Οι άντρες ονειρεύονται τις γυναίκες Οι γυναίκες ονειρεύονται τον εαυτό τους να τις ονειρεύονται
Οι άντρες κοιτούν τις γυναίκες Οι γυναίκες βλέπουν τον εαυτό τους να τον κοιτούν
Οι γυναίκες διαρκώς συναντούν βλέματα που λειτουργούν σαν καθρέφτες
υπενθυμίζοντας τους την εμφάνισή τους ή πώς αυτή θα έπρεπε να είναι.
Πίσω από κάθε ματιά υπάρχει μια κρίση.
Κάποιες φορές η ματιά μου συναντούν είναι η δική τους, αντανακλούμενη από έναν πραγματικό καθρέφτη.
Μια γυναίκα πάντα συνοδεύεται, εκτός όταν
είναι τελείως μόνη της. Και μπορεί ακόμα και τότε, από
την εικόνα του ίδιου της του εαυτού. Καθώς περπατάει,
διασχίζοντας ένα δωμάτιο, ή κλαίγοντας για τον θάνατο του πατέρα της
δεν μπορεί να αποφύγει να συλλαμβάνει τον εαυτό της, να περπατάει ή να κλαίει
από την παιδική ηλικία, διδάσκεται και πείθεται να επιθεωρεί τον εαυτό της συνεχώς
Πρέπει να επιθεωρεί όλα όσα είναι και όλα όσα κάνει διότι
Ο τρόπος που εμφανίζεται στους άλλους και ειδικότερα ο τρόπος που εμφανίζεται στους άντρες
είναι ζωτικής σημασίας, καθότι
[music]
A woman in the culture of privileged Europeans,
is first and foremost a sight to be looked at.
What kind of sight is revealed in the average European oil painting
There were portraits of women as there were portraits of men.
but in one category of painting, women were the principle
ever occuring subject, that category was the nude.
In the nudes of European painting, we can discover some of the criteria
and conventions by which women were judged.
We can see how women were seen.
What then is a nude?
In his book on the nude, Kenneth Clark says that being
naked is simply being without clothes
the nude, according to him, is a form of art
I would put it differently.
To be naked is to be oneself.
To be nude is to be seen naked by others and
yet not recognized as oneself. A nude
has to be seen as an object in order to be nude.
In the European oil painting, nakedness is not taken for granted
as in archaic art. Nakedness is a sight for those who are dressed.
That is why Manners's painting which really marks the end of a period I am considering is so
profound a comment on all the works that preceded it.
the story begins with the story of Adam and Eve as told in Genesis.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and it was a delight for the eyes,
and that the tree was desired to make one wise
she took of the fruit thereof and did eat
and she gave also to her husband with her, and he did eat.
and the eyes of them both were opened, and they
knew that they were naked
and the Lord God called out to the man and said
Where art thou? and he said
I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid
and I hid myself
unto the woman God said, "I will greatly
multiply thy sorrow and thy conception. In sorrow, thou shall bring forth children,
and they desire will be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."
Two things are striking about this story.
They become aware of being naked because, as a result of
eating the apple, each sees the other differently
nakedness is created in the mind of the beholder.
The second striking fact is that the woman
is blamed and is punished by being made subservient to the man
In relationship to the woman, the man becomes the agent of God.
In medieval art, the story is often illustrated scene following scene
as in a strip cartoon.
During the Renaissance, the narrative sequence disappears, and the single moment
which is nearly always depicted, is the moment of shame.
The couple wear fig leaves or make a modest gesture with their hands
but now, their shame is not so much in relationship to one another as is to the spectator.
It is the spectator looking which shames them.
Later, as painting became more secular,
many other subjects offer the opportunity for painting nudes.
But always in the European tradition, the nude implies an awareness of being seen
by the spectator. They are not
naked as they are, they are naked as you see them.
Often, as with the favorite subject of Suzanna and the elders,
this is the actual theme of the picture.
We join the elders to spy on her.
She looks back at us looking at her.
Sometimes the woman, Suzanna, looks at herself
in the mirror, picturing herself as men see her.
