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CHAPTER 4

GROWING UP LOOKING: DESIRE, ABSTRACTION AND GOD

LOOKING, BODIES AND DESIRE

Imagine, now, a child who is approaching puberty in Italy in the late 1400s. She is becoming aware of sexual desire and is developing the intellectual ability to think more abstractly.

In the 1460s, a four-metre block of marble lay in the grounds of Florence’s cathedral. Almost fifty years later, the authorities commissioned a twenty-six-year-old Tuscan from a banking family to make a sculpture from it of a warrior king who may have lived around 1000 BCE. Whilst still a boy, the warrior had killed a giant on a battlefield by hurling five smooth rocks at him, and then cut off his head.

The sculptor worked on the commission for three years, drawing on the marble’s surface rather than using a life model. Usually in art, the warrior in question was depicted after his triumph, and with the giant’s severed head at his feet, but the sculptor decided to show him before the killing, once he had decided to square up to the giant, but in advance of him setting off. His brow would be tense with resolve, his eyes staring, his neck muscles clenched: a portrait of anticipation and purpose. The boy would also be naked (and uncircumcised, which was the custom for Italian sculpture at the time, but significant given that the warrior had objected to the giant in part because the latter was uncircumcised). The boy was David, the giant was Goliath and the sculptor was Michelangelo.

On 8 September 1504, forty men begin to haul Michelangelo’s David to the place in Florence where it is to stand, a place that had been decided by a committee that included Leonardo da Vinci and the painter Botticelli. On the way, crowds gather. Our pubescent teenager is amongst them. The sculpture is stoned. The teenager does not fully understand why. Presumably the protestors did not want to look at its nudity, and nor did they want others, especially children, to do so. They felt that looking at bodies was wrong, or looking at them in public was wrong, or allowing women or children to see them was wrong.

The story of how we look at other people’s bodies builds on what we have seen so far. We have talked about distance in looking, meeting others’ eyelines, social looking, the pleasure we take in looking at the sky and nature, the visuality of objects, and a growing interest in our own self-image. So what happens when an evolving young person’s gaze becomes desirous? This chapter is about such evolution – those moments in our lives and in human culture when seeing something physical leads to something less physical, as a road leads from here to there. Bodies, shapes and the sun are the starting points of this chapter, but desire, abstraction and God are its destination.

In the case of David, marble had led to desire, and the fear of desire. David was a teenager, and our teenage years are when we first have erotic responses to the world, so how does our Italian Renaissance teenager look, and how do other teenagers look? Consider this remarkable one.

The movie actor Lauren Bacall was nineteen when this image, a still from the Hollywood movie To Have and Have Not, was shot. She is in shallow focus, like the Mona Lisa. Her body is torquing, her chin drops, her hair is a frame, her eyes complete the twist. The key light is top left. It catches the top of her hair, her right cheek, her upper lip, the tip of her nose and her chin. Bacall in real life was interested in light, and talked of how Marlene Dietrich was lit with a top or ‘north’ light. Bacall’s image here was called ‘the look’. Bacall had ‘the look’. The look meant sexy, confident and disdainful. She was saying, Do you really expect me to believe that?

The surprise, therefore, is that Bacall was shaking when images like this were filmed. She was so nervous, so new to cinema, so intimidated by her director Howard Hawks and her leading man Humphrey Bogart, that she shook. To stop the shaking she dropped her chin, which made the back of her neck stiffen and throat clench, thus stabilising her head. Her lack of confidence resulted in something that looks very confident.

There is an optimal time to see certain images. The impact of some photos is hidden. Guarded. Not here. The confidence in this image, its sexuality, its graphics, mean that it is clear and present. Her face is in your face. The best time to see this photograph is when you are young, like Bacall is young. It is so available, so full of attitude, so unforgettable, so ready for life and all it will throw at it. Lauren Bacall is dead, but here she still disdains, still attracts, still abstracts, still refrains. Bacall is a teenager here, and so is the image, and so are we. When we think about our own looking as a teenager, we realise that there was quaking in it, shaking in it. We felt both insecure and desirous, both of which make you tremble. We wanted to stand confidently and look like we knew what we were doing, but we were faking it in some ways. Teenage looking is formative looking because it is so alert and adrenalised. It is fight-or-flight looking.

