Ways of Seeing Art

There are similarities and differences in the ways of seeing demonstrated in John Berger's book Ways of Seeing and the art works in Barbara Kruger's retrospective exhibition at the Geffen Contemporary at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Kruger tends to present images and words that derive their meanings from their unexpected juxtaposition. The meanings that Kruger creates are almost endless because she uses words that do not necessarily connect with the image, or, if they do seem to have obvious connections, force the viewer to think farther about what s/he is looking at. In his sections on advertising, and in other places, Berger discusses the ways that combinations of images and text generate meanings that are not completely obvious. But his primary means of making the "reader" see freshly is the juxtaposition of images from clearly understood contexts.

It is not surprising that the main similarities between the two are related to Berger discussion of advertising, since Kruger started in commercial advertising, "performing serialized exercises with pictures and words" that were probably very much like the advertisements that Berger uses (quoted in Goldstein). One example of this is the advertisement in which a beautiful woman in a towel looks out the window toward a handsome man who is arriving with his Rolls Royce. The text reads, "things happen after a badedas bath" and it is an advertisement for a bath product (145). As Berger says, this kind of adve

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the world. By presenting an unusual combination she gives the viewer access to fresh ways of seeing--including the ability to understand how s/he looks at things and what influences make him/her produce a particular response to images. At times, however, Kruger and Berger accomplish similar ends with different means. In his book, for example, Berger includes three European paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which black people are represented. At the top of the page (117) are portraits of wealthy white people, a Princess and a Duke, accompanied by black child servants. The clothing of both the subjects and their servants is equally rich. The subordinate position of the Princess' attendant is clear from the way the servant looks up at her and the fact that she rests her arm on his shoulder. The Duke's servant accompanies his master at hunting and holds the birds that he shoots. The lower portion of the page features a picture entitled Two Negroes, by Rembrandt. In this picture the men are dressed in some type of European clothing and they are anonymous subjects rather than wealthy people who have paid to have their portraits painted. The man in the front looks thoughtfully off to one side, with a

Category: Arts - W