Forster, Velasquez, Madrid, Mitchell and .. Not Looking ... of course

February 6, 2009

Dear James

I found “Not Looking at Pictures” in the library and enjoyed it as respite from the dense art criticism and visual studies I usually read on such matters as looking.

            A couple of things: first, yet again, we are brought back to Velasquez. It seems as though he is the first and last word on looking and visual representation. Everything I read on the topic, and everywhere I turn, there is Las Meninas, as though the Infanta is calling to me. I think, when you get here, we need to go to Madrid for a weekend. Why not? Apparently, the Prado has just been refurbished, a new wing for modern art has been added in an attempt to get people back into it. I have never seen Las Meninas, but have often mentioned it in my writing, and read about it. The time has come to go see it, and I think it would be a great way to officially inaugurate our blog correspondence. I also want to see Las Hilandera (The Spinners)  in the Prado – it has two picture planes, the foreground in a passionate, devastating red, and the back in grey. The grey is fascinating because it behaves itself as a canvas which makes possible Velasquez’ lighting of the scene that takes place just before the grey. Of course. I want to see for myself how he does this, and why is it grey that creates the background plane.

            Back to not looking. Forster is interesting, not because he says anything we don’t already know, but because he says what all those image and visual studies scholars I am always quoting, say. He says basically, that we don’t look at pictures. That when standing before a picture, we see ourselves. We look into it as though it were a mirror of our own petty obsessions and start daydreaming, start thinking of our own self-important ideas. And in so doing, we shut down all possibility of what the picture has to offer.  It’s difficult to argue with that. It reminds me of the ladies I have seen discussing the color of a Renoir fabric as the exact same one they want for their curtains, or the man who sat next to me at the Rothko exhibit in London and pronounced he could paint those canvases. It’s all about me, the viewer. There is a lovely line in Forster’s essay where he quotes a picture, any picture who, dismayed at the viewer’s distraction and daydreaming, calls out to the viewer: “What have your obsessions got to do with me?” …”I am neither a theatre of varieties nor a spring-mattress, but paint. Look at my paint.” Isn’t that what W.J.T. Mitchell is saying in the very title of his book What Do Pictures Want? Of course, Mitchell says much more – which we can actually talk about here – but it’s the same idea. My point is, Forster wrote “Not Looking at Pictures” in 1937. It makes me wonder where not looking is indeed the product of the barrage of images of the information age? Is there something inherent in the image that teases us away from its vision? As though it had a power over us too great to withstand? Maybe that’s too dramatic, but it makes me wonder.  How, if at all, to historicize the kinds of not looking which interest us – behaviors that I always thought belonged to our age….