She sees herself first and foremost as a sight
which means as a sight for men.
Thus the mirror is a symbol of the vanity of women
yet the male hypocrisy in this is blatant.
You paint a naked women because you enjoy looking at her
you put a mirror in her hand, and you call the painting vanity
thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you have
depictured for your own pleasure
And thus, incidentally, repeating the biblical incident by
blaming the woman
The Judgement of Paris is another famous mythological subject with the same
in written idea of looking at naked women and judging them.
Paris awards the apple to the woman he finds most beautiful.
Beauty in this context is bound to become competitive.
The judgement of Paris is transformed into a beauty contest.
Aesthetics when applied to women are not
as disinterested as the word beauty
might suggest
I don't want to deny the crucial part that seeing
plays in sexuality, but there's a great difference in being seen
as oneself naked or being seen by another in that way
and a body being put on display
To be naked, is to be without disguise.
To be on display, is to have the surface of one's own skin,
the hairs of one's own body
turned into a disguise.
A disguise which cannot be discarded.
Amongst the tens of thousands of European oil paintings
of nudes, there are perhaps 20 or 30 exceptions, paintings in which the
artist has seen the woman revealed as herself.
this Rubens
this Rembrant
this George De La Tour
These paintings are as personal as love poems
and their character is quite distinctive
Most nudes oil paintings have been lined up
by their painters for the pleasure of the
male spectator only
who will assess and judge them
as sights
Their nudity is another form of dress
They are condemned to never being naked
with their clothes off, they are as formal
as with their clothes on
Those who are not judged beautiful, are not beautiful.
Those who are, are given the prize.
The prize is to be owned.
That is to say, to be available.
Charles II commissioned this secret painting
from Lale. It's like hundreds of others,
it might be Venus and Cupid, but
in fact, it was a portrait of one of his mistresses Nell Gwen.
He chose her passively looking at the
spectator staring at her naked.
Her nakedness is not an expression of her own feelings
it is only a sign of her submission to his demand
The painting, when he shows it to others,
demonstrates this submission. His guests envy him.
By contrast, in another tradition, nakedness is a celebration of
active sexual love as between two people,
the woman as active as the man
the actions of each absorb the other.
In oil painting, the second person or the second
person who matters it the person looking at the painting.
Compare these two women.
One the model for what is considered a masterpiece by Eng
and the other an ill paid model for a photograph in a girly magazine
Or these two
just the expresssion, the look,
what do you see?
It seems to me that in each pair, the expression
is remarkably similar, and it is an
expression of responding with remarkable charm
to the man who she knows is looking at her
although she doesn't know him
It is true that sometimes a painting includes
a male lover, but the woman's attention is very rarely
directed towards him. She looks away from him
or she looks out of the picture towards he who
considers himself her true lover, the spectator-owner
this painting was sent as a present from the Grand Duke of Florence to the King of France
The boy kneeling on the cushion and kissing
is Cupid the woman is Venus
But the way her body is arranged has nothing to do with
that kissing. Her body is arranged the way it is to display it
to the man looking at the picture
the picture is made to appeal to his sexuality
it has nothing to do with her sexuality
The convention of not painting the hair on a woman's body helps towards the same end.
Hair is associated with sexual power, with passion.
The woman's sexual passion, needs to be
minimized, so that the spectator feels
that he has the monopoly of such passion.
There were paintings which depicted
male lovers. These did exist.
But they were mostly private, semi-pornographic
pictures. In most paintings, which were painted to be seen
rather than hidden, the only rival to the male
spectator is a cupid.
Now, how extraordinary it is that the
pictorial symbol of passion is a small boy.
For a similar reason, women in the European art of the oil painting are seldom seen dancing.
They have to be shown languid, exhibiting a minimum of energy.
They are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.
The appetite was theoretically gargantuan.
The absurdity of this male flattery, although it was not seen as absurd then
reached its peak in the public academic art of the 19th C
prime ministers discussed under paintings like this
when one of him felt he had been outwitted, he looked up for consolation
the nude in European oil painting
is usually presented as an ideal subject
it is said to be an expression of the European humanist spirit
I don't want to reject entirely the truth of this,
but I have tried to add to it
starting off from a different viewpoint.
