Being Seen

Looking at You Looking at Her Looking at Him While the Others Look On

Perception has been a popular subject in art for a long time. Particularly, the sociology of perception.  Lacan and “gaze theory”, Derrida and deconstruction, Foucault  and surveillance theory, Iregary and the female self  separate from male constructions., among others. All the just mentioned ideas have stimulated discussion of art and even influenced many artists to work in a way that brings to mind such discussions. The simplest social encounter in an urban setting can be unpacked to reveal unacknowledged privilege, racism, classism, sexism, Eurocentrism,  imperialism,  and objectification of humans.  

And that usually is it as far as discussions of perception in art are involved, unless one indulges in a formalist analysis of historical art to see how the works were set up.

Is there another way of thinking about perception in art that does not lead us back to sociology or to analysis that supports theory rather than experience? I think there are a few ways we can look at which might alter perceptions and lead us to new constellations of imagery.

For example, it is fairly routine practice in popular discourse to talk about how we are all being watched. The government or the Secret State or Big Business or a combination is all watching us. Maybe. Let’s unpack this idea of being watched. At any moment in the street, you can be seen by other people, most of whom will not take that seeing beyond a second or two. These are strangers, and their assessment of you and me is based on their inner worlds, their standards. Does the watching stop there? Any animals on the street—dogs, cats, squirrels, mice, birds—will also have seen you and assessed you. Are you a threat? We don’t really know how an animal sees us, beyond the friend-or-enemy test. A crow, for example, can recognize individuals on a day-to-day basis. What do they see? What is their experience?

Does it make sense to think that insects perceive us? At some level they do, but it is not the kind of vision we normally associate with eyes. For many, we may become a potential food source or a threat. 

What about plants or trees? At this point, we may justifiably begin eye-rolling. But is there any definitive evidence to state that trees do not have sentient experience? And if they do, then at some level they might be able to sense us (which is akin to seeing us). In fact there has been research on how trees respond to each other.

We can take these ideas into a model of consciousness. The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty offered us the concept of “inter-being”, a mode in which, for example, I am aware of a tree and at the same time it is aware of me, and I am also aware of a new relationship based on that knowing. There is nothing I can do with this knowledge or experience except enter into a certain kind of openness and cognition. 

But such openness and such cognition will lead us to a new engagement with Nature. Landscape art, for example, typically depends on set horizon lines and the distinction between “us” and “them”, them being the particulars of Nature. But what if we wanted to make a picture not of a fixed view of our separation, but of something altogether different, perhaps a view of no separation at all. Some kind of unitive experience. What would that even look like as art? First, we would have to be able to see ourselves and others differently, not just as part of sociology. And we would have to include in our acceptance all other beings, if only momentarily.

Such seeing and acceptance of being seen can lead to a new kind of aesthetic. This aesthetic would be driven by experience and contemplation, rather than by technology and fashion.