Television’s assault on art history. Ways of seeing in the dispute over the property of art images
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24310/umatica.2024.v6i7.20382Keywords:
John Berger, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Oskar Negt, Alexander Kluge, Intellectual propertyAbstract
Starting from the scarce critical reception in Spanish of the documentary series and book Ways of Seeing (WoS, 1972), and departing from the dominant Anglo-Saxon interpretations, this article argues that its relevance lies not so much in its subject matter as in the way it challenged the ownership of works of art and academic authority through an audiovisual assault on the artistic canon. Unlike other proposals, WoS would not have used television to uphold the academic account of art, but would have found in audiovisual mediation the possibility of freeing its images from the authority of experts and the ownership of elites in order to favour heterodox experiences. This argument is spelled out by a) reconstructing the position offered in WoS regarding the way audiovisualization defies the ownership and authority of art images; b) situating its invitation to raid the artistic canon in post-1968 debates in the work of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge; and c) inscribing WoS in a broader attempt to form a public countersphere that would contest the legal and material ‘intellectual property’ order that regulated audiovisual mediations at the time.
Downloads
Metrics
References
Adorno, T. W. (1954). How to Look at Television. The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television. 8(3), 213-235. https://doi.org/10.2307/1209731
Althusser, L. (1970). Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État (Notes pour une recherche). La Pensée, (151).
Art-Language. (1978). Ways of Seeing. Art-Language, 4(3).
Bal, M. (2012). S-word. Journal of Visual Culture, 11(2), 145-148.
Baudrillard, J. (1972). Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe. Gallimard.
Berger, J. (1957). The New Nihilists. Labour Monthly, 123-126. https://www.unz.com/print/LabourMonthly-1957mar-00123/
Berger, J. (2008). Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. Verso.
Berger J., Bloomberg, S., Fox, C., Dibb, M. y Hollis, R. (1974). Modos de ver (J. G. Beramendi, Trad.). Gustavo Gili.
Boyle, D. (1997). Subject to Change. Guerrilla Television Revisited. Oxford University Press.
Bruck, J. y Docker, J. (1989). Puritanic rationalism: John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and media and culture studies. Continuum, 2(2), 77-95. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304318909359365
Brunsdon, C. y Morley, D. (1978). Everyday Television: ‘Nationwide’. British Film Institute.
Conlin, J. (2016). ‘An irresponsible flow of images’: Berger, Clark, and the Art of Television, 1958-1988. En R. Hertel y D. Malcolm (Eds.), On John Berger: Telling Stories (pp. 269-291). Brill Publishers.
Conlin, J. (2020). Lost in Transmission? John Berger and the Origins of Ways of Seeing (1972). History Workshop Journal, (90), 142-163. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbaa020
Debord, G. (1967). La société du spectacle. Buchet-Chastel.
Downing, J. (2001). Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements. Sage.
Eco, U. (1964). Apocalittici e integrati: comunicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura di massa. Bompiani.
Elkins, J. (2003). Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. Routledge.
Enzensberger, H. M. (1972). Elementos para una teoría de los medios de comunicación (M. Faber-Kaiser, Trad.). Anagrama.
Enzensberger, H. M. (2010). Absolute Emptiness. The Null-Medium, or Why all Complaints about Television are Irrelevant. En C. Martínez (Ed.), Are you Ready for TV? (pp. 10-25). MACBA.
Europa Press. (2010). El Prado rinde homenaje a Jonh [sic] Berger. Europa Press. https://www.europapress.es/cultura/exposiciones-00131/noticia-prado-rinde-homenaje-jonh-berger-20100208123749.html
Fiske, J. y Hartley, J. (1978). Reading Television. Methuen & Co.
Fuller, P. (1981). Seeing Berger. A reevaluation of Ways of Seeing. Writers & Readers.
Fuller, P. (1988). Seeing Through Berger. Claridge Press.
García Canclini, N. (1990). Culturas híbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. Grijalbo.
Garro Larrañaga, O. (2011). Aprender a mirar: la mujer como sujeto activo de la representación. La ventana. Revista de estudios de género, 4(33), 302-320.
