ARTH 2220 Study Guide - Final Guide: Sylvia Sleigh, Male Gaze, Coco Fusco
14 Apr 2013
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Document Summary
Viewers do not always look at an image alone, in a darkened room. The interplay of human senses, the context of the image, the relationship to other viewers, and more contribute to how we practice looking. The term spectatorship provides a more textured understanding of looking, where the practice is enacted in an interactive, multimodal, and relational field. To gaze is to enter into a relational activity of looking. The concept of the gaze plays a central role in theories of spectatorship in modernity. Ren descartes helped to usher in modernity with his philosophy that stated that the world. The subject in modernity becomes known when we accurately represent it in thought, not when we know it through the senses and not when we imagine it in our mind"s eye. Representation held an important place in the cartesian understanding of the human subject. The cartesian human subject thus is constituted in part through an activity of thinking that involves spectatorship.
