Midterm Synopsis

Whenever we look at something, it is not just the object that determines what we see. We not only look in a context of the sounds, smells, and feelings surrounding us, but in the context of how our individual brains interpret what our eyes deliver. Chapter three of Practices of Looking goes into detail about the concepts of spectatorship and the gaze, explaining their uses in understanding the psychology of looking. Spectatorship is defined as “the practice of looking” (p 102), while the gaze is “a field rather than an individual’s act of looking” (p 103). The concepts of spectatorship and gaze are used in all sorts of visual media throughout history: from classic masterpieces to current blockbuster movies.
In order to better explain this concept, Foucault used the Diego Velazquez painting “Las Meninas”, painted in 1656. In this painting, Velazquez carefully took the spectator into consideration. By placing a mirror in the scene, the viewer’s viewpoint is altered, and in effect, Velazquez also places the viewer into the scene. When the viewer becomes part of the object they are looking at, it brings the interpretation to a whole new level. While these this may have been a trick of the trade nearly 400 years ago, it is still in practice today.
The unconscious mind is very important when it comes to cinematic spectatorship. The gaze has been heavily looked at in the field of psychoanalysis, and helps to understand spectatorship and the unconscious aspects of looking. “Psychoanalysis was brought in to visual theory in order to explain more fully the idea that the subject is constituted at an unconscious, as well as a conscious level” (p 103). Christian Metz, a cinematic theorist wrote about how the minds of viewers react to watching a film. When in a dark movie theater, where the screen acts almost like a mirror, the viewers shed their own ego and identifies with the character on screen. Jacques Lacan another theorist believed “that the gaze is a property of the object and not the subject who looks. The gaze is a process in which the object functions to make the subject look making the subject appear to himself or herself as lacking” (p 122), which leads to the process of identification, and the study of how we respond to and associate with images.
The gaze has also been studied in terms of gender. Through most of history, the audiences of works of art have been men, so the artists have geared their works towards male eyes and brains. This resulted in the nude females always appearing as “objects of an active or ‘male’ gaze, and their returning looks are more often downcast, indirect or otherwise coded as passive” (p 123-124). Centuries later, this trend can still been seen in present-day advertisements.
Artists and advertisers have a knack for getting into the minds of their viewers. Through careful use of the gaze and spectatorship, they cannot only alter what we see, but how we see.