Duer who believed in the ideal nude
thought that this ideal could be constructed
by taking the shoulders from one body
the hands of another, the breasts of another,
and so on
Was this humanist idealism?
Or was it the result of the indifference
to who any one person really was?
Do these paintings celebrate
as we're normally taught
the women within them?
or the male voyeur?
Is there sexuality within the frame?
or in front of it?
I showed the program, as you have seen it, up to now, to five women.
It began to seem absurd that the only images
that you are seeing are of women
silent, mute
So, I showed it to them and asked them to comment.
To comment not so much on the program
but rather on the questions raised by it
Above all, on the question of how men see women
or how they have seen them in the past.
And how this influences the way women see
themselves today.
We have an image, of
Of course, we all have an image of ourselves
and it is a visual image, but I wonder how
much this sort of classical European painting
has shaped that image.
In my own case, I find it quite impossible when I
look at the paintings you show, in your film, I can't
take them seriously, I cannot identify with them
because they are so immensely exaggerated.
Always, you know, they fasten onto some secondary
sexual characteristic, these enormous breasts,
these beasting bottoms, those huge things like that
and they just aren't real. Whereas with
photographs, you can feel that as potentially, possibly
although it probably isn't. Many of these paintings you show are idealized.
Um, and therefore, they are to me very unreal.
in connection with any deep down image that I might have of myself
or in connection with any deep down
pleasure I might have
when looking at another female body
they don't give me that pleasure at all
I can admire then as paintings
but they don't mean human beings to me
the image that I compare myself to
is the photograph because it is with photographs
that I have been encouraged to think of myself
in this way, it is essentially advertising to me
that has made me think of myself in this way
and consequently, I find it extremely interesting to go
back and think of nudes in this way because
I have never done so, but having seen the film
I have no doubt that the same thing applies.
And do you find the nudes in painting unreal
in the same way? yes.
Well, you can't get any information from it,
can you ? there's no guide to how you might--
what information is lacking?
well, activity. Dynamism. it is how
someone sees you and that's all,
it is laid upon you.
I'm glad you showed the men in picture
because I always find this extremely shocking
the men are dressed and the women are naked
and this seems to sum up the entire situation
because these women as well being humiliated
and I think this is part of the whole
scheme of things
as most people have had, at some station
in life, nightmares about running through the streets with nothing on
while everyone else is dressed. And this seems
to me to be one element in the picture.
One very interesting thing you said in the film was
about how nudity was really a kind of disguise,
it wasn't the real person themselves free.
But it was just another garment they were wearing
and worse than a garment, in a sense, because
it was something that you can't take off.
This comes, I think, from
nudity being combined with a pose. And that's
inevitable if you're going to have a painting
of a model. Um, in a way, I think that
we're always dressing. We're always dressing up
for a part. Always putting on a uniform of one kind of another
and I think women do this more than men
men have only been doing it fairly recently.
Women are always dressing to show the kind of
character that they want to present: the mother, the working
woman, the pretty young chick. And nudity
is a uniform, in a way, for I'm ready
for sexual pleasure. So, it doesn't. You can't
identify being nude with being free.
Only just recently read that book
which describes a way in which a woman
is reduced to the sexual pleasure she can
to a complete object provide to a man. And what struck me in all that book
that was the most impressive image is the fact that she was told
that she was never to touch her own breasts to
close her own mouth or to put her legs
together. So, the whole point about her stance
all the time is that she was available
and this sense of being available of waiting
for other people is the very antithesis of action
and you know just like the Brook Street
Bureau advertisement, Tony hasn't run. He's
three minutes late in ringing. You feel this whole
situation, the number of women you talk to who
say I stay in so many night a week, waiting for someone to ring
the concept of availability implies
passivity because if you're simply waiting for someone else to act
then you can't help yourself.
yes, it's like you will awake when a man touches
you when a man kisses you. Whether its an excuse,
to get yourself going, I think women are shy
they are waiting too long.
yes, yes.
Could I say something now about narcissism?
