The way how we see things is not only about physical ability but also a connotation which influenced by history and knowledge. Two terms vision and visuality: seems to be not quite equal.
Why vision and visuality, why these terms? Although vision suggests sight as a physical operation, and visuality sight as a social fact, the two are not opposed as nature to culture: vision is social and historical too, and visuality involves the body and the psyche. Yet neither are they identical (Foster, 1988, ix).
So and now when it is more complicated than just simply seeing objects - scopic regimes tend to help with identification of which visuality is exactly right or dominant and how we can identify them.
"-scopic" - used to form adjectives that describe devices for looking at or discovering and measuring things. (Cambridge Dictionary online)
In "The Split Between the Eye and the Gaze", Jacques Lacan looks to the scopic field as identified by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty identifies the eye as the guide in his examination of ideas in the aesthetic world, and also points out the fundamental obstacle in understanding the scopic field: I see only from one point, but in my existence am looked at from all sides. [Jacques Lacan] The scopic field is not limited to the subject's view, but indicates all visual angles, which is difficult to get around when the medium for experiencing this field is limited to the eye. A singular person can thus only have one view. (Tunis (2007) online).
In modern science, the term often used in the interpretation of Martin Jay, who introduced in 1988 the article "Scopic regimes of modernity." Martin Jay discussed ... to the ocular permeation of language, there exists a wealth of what might be called visually imbued and cultural social practices, which may vary from culture to culture and epoch to epoch. Sometimes these can be construed in grandiose terms, such as a massive shift from an oral culture to a "chirographic" one based on writing and then a typographic one in which the visual bias of the intermediate stage is even more firmly entrenched. ... Somewhere in between, historians of technology have pondered the implications of our expanded capacity to see through such devices as the telescope, microscope, camera, or cinema. (Jay, 1994:2,3). In other words, there are technological changes which dramatically influence our way of vision and visuality.
Alexander Gerasimov, JV Stalin and KE Voroshilov in the Kremlin. 1938 Oil on canvas. 296 × 386 cm. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow [Online] Available from: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/И._В._Сталин_и_К._Е._Ворошилов_в_Кремле#/media/File:A._Gerasimov_Stalin-and-Voroshilov.jpg [Accessed 30/08/18]
Technological progress changes not only the things which we see but also the way how we see and perceive things. For instance, in the work of Alexander Gerasimov viewer’s point of view is clearly lying far under the horizontal line so portraits of two persons are higher than our gaze. The visuality of this image puts us lower compare to influential persons. Does it mean that this point of view can change our perception of the scene? Yes, it does. Here I want to present another example. The work of Jackson Pollock Number 23. Difference in-between these two artworks only 10 years (!) and the Second World War. Point of view does not exist. It is a new understanding of the artwork and the world around. Greenberg in 1960 summarized the history and concluded how artwork should look like and how does it correlate with our visuality.
A similarity of the first work could be found in photography and sometimes in cinema. But second work rather rare for last two disciplines.
In photography, it is caused by the process. The point of view depends on the position of a camera lens. In such forms of photography like portrait, group portrait the model looks at the viewer, that is, into the camera of the lens. In other words, the model seems to contact us directly. She knows that she is being looked at, that the audience is behind the photo. In cinematography normally works the Fourth wall rule. It is when actors and spectators are separated with an imagined wall; actors would perform as in real life without the involvement of the audience. But later this effect was “broken” and actors began talking directly to the viewer. For instance one of the resent films Wonder Wheel (2017) directed by Woody Allen. One of the main characters (Justin Timberlake) treats the camera as another person speaks with it and shares inner thoughts with a viewer like with a friend.
Here the question arises, is the viewer becoming a part of this communication? On one hand, looks like that direct addressing to the audience make people feel involved in the process. Hereby, an actor communicates with us in the past and we react in the present, but this is rather a monologue from the performer side. Eye contact is established with the camera (this is a photograph, a movie), which broadcasts the image to us and we perceive it as a direct interaction. On the other hand, in arts like drawing and painting, model transfers emotions to the viewer this is nonverbal contact with the audience, but here a transmitter of ideas and emotions is an artist. Those who look at you from a painting in figurative art can have direct eye contact with the viewer. But for example, in Russian icons, the image from the picture can speak directly with your soul, and this is what the icon and abstract art have in common. And above all, technologies change the way how we perceive things through new mediums and new ideas which form our taste and mindset.
Bibliography and references
1. Hal Foster (1988) Vision and Visuality, Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture Humber 2, BAY Press, Seattle
2. Courtney Tunis (2007) Scopic, vocative The University of Chicago [Online] Available from: http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/scopicvocative.htm [Accessed 30/08/18]
3. Jay M. (1994) Downcast Eyes The Denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought, University of California Press, Berkeley
4. Alexander Gerasimov, JV Stalin and KE Voroshilov in the Kremlin. 1938 Oil on canvas. 296 × 386 cm. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow [Online] Available from: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/И._В._Сталин_и_К._Е._Ворошилов_в_Кремле#/media/File:A._Gerasimov_Stalin-and-Voroshilov.jpg [Accessed 30/08/18]
5. Cambridge Dictionary [Online] Available from: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/scopic [Accessed 18/06/20]