The Object Stares Back
April 22nd, 2008On the Nature of Seeing
by James Elkins
ISBN: 0156004976
There is no such thing as “just looking”; Elkins argues persuasively that seeing is more complicated than that. As an art historian with a willingness to explore not only the metaphorical but biological underpinnings of vision, he’s in a position to know.
He considers extreme images (death, illness, nakedness), bodies, faces, and blindness in his meditation on the meaning of seeing. Elkins is an academic, but you don’t need to be a specialist (in his discipline or otherwise) to follow or appreciate his arguments. Yes, he covers his french theorist bases here (Bataille, Lacan) but he doesn’t dwell on them; he remains more interested in communicating his ideas than exploring arcane theory. He can even be pretty funny, in his own way: “Consider the blue peacock, a bird nearly ruined by centuries of bad poems (figure 62).”
We can all be expected to know what a peacock looks like, and he did just tell is it is blue, so figure 62 is not so bad. The rest of the visual reproductions are not nearly as well-known or recognizable, so why they aren’t of higher quality is a mystery to me. The images are reprinted entirely in black and white, and frequently too muddy to convey the power he assures us they have. That is probably the most serious flaw in the book.
If you are interested in vision — in just about any sense of the word — you’ll probably find something of value in this book. I liked his Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction better, probably because it’s framework was in comparison more aligned with my interests. This is a more specialized interrogation of seeing — which is what it set out to be — than an exploration of an emerging field of study. Elkins is interesting and fairly prolific, so I’m sure I’ll be reading him again.