Gould, S. y Leblond, D. (Eds.). (2023). Fifty Years of Seeing with John Berger. Études britanniques contemporaines, (65). https://doi.org/10.4000/ebc.13853
Greenberg, J. M. (2008). From Betamax to Blockbuster. Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video. MIT Press.
Guins, R., Kristensen, J. y Pui San Lok, S. (Eds.) (2012). Ways of Seeing 40th Anniversary Issue. Journal of Visual Culture, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/14704129124441
Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and decoding in the television discourse. [Discussion Paper]. University of Birmingham.
Hall, S. (2021). Television as a Medium and Its Relation to Culture. En C. Brunsdon (Ed.), Writing on Media. History of the Present (pp. 209-236). Duke University Press.
Hansen, M. (1993). Foreword. En O. Negt y A. Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (pp. ix-xli). University of Minnesota Press.
Hertel, R. y Malcolm, D. (Eds.). (2016). On John Berger: Telling Stories. Brill Publishers.
Howells, R. (2003). Visual Culture. Polity Press.
Jay, M. (2014). The Little Shopgirls Enter the Public Sphere. New German Critique, 41(2), 159-169. https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-2680828
Jones, A. (Ed.). (2003). The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. Routledge.
Kellner, D. (2005). Critical Perspectives on Television from the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism. En J. Wasko (Ed.), A Companion to Television (pp. 29-47). Blackwell.
Kristensen, J. (2012). Making Ways of Seeing: A Conversation with Mike Dibb and Richard Hollis. Journal of Visual Culture, 11(2), 181-195.
Lalululatv (2021, 29 de noviembre). Modos de ver 1 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J-CXyx58T8
Lang, K. y Kalkanis, E. (2017). An Analysis of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. Macat.
Lipton, E. (1975). Book Review: John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. The Fox, (2), 1-7.
López Cuenca, A. (2018). ¿De quiénes son las imágenes? La Historia del arte en la era Betamax. En La vorágine de las imágenes. Accesos, circuitos, controles, archivos y autorías en el arte (pp. 17-39). INBA & CENIDIAP.
Ludmer, J. (2015). Clases 1985. Algunos problemas de teoría literaria. Paidós.
Martín Barbero, J. (1978). Comunicación masiva: discurso y poder. CIESPAL.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill.
Merrifield, A. (2012). John Berger. Reaktion Books.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (1986). Iconology: image, text, ideology. University of Chicago Press.
Negt, O. (1978). Mass Media: Tools of Domination or Instruments of Liberation? Aspects of the Frankfurt School’s Communications Analysis. New German Critique, (14), 61-80. https://doi.org/10.2307/488061
Negt, O. y Kluge, A. (1993). Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (P. Labanyi, J. O. Daniel y A. Oksiloff, Trad.). University of Minnesota Press.
Overton, T. (2018). Introducción. Abajo las alambradas. En J. Berger, Panorámicas. Ensayos sobre arte y política (pp. 7-18). Gustavo Gili.
Pellejero, E. (2013). Modos de hacer / Modos de ver / Modos de pensar (Arte sin supersticiones). Escritura e imagen, 9, 85-99. https://doi.org/10.5209/rev_ESIM.2013.v9.43539
Pollock, G. (2012). Muscular Defenses. Journal of Visual Culture, 11(2), 127-131.
Ramírez, J. A. (2005). La crítica y la historia del arte frente a los derechos de reproducción. Revista Lápiz, (217), 26-41.
Ramírez, J. A. (2009). El objeto y su aura. (Des)orden visual del arte moderno. Akal.
Robson, L. (Ed.). (2023). John Berger: Stop-Gap Man. Critical Quarterly Special Issue, 65(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12668
Roldán, E. (2022). De Benjamin a Kluge: la centralidad de la Erfahrung en las reflexiones sobre el cine de la Teoría Crítica. Revista Humanidades, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.15517/h.v12i1.49099
Solaguren-Beascoa de Corral, F. y Bardí-Milà, B. (2023). Sobre la mentira: la verdad de las mentiras: A propósito del libro Modos de ver de John Berger. EGA Expresión Gráfica Arquitectónica, 28(48), 38-55. https://doi.org/10.4995/ega.2023.20064
Sperling, J. (2018). A Writer of Our Time. The Life and Work of John Berger. Verso.
