About looking
Bibliography
Berger, J. (2015). About looking. Bloomsbury Paperbacks. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=2673604
Abstract
As a novelist, essayist, and cultural historian, John Berger is a writer of dazzling eloquence and arresting insight whose work amounts to a subtle, powerful critique of the canons of our civilization. In About Looking he explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see. How do the animals we look at in zoos remind us of a relationship between man and beast all but lost in the twentieth century? What is it about looking at war photographs that doubles their already potent violence? How do the nudes of Rodin betray the threats to his authority and potency posed by clay and flesh? And how does solitude inform the art of Giacometti? In asking these and other questions, Berger alters the vision of anyone who reads his work
Notes
Why Look at Animals?
- rupture between humankind and nature through capitalism
- before that, animals were “central”, but not through economic means, but through the imagination of messengers and promises and through invitation
- how we can see the animals, the animals can see us. ascribing power to the way animals look (at us)
- through our differences, with animals, there is a commoness. we’re same because we’re equally different
“The beavers are perhaps the only remaining example, the last monument to that animal intelligence…”
- the animal/pet as a mirror of how we treat earth as a whole as well as ourselves
- nowadays, the animals have retreated to signifiers, have become looked-at objects from acting subjects
“The image of a wild animal becomes the starting-point of a daydream: a point from which the day-dreamer departs with his back turned.”
- zoos as a symbol of colonial power
- zoos as images, cages as frames
- zoos as the monument to the dissappearance of the animals from our everyday lifes
The text definitly radicalised me.