There was fight or flight in those who threw stones at Michelangelo’s David. Looking for them was a force field. When the Australian film-maker Baz Luhrmann was making William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, he could not think of a way of filming the moment when the teenagers first glimpse each other. He racked his brains. One night he was in a restaurant, and went to the toilets. At the washbasins he looked up and saw a fish tank and, through it, the ladies’ washrooms. As he looked through the tank, he realised that this was the visual solution to his problem. Here, in a very horizontal image, he has Juliet glimpse Romeo, who is dressed as a knight and is reminiscent of medieval stories of courtly love – Abelard and Eloise, Dante and Beatrice, Lancelot and Guinevere or, in Iran, Layla and Majnun.

Luhrmann’s image shows teenagers like our Renaissance one. It makes us ask what we are looking through when we look at the body of another. What does a teenager look through? What is the fish tank, what is the medium? In any love story, the question is What is stopping them? In Romeo and Juliet, it is family. Often it is the fact that home, that camera obscura, that place where we learn the seeing network, wants to keep the teenager childlike. It is scared of what the young adult might see. It realises that looking can be disruptive, especially when the looked-at is a body. Teenagers’ erotic looking often scares those who want to arrest their childhood gaze.

This painting by Titian, which was finished in 1559, tells the mythological story of Actaeon who, whilst out hunting, happens upon the bathing spot of the goddess Diana and her nymphs.

He pulls back the red curtain, sees their naked bodies, and they recoil. Diana’s response is to turn Actaeon into a stag, who is then hunted to death by her own hounds. Though he did not intend to transgress, he is punished for looking, for pulling back the red curtain, for entering the force field – as the Florentines did when they looked at David, as we do when we look at Bacall, as Juliet did when she looked at Romeo – and for not, then, averting his gaze. His looking led to something else – desire, reproach, transformation and then death. We cannot blame Actaeon, but in feminist terms we can say that the force field in which he looks is political. In Ways of Seeing John Berger says that a woman’s presence ‘defines what can and cannot be done to her’. If you get to look at another’s naked body, it is often because you are more powerful than they are, because you are rich or male or white, or all three – especially in Western culture. Such privileged looking is the male gaze. As most artists have been men, as have their patrons, the dominant direction of looking in culture has been from a man to a woman. The road has led that way.

In France in 1863, Édouard Manet painted this scene which complicates or plays with the male gaze. In it, we the viewers are the only ones who look at the naked woman. The men in the picture do not look at her. They are dressed fashionably, the hipsters of their day. The obvious thing would have been to make her the visual centre of gravity, but Manet’s network of glances is less expected. We are challenged by the desire in the scene. It does not work in conventional ways. The men lie back but the naked woman sits up, alert, looking at us, restless, unengaged by the hipsters, needing more from the force field.

Flip the picture so that the men are naked and the woman is not, and you will get an equal scramble of looking frequencies. The image has been restaged numerous times, including, in the 1980s, for the band Bow Wow Wow’s LP The Last of the Mohicans and for the Star Wars generation, where the naked woman is Princess Leia, the man on the right is Darth Vader and the man in the brown jacket is Chewbacca.

Three years after Manet, Gustave Courbet, who we saw earlier scraping back his hair and being shocked by his own face, painted the genitals of his lover, and called the result The Origin of the World. The woman’s legs are spread. We see her vulva, belly and right breast.

An image from the world of pornography had migrated into the realm of art and, by doing so, challenged the low culture/high culture distinction. The latter enriched and the former debased, so the bourgeois assumptions claimed. But as the desire to look at sexually stimulating things was felt by most humans, how could it be inherently demoralising and enfeebling? The Florentines in 1504 would have been apoplectic, and even today, when we look at it, we might think How are we getting to see this much?, and Is this allowed?, and What looking is there to do after this? Our teenager in Renaissance Italy will feel such lust, amongst the most powerful sensations they will have experienced. The mixture of pleasure and yearning in sexualised looking is tempestuous. The erotics of looking sets the teenager on a stormy sea. Most looking has, within it, an element of attraction and, therefore, the potential to disrupt, but when attraction becomes compulsive, looking can feel like bullying. The teenager wants it but not to be lost in it, or wonders what it says about them if they do get lost. Lust’s ability to exclude or distort other thoughts is like a looking fever.

