Narcissus in Bloom by Matt Colquhoun

Author:Matt Colquhoun
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781914420641
Publisher: Repeater Books
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

16. Gazing Back at the Gaze

Just as English only has one word for two types of “power”, the invention of the self-portrait and its role in conceptualising the individual more generally (by giving rise to the singular perspective in art) has likewise left us with only one “image” or “perspective” with which to represent these two forms of power in our visual languages as well. Is it any wonder, at least in conversations around the narcissism of the self-portrait, that we routinely renounce our capacity to look altogether, or otherwise confuse one form of power for the other? But just because we struggle to represent our potentials and our possessions does not mean that the cleft between the two is wholly invisible to us.

Photography, as we have already seen, can twist our perspectives in interesting ways. Indeed, the self-portrait, at its best, can create fractal representations of power, with each form facing off against the other. Like two mirrors turned inwardly together, the gaze of the alienated individual meets the gaze of the socially embedded self, and the myriad eyes that make up each gaze are locked together, just as they were for Narcissus, who both saw his potential for the first time and, in the process, gained painful knowledge of a version of himself that had long been possessed by others.

Read negatively, we can mourn Narcissus for his decision to destroy his own image in response to this kind of capture; read more positively, we find Narcissus activating his potential, escaping the trap placed between seeing and being seen through an active self-transformation. In much the same way, whilst we might despair at the ways this kind of narcissistic capture fuels and entraps us within our own self-concern, our awareness of this fact can also inspire us to attack the gazes that surround and torment us.

Consider Laura Mulvey’s famous conception of “the male gaze” (which can easily be extended and considered alongside the complimentary gazes of heteronormativity, whiteness, the bourgeoisie, et al). In her 1989 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Mulvey demonstrates how the power of the spectacle in the visual arts is split along (nonetheless blurred) lines that are very similar to those previously discussed, which are found between a more general sense of our potentials and possessions. “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female”, she writes.1 Men look; women are looked at.

But the finer point for Mulvey is that these expectations of activity and passivity are nonetheless socially formulated. The male gaze is not innate to visual media or even to individual men in themselves, but is instead diffusely emboldened by complex relations of power that are “reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him”.2 The male gaze, then, is the impersonal, controlling and preexisting gaze of a misogynistic socius, which emboldens the potential of the male individual and makes possible a woman’s

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