Ways of Seeing - John Berger

Just finished this interesting little book, more of an essay really, sort of developing a materialist link between classical oil painting and publicity. I think it was published in the early 70's, so its maybe not the most revolutionary of works to be reading now, and it definitely had some of the socialist rhetoric of the 70's in there, but it was good.

He basically proposes that most oil painting (as a specific artistic form, not just the medium of the paint itself) from 1500 to 1900 is basically a wish-list, an advert for how the subject wished their lives to be seen. Dressed in rich silks and furs, surrounded by 'objects', invariably representing trade, exploration (a globe), the arts and music (a lute), or situated at ease in the country, surveying the parks and fields they owned, Berger says that oil painting allowed a degree of realism to be conveyed by the painting that when things/scenes etc were included within the painting it was like actually owning them. And this would not just be in terms of a moment, this painting was to portray this life down the ages. I suppose like a pharoah taking his treasures into the afterlife.

This was before printing of images was possible, and in the earliest cases, before even printing text was widely available. The power of images and words at this time was incalculably higher than when photographic images and print text appear - now, with thousands of digital images documenting every look, hair do, change of clothes, we don't consider our visual legacy so much, but with oil painting came a real chance to set down (forever) how you would be viewed. A picture paints a thousand words, and if a headstone was all you were going to get, then you didn't get much chance to be remembered. It created a permanence, and this permanence was materialistic. A legacy.

And then he follows that publicity, marketing, advertising flows directly from this artistic tradition. I think this was a bit of a tenuous link to be honest, but he writes some interesting ideas about what publicity means, and how we should view the images we see. We are always being sold to now, and he wants to put across his point (which I agree with), that consumerism is not substitute for real freedom. Being able to choose between three different types of lettuce in the supermarket isn't freedom. Being able to actively change society with an election is freedom... unlike the one we're about to have incidentally.

Crits tomorrow, so I'll stop this, but its an interesting book, and, being on oil painting, its got loads of nudey pictures in it, so take a look if only for that.