Vinelli, N. (2014). La televisión desde abajo: historia, alternatividad y periodismo de contrainformación. Editorial Cooperativa El Río Suena & El Topo Blindado.
Walker, J. A. (1993). Arts TV: A History of Arts Television in Britain. John Libbey.
Wallach, A. (1976). Ways of Seeing. Artforum, 14(6), 43-45.
Williams, R. (1974). Television. Technology and cultural form. Routledge.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Alberto López Cuenca
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
All contens publishes in Umática.Revista sobre Creación y Anáisis de la Imágen are protected under the Creative Commos Attribution-NonComercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
All about this license is available in the following link: <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0>
Users can copy, use, redistribute, share and exhibit publicly as long as:
- The original source and authorship of the material are cited (Journal, Publisher and URL of the work).
- It is not used for comercial purposes.
- The existence of the license and its especifications are mentioned.
There are two sets of authors’ rights: moral and property rights. Moral rights are perpetual prerogatives, unrenounceable, not-transferable, unalienable, imprescriptible and inembargable. According to authors’ rights legislation, Umática.Revista sobre Creación y Anáisis de la Imágen recognizes and respects authors moral rights, as well as the ownership of property rights, which will be transferred to University of Malaga in open access. The property rights are referred to the benefits that are gained by the use or the dissemination of works. Fotocinema. Umática.Revista sobre Creación y Anáisis de la Imágen is published in an open access form and it is exclusively licenced by any means for doing or authorising distribution, dissemination, reproduction, , adaptation, translation or arrangement of works.
Authors are responsable for obtaining the necessary permission to use copyrighted images.
Copyright note: Authors who have publications with this journal agree and certify to the following terms:
- That he/she has contributed directly to the intellectual content of the work, for which he/she is responsible for all purposes.
- That he/she approves the contents of the manuscript submitted to the editorial process of UMÁTICA, REVISTA SOBRE CREACIÓN Y ANÁLISIS DE LA IMAGEN, and therefore agrees that his/her name appears as the author(s).
- That the content of the article has not been published and that it does not appear in any other work that is about to be published.
- That he/she agrees not to submit it for consideration of another publication while it is in the process of being reviewed by UMÁTICA, REVISTA SOBRE CREACIÓN Y ANÁLISIS DE LA IMAGEN, nor later in case it is accepted for publication.
- That he/she has not had, nor does any personal or financial affiliations that could prejudice the development or results of the present work.
- That all those persons who have made a substantial contribution to the development of the work, having given their permission for the mention, have been mentioned in the acknowledgments section.
- That he/she agrees to provide, when required by the journal, access to all the data and sources on which the work presented is based.
- That he/she will actively participate in the realization of all those stylistic or orthographic-typographic modifications necessary for the publication of the work when notified by the journal's editorial team.
- That he/she has not violated, and nor will, the laws and human or animal rights during the process of research and publication of this work.
- That, none of the institutions in which he/she carries out his/her scientific and research work has presented objections to the publication of the manuscript submitted for evaluation.
- That data and references to materials published are credited and included in the references and citations and, in the cases required, have the due authorizations of those who own the patrimonial rights.
- That any material used is free of copyright. Author(s) is responsible for any litigation or claim related to intellectual property rights, exonerating UMÁTICA, REVISTA SOBRE CREACIÓN Y ANÁLISIS DE LA IMAGEN (UMÁTICA, CREATION AND ANALYSIS OF IMAGE JOURNAL) of any responsibility.
- That in case the work is approved for publication, authorizes the publisher to include the text in the journal UMÁTICA, REVISTA SOBRE CREACIÓN Y ANÁLISIS DE LA IMAGEN and to reproduce, edit, distribute, exhibit and communicate it in the country and abroad by printed, electronic, CD, Internet or any other means known or to be known.
23.png)