The Origin of the World was not a destination; it was just another note on the scale of looking at bodies. The French artist Orlan showed this by copying the painting, but replacing the vulva with an erect penis and calling it The Origin of War. The British painter Francis Bacon zoomed out from genitals to portray his lovers as escapologists, wriggling out of their own bag of knees and knuckles.

Bacall’s look, Romeo and Juliet’s fish tank glimpse, Actaeon’s tragic accident, Manet’s wrong-footing lunch, Courbet’s close-ups, Bacon’s male wrestling: looking at bodies is an ongoing fascination. In the 1930s the film-maker and Nazi sympathiser Leni Riefenstahl pictured naked bodies with awe and classical grandeur, as if they were David; five decades later, despite years of denazification, and long after it was possible for her to hang on to any of the ideas of the Hitler times, she was in Africa, again photographing young people naked and heroic, with the same aesthetic as before, as if Auschwitz-Birkenau had not happened, as if her filming bodies was still just her filming bodies. Her fascination had become stuck, unresponsive to changing times. Hers was a female gaze which led nowhere, or to bland, heroic idealism. If our theme in this chapter is the road that looking takes us on, hers was a dead end.

Elsewhere, the female gaze was far more of an adventure. We have already said that looking at bodies is a force field and a bumpy road, but this image from Claire Denis’s film Beau travail (shot by Agnès Godard) makes us mix metaphors again and say that it is like a war zone.

What would a teenager think of this? Eight soldiers are too well posed to be dead. In the film we have seen them circle each other and fight, now four are topless, their legs spread, as if struck by lightning, or supplicants to some wrathful god, or willing to submit to the political and erotic imagination of a film-maker who was brought up in West Africa and wants to turn the tables on men looking at women. But if Denis had been standing really close to one of these men, or filming in the 1920s or 1930s, or trying to show what it would feel like to be in love with him, she might have used the soft focus that we saw in Chapter 1, the focus of the look of love. Instead, she makes it look like they are doing snow angels in the sand. Their poses serve no rational purpose. Instead, the image is reaching towards abstraction.

ABSTRACT LOOKING

Maybe that is what desirous looking really is; maybe that is what Juliet saw in Romeo, or Michelangelo saw in his slab of marble or our Renaissance teenager sees as she grapples with the disruptive power of erotic looking – an abstraction, a journey from a body to an idea. Teenage minds come to terms with both. In the 1000s CE, the Chinese painter Sung Ti advised a fellow painter to throw a sheet of white silk over an old stone well. He should then gaze at the sheet day and night, as it billows in the breeze and as the clouds cast shadows on it, until he starts to see, in its creases, the formations of a landscape – mountains, ravines and rivers. ‘Get all these things into you,’ continued Sung, and his advisee would see in the sheet ‘men, birds, plants and trees’. More than four hundred years later, in his Treatise on Painting, Leonardo da Vinci gave similar advice:

Look at certain walls stained with damp, or at stones of uneven colour . . . you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods . . . expressions of faces and clothes and an infinity of things.

Later in the same book Leonardo writes that looking at clouds can stimulate our imaginations.

Imagine, then, that as Yves Klein looked up at his blue sky, clouds came. A watercolour painting of them would look something like this.

A few moments after this painting was completed, the very same cloudscape was photographed with the digital zoom of a phone camera, and the result was this.

Pixelated, grey becoming dark and purple, like a bruise – what could be called an automatic abstraction. The journey from real clouds to abstract shapes was unplanned. Minutes after the skyscape was painted, the photograph was taken. We perhaps like to think that as abstract art became famous in the twentieth century, human beings started looking abstractly then too, but Sung and Leonardo were talking about looking abstractly centuries ago, and the earliest sculptures show that stylised looking is very old indeed. Take this Iron Age sculpture from La Spezia, Italy.

