Lecture 5 - The Gaze and The Media

Here are my notes from the fifth lecture The Gaze and The Media on 24/11/2011.

'according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome - men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at' - Berger

Woman carry around an idea of being looked at - not vanity, proliferation of images.

The word vanity is used as some sort of sinful regard to oneself.

image of woman on bed

lost in thought, lost in a moment of reverie and this allows us to look at her without the challenge of her looking back at us. Her body is arranged in a fairly low view point, the main focus is between her legs but thats ok because of the mirror.

babys flying image


Depict the female figure in a reclining position. She's raised her hand which partly covers her eyes. This gesture suggests either just woke from sleep or just going to sleep. This position allows us to look at her body.

image laying on back


Sophie Dahl for Opium - withdrawn because of its overt use of nudity. The naked body takes up 3/4 of the image and the rest is where we rest our gaze.

portrait version

This version of the advert was allowed and the only change really is the image has been rotated. With the vertical image there's more emphasis on the face rather than the body.

girl on bed

Woman looking in an inviting way, so is looking directly at us from the image. Welthy woman who has servants in the background. Knows we are there looking and allows us to do so.

image of woman in bed with black behind

This image was painted during modernism, so this one has a modern view. Slightly elevated on the cushions and uses hands to cover area, but position is more assertive and endorses the likeness of a wealthy woman, not a hooker. Servant offering flowers but she is turned away disregarding which suggests they are from one of her lovers.

gorialla girls poster


Do women have to be naked to get into the met. museum? Was cancelled because the fan was taken as more than just a fan and suggested other things.

girl in bar


gentleman is stood face to face with the barmaid, this is represented through the mirror. We are also in front of the barmaid also seeing what he sees. The mirror reflection is a distorted reflection as we wouldn't see it if this was real life as the reflections would be directly behind the woman. Womans gesture is approachable suggesting she is ready to wait on us.

mirror image


Reinterpreted the previous image. No hidden device. The camera is directly in the centre of the image. We are in the middle section, the woman on the left and artist on the right.

The camera in contemporary media has been put to use as an extension of the male gaze at women on the street. - Coward, R. (1984)

hello boys


Wonder bra ad. The link between the text and image, either the woman is saying 'hello boys', although she isn't looking at us she is looking down at herself, at her cleavage, her own body. Imagine it huge above a street, she is looking down on the people below the billboard.

Coward also looks at voyeurism, Peeping Tom, character with the camera spies on women and lures them to his apartment then records himself killing them. Obsessive take on women. Perversion.

image of guy


Underwear advert of male in the reclining pose the same as the previous looked at ones in paintings. He has his eyes closed, so we are able to look at his body in the same way.

d&g ad


From 2007. We see here a display of male strength, sport, the male body. Obsession with the cult of health. Every single guy returns the gaze in the image.

Ideas about the gaze comes from Laura Mulby's theory of the gaze. She looks at the cinema from the 1950's. The framing focuses on the areas that allows us to look at and be pleasurable to see. The body is an object for consumption.

Freud referred to the pleasure in looking at other peoples bodies being pleasurable. Mulby suggests that the cinema allows for more closer look into the bodies that are being displayed on screen. Pleasure in looking has been split between active male looking and female role.

beheading image

There's also a tradition in art history that suggests that the woman is passive. This image reverses these roles by beheading the man.

Women are 'marginalised within the masculine discourses of art history'

'I shop, therefore I am'.

is it her that did the 2 fried eggs and a kebab sculpture? its minging either way

polaroid money


Self portrait of her 'stuffing money in herself'. The idea of the body replicates a pornographic pose. The idea of women making money from their art.

Reality Television
Appears to offer us the position as the all-seeing eye- the power of the gaze
Allows us a voyeuristic passive consumption

Turning voyeurism is turning this into an everyday activity. Contestants are performing for us to watch. Is it really real?

Looking is not indifferent. There can never be any question of 'just looking'.

Lecture 4 - Critical positions on the media and popular culture

Here are my notes from the fourth lecture Critical positions on the media and popular culture on 10/11/2011.

Aims

• critically define 'popular culture'
• contrast ideas of 'culture' with 'popular culture' and 'mass culture'
• introduce cultural studies and critical theory
• discuss culture as ideology
• interrogate the social function of popular culture

What is culture?

Gain culture - they grow and as they grow they gain culture - the process of general emancipation 

A way of living - a certain subculture, values, attitudes, certain ways of thinking about the world.

Global cultures - thinking globally.

It can be used to describe a cannon of really important artworks or type of literature, i.e Shakespeare, Beethoven.

A marx's reading of culture is that you have a particular class/relations, and because of these relations a superstructure forms  ideology.

boat image

Culture emerges from the base, then culture almost legitimises and makes possible the relation of base production.

Culture could be a site of political conflict.

Popular culture

If you think about popular culture instead of culture, you get different answers. Theres 4 answers for this all of which are different.

1. The idea of popular culture as an idea of something that is popularly measured. The problem with this is that it leads to confused results.

2. Different but most common is that popular culture is a somewhat inferior form of culture, work that is mass produced as opposed to individually produced. Works that aspire to be important but for various reasons they fail.

3. Anything that aims to be populist comes under popular culture.Work that is easy and for the people is easy and less important. There's an elitism.

4. Culture that's made by people for themselves. By the people for the people. The working class popular culture would be brass bands.

