averted, looks like she's just woken up
she is not aware we are looking

Titian - Venus of Urbino

awareness of us looking, ladylike inviting slightly modest.

Manet - Olympia

A prostitute, displays the trappings of wealth, uninterested in flowers, the cat is a symbol of femeninity and independance.

Inges - Le Grand Odalisque
-guerilla girls
"less that 5% of the artists in the modern art sections of galleries are women, 85% of the nudes are female.

Manet - Bar at Folies Begeres
-a girl at the bar serving , looks right at us. impossible reflection  of the artist to the right. We are in his place.

Jeff Wall photographic recreation of the above.


The replay of this "women as objects" in popular imagery is an obsessive distancing of women. It is voyeurism.

Peeping Tom - 1960
A photographer takes an image and then kills the woman to own her image.

D&G 2007

a group of men ina gym, objectified as powerful, displayed actively. Freudian interpretation is obvious - men are dominant and women are submissive.

In a patriarchal society, the pleasure of looking is split as above.


Barbara Kruger - Your Gaze hits the side of my face. reclaimed images, stone sculpture, violent wording, turning away, stone skin

Sarah Lucas - Eating a banana.
the banana is a fallic object, she looks straight at us, agressively.

Amanda Knox was spoken about in the italien media as being a witch. a natural liar.
The Maleus Maleficarum - book about witches, witches power comes from carnal desire which in women is insatiable - according to the book. example of typical sexual repression

Susan Sontag - "to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed"

Reality Tv like Big Brother is voyeuristic.consumption of a type of reality.

"looking is not indifferent" - Ways of seeing chapter 3

LEVEL 5 - Lecure 1, Panopticism. (14/10/11)

Literature, art and their respective producers do not exist independently of a complex institutional framework which authorises, enables, empowers and legitimises them. This framework must be incorporated into any analysis that pretends to provide a thorough understanding of cultural goods and practices.’ Randal Johnson in Walker & Chaplin (1999)

The Panopticon - Jeremy Bentham (1971)

Foucault says that forms of knowledge such as biology, medicine and psychiatry, legitimise the use of hospitals school and prisons.

These institutions effect us by internalising our responsibility.

Punishments and technology such as execution, the stocks, torture and prison were / are used as forms of discipline to prevent people from breaking the rules instated by the wealthy and powerful in our society.

Discipline is a ‘technology’ [aimed at] ‘how to keep someone under surveillance, how to control his conduct, his behaviour, his aptitudes, how to improve his performance, multiply his capacities, how to put him where he is most useful: that is discipline in my sense’ (Foucault,1981 in O’Farrrell 2005:102)

The panopticon is also a metaphor for the way power is beggining to exist in modern society, it intills the feeling of being watched in everyone.

I will use the panopticon to describe this power structure from now on.

The model of the panopticon is being used in modern society today.

In Cuba there is the Presidio Modelo, In england Millbank prison resembles this model.

Not only that but modern offices and schools often resemble the panopticon, they seek to make people feel like they are being watched. Libraries and museums often look like it. The act of keeping files on individuals is a method embodied by the panopticon.CCTV is a very good example. As is FACEBOOK.

The panopticon allows scrutiny, allows the supervisor to experiment on their subjects and aims to make them more productive.

It seeks to reform prisoners, treat patients, instruct school children, confine but also study the insane, supervise workers, and put beggers and idlers to work.

What Foucault is describing is a transformation in Western societies from a form of power imposed by a ‘ruler’ or ‘sovereign’ to……….. A NEW MODE OF POWER CALLED “PANOPTICISM”

The ‘panopticon’ is a model of how modern society organises its knowledge, its power, its surveillance of bodies and its ‘training’ of bodies.

‘power relations have an immediate hold upon it [the body]; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’ (Foucault 1975)

Foucault argues that this sort of society produces 'docile bodies.'

We are self monitering, self correcting, obediant bodies.

“That the techniques of discipline and ‘gentle punishment’ have crossed the threshold from work to play shows how pervasive they have become within modern western societies” (Danaher, Schirato & Webb 2000)

His definition is not a top-down model as with Marxism

power is not a thing or a capacity people have – it is a relation between different individuals and groups, and only exists when it is being exercised.

The exercise of power relies on there being the capacity for power to be resisted

‘Where there is power there is resistance’