No human or animal looks like this, but that does not mean that its lack of realism is a failure on the artist’s part. The U nose is not trying to look exactly the same as a nose or beak that appears in nature. The sculptor has looked at real noses, then tried to make something that is visually distant from, but evocative of, a nose or beak. The same with the far-apart eyes and the oval head. The result is simplified, graphic, detached and other.

Early sculptures often purposely stylise in this way. They show that Klein, or a baby carried on her dad’s back looking up at the sky, had a tendency to tune out from the specifics of what they are seeing into something more generalised. The sculpture is semi-abstract the way the digital photograph of clouds is semi-abstract. In his book Visual Thinking, German theorist Rudolf Arnheim compared this Corot painting of mother and child . . .

Reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation

. . . with this Henry Moore sculpture of two objects, the larger one on the right leaning over the smaller one on the left.

The painting is specific about costume, hair and location. Nothing in the sculpture can be said to have a specifically human subject, yet the visual connection to the painting seems true. Like the designers in the previous chapter, Arnheim is pointing to an essence, an underlying form. Corot paints the fuselage, Moore sculpts the engine that lies beneath it.

The face with the U nose shows that people have always done such looking. Abstraction has not just been an occasional destination of looking, or an idea exclusively for learned lookers; it seems to be a product of looking. In the same era that the face with the U nose was made, and thirteen hundred years before Cleopatra, the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten. He did so because he had undergone a religious conversion. He had rejected the old Egyptian theology which worshipped the Moon, stars and other heavenly bodies, and become entranced by the most visible body of all, the Sun – Aten – a disc god, which he saw as a godhead. This relief sculpture from 1375– 54 BCE shows Akhenaten on the left and his wife Nefertiti on the right, radiated by the Sun. They have eyes only for themselves and it. Its beams of light travel from it, out into the world, and into the eyes of the people, as in a child’s drawing of the Sun.

The man and woman’s three daughters wriggle for attention. Their son Tutankhaten, who later changed his name to Tutankhamun, and who we will come to later in our story, has yet to be born into this kingdom of the Sun.

To see a god in the Sun, to see in it a god’s mythic journey and intent, Akhenaten had done abstract looking. He had seen something physical and turned it into something metaphysical, allowing what he had seen to explain the conundrum of consciousness and the agony of death, and to be the source of life and the patterns in nature. God was light. Akhenaten photosynthesised light. He turned it into awe. Visible light, the tiny bit of the electromagnetic spectrum that human beings need in order to see became, paradoxically, the great symbol of the unseen. By the time of the Middle Ages, this abstract light was seen as distinct from the everyday light actually perceived by human eyes. The former was lumen, the latter was lux. The road of looking led from lux to lumen. This idea, this visual pun, these two types of light, held sway for centuries.

In the sixteenth-century Italian paintings of Caravaggio in particular, light was both lumen and lux, divine and optical. He became famous for his realistic light which also, in its drama and clarity, transcended realism. Shards of light suddenly seem to fall upon street people in his large paintings, enacting sacred or profane stories. The light dimmed in his work as the painter aged, but it did not lose its duality. Jump forward to the twentieth century and you get artists still interested in using light to refer to something beyond the material world. There are numerous examples. American artist James Turrell has us look up to the sky in his works, through open discs in ceilings. He frames Klein’s sky, like the roof of Rome’s Pantheon does. In the annual Fête des Lumières in Lyons in France, new computerised light animations seem to make buildings buckle or bend at the knee.

On a hill close to Lyons there stands a building that is made of concrete and looks like a beehive or a Star Wars battleship, but which controls light exquisitely. Seen from the outside of Le Corbusier’s La Tourette priory, these blunt stumps of concrete give little indication of their function.

But here is what happens on the inside. The stumps are the tops of light tubes or barrels, into which sunlight enters then bounces down, softening as it does so, lux becoming lumen. Through a circular aperture in its ceiling, they descend into a dark chamber, and here fall upon a concrete block, painted deep red.