Inferior or Residual Culture

• popular press vs quality press 
• popular cinema vs art cinema
• popular entertainment vs art culture

The reason why we question wether something is good or bad comes from the fact that we're coded to think and accept certain things - to do this is flawed.

There are different levels to popular culture, and the dynamics.

Prior to modernity and urbanisation, society had a modern culture on top of a shared common culture. The first time this changes is with industrialisation and urbanisation, people are condensed together  but aso physically separated. Where these people now start to live when industrialisation comes in to action the classes get really separated, working class, elite, etc. 

You get a physical distinction between the rich and the poor. This starts to create a cultural separation. Classes then start to create their own culture forms, and activities- such as drinking, playing piano. They find their own form of literature and music. 

This starts to emerge a working class voice/working class culture. Before this moment in charge of setting what was important culturally was the ruling class. Now there is two voices competing against each other.

Massing people together gets them to start thinking about how their culture should be, writing new ones.

Culture and Anarchy - M Arnold (1867)

He tried to define what culture was. The book's about him defining what culture is. 'The best that has been thought and said in  the world'. He explains how one gains culture by the perceit of culture.Culture is the force that can minister the diseased spirit of our times - meaning the opposite to culture. Anarchy, that has its own voice heard. If we teach them how to respect our culture, they can be welcomed in, but if they start to develop their own then its classed as anarchy.

These theories start to emerge when the control of the working class starts to be questioned. 

Leavisism- F.R Leavis & Q.D Leavis

- still forms a kind of repressed, common sense attitude to popular culture in this country.

Throughout the 20th Century, we have seen a dumbing down of culture. A cultural decline. 'Culture has always been in minority keeping'. 

It's a form of snobbery that can still be seen now in attitudes towards popular culture - such as attitudes towards x factor and big brother, the snobbery in the way that people just dismiss these programmes emerges from Arnold and Leavis. They have an agenda.

Frankfurt School

Theodore Adorno & Max Horkheimer

'the culture industry'

At this time there was the start of mass production in America.

Frankfurt School

Herbert Marcuse

Lecture 3 - Marxism & Design Activism

Here are my notes from the third lecture Marxism and Design Activism on 03/11/2011.


Aims

• to introduce a critical definition of ideology
• to introduce some of the basic principles of Marxist philosophy
• to explain the extent to which the media constitutes us as a subject
• to introduce 'culture jamming' and the idea of design activism

What can designers do to change the world that we live in or alter the situation that we find ourselves in?

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it" - Marx, K. (1845) 'Theses On Feuerbach.

Praxis - a unification of thought and action.

Marxism is: was both a political manifesto which outlines what Marx saw as a better way of organising society, and described the road to achieving that. As well as politics describes how workers will always be in conflicts. A physiological method. It lead to the rise of the soviet union. 

What is Capitalism?: This is the stage of which we live in, the society in which we live in. It's a society where control of the means of production is held by a few individuals, therefore a few individuals makes loads of money.Everyone else works for these individuals. Everything is bought and sold. People are commodities in the way of shoes. Our interactions evolve around the logic of a market. It's a system which makes us compete, and says that if you end up at the top of society it's probably because you deserve to be. Compete against each other for grades, jobs, etc.

The evolution of humanity

1. Primitive Communism - society would change and hierarchies would emerge

2. Slave Society - someone had something someone else didn't

3. Feudalism - develop the ruling class

4. Capitalism - capitalists are the ruling class

5. Socialism - people will gain class consciousness, overthrow the capitalists and take control over the state.

6. Communism - people who own the ability to own money

The materialist conception of society.

Marx argues that society can be broke into teo sections - first is economic, the base. At any given moment society will have certain technology/tools/skills etc. This has relations of production, and develops things like employer and employee sides. Certain relations emerge. 

Everything is a result of the forces of production and everything that surrounds that production.

Everything can be traced back to issues of class, gender politics, racial polotics. Anything can be read as a certain political attitude.

Capitalism produces laws, culture, politics, education, art that reflects that attitude.

pic of boat

The base determines the content and form of the superstructure which then reflects the form of and legitimises the base, and so on.

Education - the base are ones of bosses and workers, the boss telling the worker what to do. The education emerges. This then makes people think where workplace relations where the boss is like do this, do that is acceptable.

house image

We're forced into situations that we don't really have control of.

image of pyraid thing

The ruling class.

Ideology - it has a double meaning. One can have an ideology of beliefs. The way in which a certain system of ideas distorts the power of relations, through creation of 'false consciousness'. We don't understand things the way we could, but how could we. We wouldn't let it happen.

Ideology usually emerges from the ruling class, and represents their world view. The exploited class then start to think that this is also their world view.

There's all sorts of forms of ideology. 

   - Art is about one persons expression, yet it's never been like that. In classical art, the only people allowed to be artists were the people who could afford to be educated, so you had to be rich. 

   - Women weren't allowed to be artists, just white rich men making art. 

   - A culture is then developing by rich people for rich people. 

   - Looking at art and thinking about art can influence you into thinking the way that the artist wants you to think.

image of gorilla woman

Ideology is not just something produced by society, but also a relation.

Theres various different apparatus in society.

Education isn't about freeing you up, it's about training you up to turn how how you're expected to be.

All media outlets are owned by super rich people, and what the media does is reflect ideology that is in the world already and creates a false consciousness.