I think that both men and women are narcissistic
but in different senses, and I think
that one in sometimes I have the impression
that men and women are tremendously
narcissistic and are cut off from each other
from their images of themselves. But
whereas a woman's image of herself is derived
directly from other people, the mirror you're talking about
a man's image of himself is derived from
the world that is its the world that gives him back
his image because he acts in it. and the women are drawn to him as a source, as central activity,
and as a source of worth
since he is in the world, the fact
that he values her is important
and so because their centers of narcissism are different,
and the woman's is essentially only
related to the other person
she is in a much more passive position than he is
in relation to it
yes
do you see narcissism as essentially a negative
or positive phenomenon?
well, i think that is very difficult to answer
but in the sense that it is related to
an identity, um, it is a positive phenomenon
and it seems to me that what women envy in men in that
they have a sense of their
own identity
that there is something in them
that is important to them other than
simply what other people think of them
and I think that thing
is product of their interaction in the world
and it is almost as if through this interaction
they build up a store of worth
of their sense of themselves
which is a constant
it cannot be lost
and because a woman doesn't go out
and do that
she doesn't create a store
she waits for the present interaction with a man
that can go, that can end at any moment
there is something here that really
I would like to push around a little bit
because narcissism is a very pronounced
way of stating a relationship with the world
whether it is a man or a woman
but this other question which is contained
within it, but doesn't go as far as it as an idea
is this sort of self delight of a person
whether or it is a man or woman
in life, in what they're doing
in relationships with a man or woman
and it is a thing that matters tremendously
and its not only a thing that is an inner thing
by which you life
but it is a very outer thing
by which you gain relationships with
your own context in the world
that you can't gain any other way
its when you've somehow been made
so unconscious of yourself that
you easily, naturally,sort of
compulsively go out to whatever is around you
now, when you're a child that tends
with people to be other things
doesn't it?
mountains, streams, whereever you go
and then only gradually as you go on
you make this kind of absolutely necessary contact with people
but I do think that the sort of essense
of self delight as a kind of possible thing
in the modern world and something
that fewer women have than men and want and must have
is the power, the compulsion, not the power
the compulsion to make contact with the world
as you are living in it
and when I'm saying that I don't
simply mean the people next door
I mean what is going on
yes
I am not so sure about the delight
I think it is a very double edged thing
I know
as I suppose I've always known
that I became aware of it in this film
I've never consciously looked at myself in
the mirror and seen myself as I am
I always see the image that I want
I know that I want to
and my children notice it that if I make up
my face I put on a certain expression
if I , from adolescence on, if I have seen myself
naked in the mirror, I have not thought of
myself naked, I have thought of myself as a nude
and I think this comes from having been trolled
around all the major art galleries
in essence, this is culture, this is beauty
with a capital B
and, of course, up to a point from advertising too
but much more from the painting
um, that you think the female body is beautiful
I am a beautiful object, if not, I have to do
something about it
um, and therefore, the painful part
of a narcissistic society is the feeling of inadequacy
this business of always posing in a mirror
I think one does absolutely automatically
and if you actually catch yourself
in a mirror by chance that is not deliberately
because you're getting dressed or having a bath
there's one in the street, or you catch yourself
in a shop window, it's a tremendous shock
because you suddenly see yourself as you are
which is windblown, untidy, badly dressed
tired, and so on
you don't see the person
at all, and I think this is what happens to women
they are always trying to measure
up to this erotic image that is projected.
There are some paintings
and I'm thinking at this moment of one painting
where there is a woman
who is wearing a garment
she is not nude
but it is a garment so loose, so comfortable
so easy, and its my idea, very much
of what a picture of a woman might be like
I think its from a period before yours,
it's so long ago by Lorenzetti
it's a fresco, very very old
and it is a picture of a woman
who is suppossed to represent peace
it's quite extraordinary
she could be one of the liberated
or trying to be liberated young women
of today. she is at ease, she is relaxed
she is not playing the part at all
she is able to combine
pleasure with thought
and with dreaming
and she is, she might spring into action
at any moment
and for me
she has much, much more to do
with nakedness, with oneself, with the
truth of oneself than any other nudes I have seen
[music]