ARH411 Theory and Methods 2022

     In this week’s reading, Amelia Jones described French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on phenomenology as it relates to interpreting art. Phenomenology is the study of consciousness and the human experience, and Merleau-Ponty’s model says that we are embodied subjects, meaning our physical bodies not only cannot be separated from our conscious minds, but that we make meaning through how our bodies interact with the world around us. In that way, the world around us is just as important to our understanding and interpretation as our own body-mind - the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of phenomenology is that all we are able to experience and understand is done so through reciprocity with others. There is no human experience - no philosophy, understanding, connection, or meaning - in a vacuum.      So what does this have to do with art? By this point in the semester, we have spent a significant amount of time learning about different ways critic...

     In “The Death of the Author”, Roland Barthes discusses the relationship between the author, their writing, and the readers - which Sherrie Levine later borrows from to apply to her art. Barthes starts by describing the idea that, contrary to what we often think and feel, the author’s words are as separate from the author as an actor is to the character they are portraying on stage. As humans, when we discover a piece of literature that piques our interest, it’s our tendency to want to research the author to better understand the person who wrote those words. Sometimes, we may even put these writers up on pedestals in our minds for having some sort of “secret” and glorify them for it.      But Barthes argues that, no matter how an author arranges the words together on the page, all of the words have already existed and there’s no combination of words the author can arrange that would be truly original to them as an individual. By looking to the author ...

This week, to further the conversation about sexism in cinema, we read The Oppositional Gaze by bell hooks, who introduces and reinforces the importance of intersectionality when talking about inclusivity in film. Hooks, a black woman, breaks down the differences between white and black female representation in film, how feminism is leaving black women out, and how she draws her own power from that which has been historically used against women like her. The mainstream cinema psychology that Laura Mulvey described in last week’s reading is only effective when the viewer can identify with the characters they are watching. When discussing it in terms of men and women alone, men identify with the male protagonist and women identify with the female love interest - but these tropes, until recently, were exclusive to white characters and actors. Even in the sexism of that structure, both white male and female characters were idealized. While we may understand now how oppressive the objectifi...

For week 5 we read “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by Laura Mulvey, who discussed the effect watching films in theaters has on the viewers, and some of the contradictory psychology behind it. She first explained the concept of scopophilia, or sexual pleasure from looking - similar to voyeurism, if not a milder and more persistent version. When watching films in a theater, despite it being a public experience intended for mass audiences, the viewer is made to feel as though they are witnessing private moments in a private space. The perspectives from which movies are shot, the intimacy of the scenes, and the darkness in the theater are all giving them a sense of privacy even when watching with 100 other people. This facet would of course be magnified as cinema has become more and more accessible to consume in the comfort of our homes in total privacy, as well. Mulvey explained that because of this scopophilia, we are drawn to films that satisfy a base sexual desire to look. The s...

      In this week’s reading, we examined the discouragingly rampant sexism in art history through Linda Nochlin’s essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? She points out the similarities between all the “great” artists through history - they were white men with access to extensive art education or apprenticeship through association, and they were deemed “great” by white men with access to extensive bank accounts. She explains that, although these famous artists are often revered as “prodigies” or “artistic geniuses”, implying that their artistic success was inherent from birth,¹ they actually had significant advantages over other (especially female) artists at the time.      Nochlin’s most obvious example for this is that professional male artists at the highest level studied live nude models, but women weren’t allowed access to these sessions until the very end of the 19th century, and even then, they weren’t fully nude.² Without equal acces...

A screenshot of the website where you can purchase Benjamin's essay as an NFT, (Zak Loyd, 2021) https://foundation.app/@zakloyd/foundation/54893       This week, we read Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, published in 1936. In the essay, Benjamin discusses how modern technology was affecting how art was being made, replicated, seen, and perceived. In particular, he was comparing photography and film to more traditional media like painting and live theater. Benjamin uses the concept of an art's "aura"¹ - the qualities that Benjamin has assigned importance, including the cultural significance, connection to the artist and audience, history, and uniqueness of the piece - to explain why he believed art produced using the new mechanical processes of the time were not only bad for art, but bad for humanity as a whole.     For example, he believed the reproducibility of the photograph diminished its aura by allowing more...