Excavación de zanja

To refer to looking as ‘the gaze’ is to embarrass the spectator with an encumbrance of theoretical presumptions. In arthistorical terms it suggests a degree of privilege and carries with it connotations of detachment, knowledge, and connoisseurship that underwrite cultural competence. Feminist art historians have accurately read this as a competence authorized by the patriarchy and thus the gaze is now not a gender neutral term. Film theorists borrowed ‘the gaze’ to label the look of the camera and the film-goer, and in mainstream western cinema, this has largely been the perspective of the normative, white, heterosexual male. In film theory the gaze is never gender neutral; it is informed by psychoanalytic concepts of desire and anxiety, and in the case of commercial cinema, is also driven by the demand for profit, and therefore vulnerable to allegations of exploitation. In addition to being instrumental in the objectification of women, and sometimes men, the gaze also stands accused of bias and exploitation on grounds of race and sexuality. The gaze that I am considering here as imbricated in embarrassments takes into account the more recent layers of meaning of pejorative (gender) differentiation, but as

supplementary to the deeply rooted original meaning of a look of cultural competence. For my work on embarrassment, ‘the gaze’ is considered to be a loaded term that takes it as read that spectatorship is a scene of objectification.

The spectatorial position characteristic of ‘the gaze’ is identified here as a potential source of embarrassments: firstly there may be a failure to display the necessary

54 disinterest that is the sign of cultural competence, and opposing this, there is a certain revulsion towards the idea of cultural competence as an embarrassing white, male, middle-class stereotype. Then there is the feeling of voyeurism, of being caught looking, and the discredit of ‘getting away with it’ offered by the gaze as the ‘alibi of art’. Finally, there is perhaps a small and academic embarrassment in talking of ‘the gaze’ at all. It is a little passé; an overworked, over-critiqued and overdetermined phrase inclined to be dismissed in some quarters as just ‘over’, with the implication that everything that there is to be said, has already been said.

In Critical Terms for Art History Margaret Olin defines the gaze;

‘Gaze’ is a rather literary term for what could also be called ‘looking’ or ‘watching’. Its connotation of a long ardent look may bring to mind the intensity in which knowledge and pleasure mingle when I behold a work of art. Whilst most discourse about the gaze concerns pleasure and

knowledge, however, it generally places both of these in the service of issues of power, manipulation, and desire.66

The gaze assumes a particular spectatorial standpoint; that of cultural competence and identification with the socio-ideological hegemony. This is extensively theorised by Bourdieu who states, with specific reference to looking at art, that seeing is ancillary to knowing; ‘the capacity to see (voir) is a function of knowledge (savoir)’ and that seeing/knowing then enables a culturally competent person to decode elements of the artwork and so appreciate it in the legitimate, that is, correct and appropriate manner.67 Such competence or ‘cultural capital’ may, according to Bourdieu be an innate competence born of social privilege, or a competence that is acquired through education.

66

Margret Olin in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds., Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). p318.

67

55 But what if such cultural capital is doubtful? Like the Autodidact in Sartre’s Nausea, the spectator may feel incompetent, or illegitimate in the art gallery. They may feel they are missing something, and afraid that that signals inadequacy, a lack of competence, exclusion from a coterie of cultural privilege.

The Autodidact suddenly grows sad:

‘Those portraits in the main hall? Monsieur,’ he says, with a tremulous smile, ‘I don’t know anything about painting. Naturally I realize that Bordurin is a great painter, I can see that he knows his stuff, as they say. But

pleasure, Monsieur, aesthetic pleasure is something I have never known.’68 The Autodidact (self-taught and thus in possession of illegitimate knowledge rather than innate cultural capital) is gropingly aware of something that he knows he doesn’t know. Something that he feels he doesn’t feel. What he is failing to find is not in fact knowledge, or feeling, but distance, a detachment that brackets out life. What is missing is a critical distance that quite separates life and art.

Differentiating between those individuals whose cultural capital originates in social privilege and ‘legitimate’ education and those who aspire to a cultural competence in excess of their social origins, Bourdieu notes; ‘the autodidact, a victim by default of the effects of educational entitlement, is ignorant of the right to be ignorant that is conferred by certificates of knowledge.’69 _{I find that I too am ignorant of the idea} that ignorance might be anyone’s by right. And I am certainly embarrassed by my lack of critical distance. The response to art that I berate myself for consistently failing to achieve is predicated on Kantian aesthetics and propagated by an old- school modernism. Clive Bell argued, almost a century ago, that there is a ‘peculiar emotion’ that all true works of art produce. He called this ‘aesthetic emotion’ and considered it to be infinitely superior to the common-or-garden type; the ordinary emotions of life;

68

Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans., Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 2000 (1938)).p157.

69

56 To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no

knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation.70

Evidently I fail to leave the ideas and affairs of life behind. I am not exalted. As a spectator I am never apart from my biography; my gender and my social origin are the conditions of my looking. Real, inconvenient, ordinary life persistently corrupts my spectatorship, and my response is embarrassingly emotional in the ordinary idiom.

Another embarrassment that disgraces the gaze is its voyeurism. Olin’s definition goes on to say that the gaze is like ‘the publicly sanctioned actions of a peeping Tom’.71 _{The gaze is a look that satisfies appetites for difference, for sex and} violence, and also for sentiment. It is a dubious look, already guilty, with the implication that the spectator, like Sartre’s voyeur at the keyhole knows he and his peeping are seen by the other, he has been caught looking. ‘The gaze’ causes the uncomfortable feeling that in the context of art, we are always ‘caught looking’. But if one of the embarrassing things about looking at art is its propensity to address our appetites for transgressive images, the counterpart of that embarrassment is what Cashell calls ‘the alibi of art.’72 _{The diplomatic immunity of ‘art’ lets the spectator} ‘get away with it’ by invoking a dispensation to indulge a taste for images that if not- art might be considered socially or morally bankrupt. The art-ness of the image in fact, not only authorises our looking, but reframes a voyeuristic look as urbane and cultured. I would argue that the alibi, as an alibi is embarrassing. It suggests a degree of hypocrisy that may conflict with our sense of a best self. I find that I am

70 _{Bell, Clive ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis’ in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in}

Theory 1900 - 2000 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003).

71

Olin in Nelson and Shiff, p318.

72

Kieran Cashell, Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art (London: I B Tauris, 2009). p1.

57 embarrassed not (only) for enjoying ‘difficult’ images, but for enjoying them ‘as art’. I am not censorious of ‘difficult’ images (quite the opposite), I enjoy looking at them and sometimes they are embarrassing but I would prefer to own my choices, in fact to ‘own up’ to my pleasure despite the embarrassment this sometimes causes.73