In front of the block stand three pedestal altars on which monks could practise mass. The whole composition seems to combine Akhenaten’s sacred light (we could be inside a pyramid here) with Arnheim’s reduction of form. Also, perhaps, the image makes us think of the Tarkovsky image of the home with the children at the door – dark inside, the luminous beyond. Design, colour, light, shelter: a feast of looking. La Tourette focuses the theme of this chapter, how looking at something concrete, or of the real world, can lead to more abstract things. These altars in the convent are like David or Bacall.

But looking at light is not the only way in which human beings have seen the unseen. This Russian panel from the 1200s gives Jesus Christ an attenuated nose, tiny mouth and large almond eyes, framed with multiple curves. Two strands of hair add a hint of realism into this otherwise geometric portrayal, but what is relevant here is where Christ is looking.

At first it seems that he is staring directly out at us, but judging by the asymmetry of the whites of his eyes, he is actually looking slightly past us, over our right shoulder, to a place adjacent to where we are but not the same. We look at him, and then with him, past ourselves, to something other. In the Christian tradition, this place is heaven. He is saying, It is close. Paradise is not lost. He is doing the abstract looking for us. It seems a jump to go from a Russian icon to a Japanese film, but Yasujiro Ozu makes his third appearance in our story here. His scene of red flowers and walking girls showed how an image can take our eyes for a walk, and his balanced domestic interior showed how rooms can contain looking. In this shot, from his most famous film Tokyo Story, a woman looks in exactly the way that Christ looks in the icon: apparently at us, but then subtly not. Our eyes do not look with hers. Is she looking through us, beyond us, or again, slightly over our right shoulder?

Ozu was not overtly Buddhist, but he certainly wanted his film to gesture towards the metaphysical. His gravestone carries neither his name nor details of when he lived, just the symbol mu, , which means emptiness or the void. This detail from an Islamic manuscript of the 1400s uses the form of an eye, but as a symbol of the gateway to the soul and as a meditative symbol of the eternal. Twin-track abstract looking.

A converse abstraction related to looking is evil, or the devil. In ancient Greece, the Arab world, Iran, India and North Africa, iniquity is represented by, and then repelled by, directly staring eyes. In ancient Egypt, this image of the Eye of Ra represents the destructive and malign aspects of the sun god.

Across the Middle East, nazars are talismans which reflect the satanic look back onto itself.

Reflection is a key point: mirrors are sometimes the harbingers of wickedness. The vanity they fuel is, it seems, damnable. The Russian icon painting could almost be Christ looking at his own image, but look too long into a mirror and you see the beast. The godless queen in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s ‘Little Snow-White’, who became the Evil Queen in the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, stared into her mirror and saw a green, demonic version of herself.

And the idea that malevolence lies within a looking glass continues. In Candyman, based on Clive Barker’s short story ‘The Forbidden’, the eponymous angry and vengeful presence can be summoned by looking into a mirror and saying his name five times. Three subsequent films dramatised the story which, in turn, became an urban legend.

God, emptiness, abstraction, the void, the devil, the metaphysical: human beings have always convinced themselves that they could see such things, and have had ways of seeing them: in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, brutalist architecture, Orthodox icons, Japanese film frames, Middle Eastern talismans and horror fiction. In India, the Hindu god Shiva is pictured dancing the world into existence, surrounded by a ring of flames, his hair flung outwards into the universe. The image somehow manages to tell a story of creation, of destruction, of the circularity of the cosmos, of the centrality of god, and of the power of dance – a journey around the world.

Hinduism is strikingly figurative. The gods take many human and animal forms, as if the looking journey is not from the material here to the abstract there, but in the other direction: from the divine and the invisible to the tangible. In another one of the world’s great religions, Islam, there is a different kind of visual exchange between the human world and the god world. The centre of worship in Islam is as abstract as Le Corbusier’s red block. The Ka’bah in Mecca was a place of pilgrimage for pagan polytheists before the Prophet Muhammad had his first revelations in CE 610 and made his migration – hejira – in CE 622. Soon he declared it the holiest shrine in Islam – a visual sun, as it were, made of black stone, to which all should look when they pray, and around which faithful pilgrims should process. The image on the next page from a 1500s Persian poetry manuscript shows the black square in a blue horseshoe, surrounded by the rectangular walls of the al-Haram mosque, which are surmounted by forty-seven domes resembling the flames in Shiva’s dance.

