The Present is Alone

Nowhere does the visible exist. We know of no kingdom of the visible that keeps its sovereignty intact. Perhaps reality, so often confused with the visible, exists in an autonomous form, although this has always been a highly contentious issue. The visible is no more than the totality of images that the eye creates during the act of looking. Reality is made visible by being perceived. And once ensnared, perhaps it can never renounce the particular form of existence it acquires in the consciousness of the person who has observed it. The visible can remain alternatively illuminated or concealed, but once perceived it forms a big part of our way of life. The visible is an invention. Doubtless one of humankind's most formidable inventions. Whence the chive to increase the tools of vision, to extend the limits of the visible thereby.

The television camera was a major landmark in the history of this desire. Television enables us to see things never before seen. And we start believing that the camera, with its zoom and its macro, with its long shots and big close-ups, is the instrument that presents us with the truth of what's real. And humanity's love of the camera has never ceased growing. Thanks to photography and cinema and television and video and the sophistications of modern computers we can view microscopic elements or images of events light years away that, in fact, permit us to see part of our own past.

At the beginning of the 70s John Berger, in his TV programme Ways of Seeing, began to suggest how the ways of reproducing artworks, ways that seemingly bring them closer to us, were also able to falsify these, erode them even. That is, he used the TV screen to demonstrate how the power of cameras - photographic or television cameras - can dislocate the unique meaning each work possesses, unless the viewer is aware enough to remain alert to so much perceptual facility. His counter example carne from painting. The camera can move about above canvases that are part and parcel of our visual heritage, breaking up their unity - and their meaning along with it - in different sorts of ways: altering their size, modifying their colour, isolating figures from the scenes that contain them - in fine, converting the parts of an originally undivided whole into autonomous elements. Today the nature of this assessment is not only surprising for what it anticipated - think of how the means of image reproduction have grown more sophisticated in the last three decades - but because it broke with the myth of the exactitude of mechanically produced images.

In 1972 Ways of Seeing became a book. John Berger put together a team - made up of Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb and Richard Hollis - to be able to satisfy the editor's requirement to have the manuscript ready in three weeks. The then oft-repeated phrase of McLuhan's, the medium is the message, acquired instant meaning. In their 'Note to the reader' the authors declare: our principal aim has been to start a process of questioning. And indeed Ways of Seeing goes on encouraging debate today into the encounter, be it accidental or intentional, between a person and a work of art. Into that magic moment, suspended in time, that instantaneously combines immediate perception with the already known and is expressed in the language of surprise and interrogation.

In the TV series John Berger had already contrived to have the camera move through the rooms of the National Gallery without accompanying them with any sound, with any text. The viewer was thus confronted by his or her own reaction: surprise, uncertainty, recognition, correlation... an awareness of a unique response to a stimulus emitted for an average generic spectator. The silence of those televised images is more powerful, even, than their form or colour. That silence fills the very act of contemplation with light. This is a silence necessary for the paintings to speak and the spectator to hear them and, in so doing, to hear him- or herself

In the book, too, the images sometimes go it alone on the mute pages. At such time, however, it's the reader who orchestrates the tempo, who controls their silence. Turning the page is a voluntary act for the person who's reading; with television the viewer is subject to the decisions of others. The text that accompanies the images takes on the energy of the written word. It can be read and reread a thousand times, until it becomes a kind of handrail for guiding the reader through the wordless pages,

What is the secret of Ways of Seeing? In what does its renewed validity lie? Possibly in the present tense in which its editing is anchored. Ways of Seeing refers to the present tense that is manifested when the spectator's gaze is detained by a painting and senses its attraction. And it does it by making the reader see what happens to him when he looks.

But the contemporariness of Ways of Seeing is manifested, too, in other tenses. The selection of images that the book offers us - always presented as black-and-white substitutes of those unique works that hang on the walls of museums - cover the whole spectrum of the history of the arts. Each, however, is presented to us as a little piece of our own time. Of a present formed of an admixture of what has been seen and what has been lived during the process of civilization, a process we bear within us in our way of seeing, of knowing and of living. Of what occurred in the past, only leftovers and literature remain. In the present tense of Ways of Seeing the past is as much a part of Holbein's Ambassadors as it is of Andy Warhol´s Marilyn Monroe. The number of years that have passed since the canvases were painted doesn't matter so much as our current ability to render their presence visible once more.

Ways of seeing a man, ways of seeing a woman, ways of seeing the arts, ways of seeing advertising, ways of seeing and ways of being seen: all are ways of demarcating the world of the visible, ways - always in the plural - of contriving to be singular.

In conjoining the present tense of the reader-spectator with the work's ability to render itself present, Ways of Seeing not only inaugurates the present continuous as the temporal register specifíc to artistic contemplation, but also decants this verbal mode to the profít of the spectator. The arts and their history have long been - and sadly go on being in a great many places - the private province of art historians, and spectators have either been reduced to silence or else have redirected their interests elsewhere.

Thirty years after its first publication, Ways of Seeing continues to display tremendous boldness when it comes to revealing the camouflaging that the arts have been habitually subject to. For many of those responsible for the artistic patrimony, its way of doing things is still not evident today: that complicity of the text with the unknown reader-TV viewer who is taken to be the true addressee of painting. The man in the street who, when he enters a museum and stops before a picture, hauls the canvas back into the present and maybe notes, as Borges said, that the present is alone.