Today's guest post is by Damian Smith of RMIT University in Melbourne. He summarises and responds to the fascinating series of papers at our 'Ways of Seeing' conference. It was linked to our contemporary art exhibition Unseen: The Lives of Looking by Dryden Goodwin.
The 2015 Ways of Seeing Conference, held on 17 July at the Royal Museums, Greenwich was a welcome opportunity to hear speakers across a range of disciplines shed new light on the complex and layered phenomenon of human sight and seeing. The museum's precinct is situated within the classically designed Greenwich Park where elegant 17th-century lines of sight and sweeping city vistas make it the ideal setting for discussions pertaining to seeing and perception, all the more so as it is home to the famed Royal Observatory, Greenwich.
The Ways of Seeing Conference coincided also with the exhibition
Unseen: The Lives of Looking, a solo project by British artist Dryden Goodwin. The exhibition investigates the world of three different professionals whose livelihoods depend on sight: an eye surgeon, a human rights lawyer, and a planetary explorer. The fourth observer is the artist himself, who is seen throughout the 95 minute film making minute drawings of his subjects as they go about their visually dependent activities. It is hard to resist the pull of this feature-length documentary for it operates at a pronounced level of intimacy, taking the viewer into the closest proximity with each of the protagonists. The film is one half of the exhibition which includes also Goodwin's drawings and etchings. These tiny depictions are presented alongside the respective tools used by the surgeon, planetary explorer, lawyer and artist. There is a forensic quality to the exhibition that is not out of place within a museum that makes significant linkages between the realms of art, science and law. The foundations of Empire, so entwined with these respective disciplines, were laid in the Greenwich riverside, for it is here that the Royal Naval College produced the man power and methods that secured Britain's maritime supremacy. If ever there was doubt that the gaze is a potential action and tool of power this place surely refutes it.
Those who are familiar with the work of British art theorist
John Berger will recognise in the title of the conference allusion to Berger's best known book and BBC television series,
Ways of Seeing. Berger brought a user friendly Marxism to lounge rooms across the globe, telling audiences that what you thought about what you saw depended on your place in the scheme of things. If you owned it you enjoyed it, but otherwise, paintings of land and luxuries were really signifiers of power. In the decades proceeding Berger's 1972 project considerable attention has been given to examining the problem of looking. The Ways of Seeing Conference went some way in considering the political imperatives of seeing but also to propose critiques relevant to the context of contemporary networked society and its ubiquitous modes of seeing, recording and disclosing. Speakers ranged across historical and contemporary points of focus - the first view of the earth from a hot air balloon, the mapping of the Atlantic, the uses and abuses of CCTV and the role of drawing in representation and perception. Semiotic, post-structural and post-modern critiques revealed the nuances, falsities and pluralities in how we see the world. Moreover, the act of seeing was revealed as a thing that binds us as a community. Social relations are built upon the complexities of seeing, showing and agreeing, or that marker of civil society, agreeing to disagree.
As an Australian participant in the conference I could not but draw attention to artist
Nathaniel Dance's iconic portrait of Captain James Cook, dating to 1775-76. The work is
on view in The Queens House alongside engravings produced by the naturalist Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, which date from Cook's first voyage to the South Pacific. So redolent are they of the European gaze cast upon the antipodes. Yet the view was also countered by the Aboriginal people who first saw these strange tall ships anchored in their coastal waters. Some of their impressions were recorded in the rock shelters of northern Australia. As is well known the encounter set the stage for a program of dispossession wherein Aboriginal people were viewed not as human but as fauna. It was an unseemly myth that persisted until 1967 when an Australian referendum resoundingly affirmed to overturn it, though the question of occupation and the annexation of Indigenous lands would remain much contested. What these stories illustrate however is how post-colonial histories must inevitably account for multiple points of view, especially where accurate historical narratives are at stake.
The Royal Museums at Greenwich is working to widen interpretation of the various collections and the Ways of Seeing Conference is but one example of this expanding program. However as a first time visitor it was the sight of Nigerian born artist Yinka Shonibare's sculpture,
Nelson's Ship in a Bottle (2010) that really set the tone. The sails that adorn Shonibare's rendering of Nelson's vessel are made from the colourful fabrics associated with West African dress. The fabrics are derived from Indonesian patterns yet they were mass produced by the Dutch. They symbolise the interlacing of cultures, viewpoints and fantasies pertaining to construction of the other. Simultaneously they are reminders that our cultural legacies are enmeshed with our ways of seeing, and that how we see today is always plural and layered.
Emily Casey and Luci Eldridge also wrote posts for this blog about the research presented in their papers.