Again, it is the geometry that strikes, the abstraction. It is like using maths to prove god. The Ka’bah is an object-building of such formal beauty and rigour that it allows those who look at it to contemplate timeless things, and everywhere. The golden circle of Akhenaten’s sun and the black square of the Ka’bah are visual opposites that do the same thing.

And long after the construction of the Ka’bah, black squares have reappeared in culture as symbols of the infinite, or refractors of our looks. In 1913, a thirty-five-year-old Russian Pole, the oldest of fourteen children, designed the curtain for the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun as a black square. It was as if the Ka’bah blocked out Aten. Two years later the designer – Kazimir Malevich – reworked the design as a single black square on a white canvas. The resulting painting became one of the most famous images in twentieth-century art. When Malevich died, mourners carried black square banners, and he was buried under a black square headstone.

In Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey novels, flat black, rectangular monoliths appear throughout the universe and across time. Their inorganic, unweathered forms are clearly built rather than growing. In Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, these stelae are first seen at the dawn of man.

Prehumans cannot stop looking at them. Their unbending immobility, their refusal of referent or function, fascinates. Their dimensions are 1:4:9, the first three whole numbers squared. The rest of the visible world is pitted or detailed; the fact that the stelae are not makes them seem extra-physical, or metaphysical. Even in science fiction, the seen leads to the unseen.

But here is the epilogue to the story of metaphysical looking: people want their gods to be unlike them, but also like them – to be far away but very close. As the Russian icon panel suggested, as well as wanting our gods to be elsewhere, we want that elsewhere to be just over our shoulders and recognisably ours. In this nineteenth-century picture of Jesus Christ, for example, he has his back to the world. He is sorrowful and downcast.

The setting is not the Middle East where Christ lived. The painting is by a Scot, William Dyce, who has chosen to have his subject sit in a very Scottish landscape. The contours and strewn rocks are what we see in the once glaciated Highlands, the colours are those of a Scottish autumn. Dyce’s picture, like many religious images, reassures its audience by saying, He is one of us. He walked where we walk. The road turns back on itself. This is an image of desire too.

How to sum up what we have learnt about abstract thinking? Perhaps with this woman. She is a North Carolinian Hupa, photographed in the 1920s. Her people migrated to where they now live in around CE 1000. Her relevance to our story is that she is a shaman, so all her adult life she has been looking at the spirit world. Abstract looking is her job.

Her looking might have been trance-like; she will have claimed to have had visions of other dimensions where benevolent or malevolent beings are, and will have used those visions to guide her fellow Hupa, perhaps to help retrieve their souls. What is striking is how canny her gaze is. There is no attempt to look awestruck in her face, no reverie. We search in vain, in this photograph, for any sign of exaltation. She stares over our right shoulder, as she will have done to many others. She will have done a lot of abstract looking.

Can we see confrontation in her face? The converse of the divine, in many cultures, is the evil eye. In the Bible (Proverbs 23: 6) it says, ‘Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meats.’ In times of minimal medical understanding, it was thought that sickness could enter our eyes from the malign look of another. Such is the power of eye contact that, throughout human history, we have felt that looking can be accursed. The eyes of a goat, for example, can seem demonic. A burning or scathing look can seem to send to its recipient, like a poisoned dart, ill will or fortune. Once looking opens up to the supernatural, it must accept that that realm can be malign as well as benign.

The Hupa shaman could be a distant relative of the baby we thought of at the beginning of this book, now towards the end of her life. In her teenage years, she started to look at other bodies. She became aware of desire and its corollaries, abstraction and god. Her looking had grown up.

Where would it go next, and what would next happen in human development?

It is time to consider the sort of looking that takes place as people live more closely together, in larger groups and more elaborate built environments in which they share, barter, serve and socialise. Their looking becomes more polyvalent in these built places. It is time to focus on urban looking. It is time to enter the built world, to see it rise and fall.