A text analysis of Nicholas Mirzoeff’s excerpt

    This paper will analyze the excerpt taken from Nicholas Mirzoeff’s How to See the World (2015). The text touches a variety of subjects that are indeed relevant to the subject of art, mainly art’s role in the interaction between the human body, the human mind, and the world around us. First, we shall proceed to understand the concept of ‘vision’. Secondly, we will look at how ‘vision’ gives meaning to the self and the other. And finally, we will see how vision establishes our place in the world.

    Let us begin with the second part of the excerpt where Nicholas Mirzoeff tackles the issue of ‘vision’. As Mirzoeff states, vision is in a constant state of “(…) feedback loops (…)” (p.83), in other words, it is a process. However, this process involves more than just ‘vision’ because it is not independent from other senses as “[i]t takes a brain to see, not just a pair of eyes.” (p.82). This implies that “seeing is something we do, rather than something that just happens naturally.” (p.86) However, vision’s complexity does not end here, Mirzoeff goes on by saying that “(…) we always know what posture our body is in, even with our eyes closed” (p.92). This is known as body-sense or body-conscience which allow us to build our body-map. In other others, a self-awareness that is coordinated with our body (also known as 'proprioception’). This concept introduces the notion of seeing with our brain; however there are some implications to this fact.

    How we see ourselves is heavily influenced by what we see and how we see it. It is here that the concept of embodiment comes into play. As described in Jane Pilcher and Imelda Whelehan’s Key Concepts in Gender Studies (2016): “Embodiment means that the body is conceptualized as an unfinished biological and social phenomenon (…)” (p.10). This means that the body intertwines both the biological and the cultural. For instance, our body-maps can be distorted by our skewed perception of reality. Mirzoeff gives the best example to this argument by using anorectic people when they “(…) look at their image and see themselves as obese, rather than the very thin body that others would see.” (p.92). This skewed perception of their own body comes from the unrealistic beauty standards in society, and thus provides evidence to the fact that culture shapes or ‘vision’.

    This helps introducing another work into this paper which is John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1990). In it, Berger also reiterates the notion that ‘vision’ is influenced “(…) by what we know or what we believe” (p.8). Berger’s work is also linked with the first part of the excerpt that introduces the concept of the ‘theory of mind’ which leads us to Mirzoeff again. Mirzoeff titles this section of the chapter “How We Think About Seeing” as “The mirror and the community” (p.94), the title makes it easy to infer that most of what we learn is through mirroring what we see around us; Indeed, Mirzoeff states that neuroscientists attribute this ability to the “mirror neurons” (p.95) in our brains, and he uses the work of Vittorio Gallese to support this thesis: “For Gallese, the brain is in effect a shared space with a ‘we’ that is not a crowd of individuals but a collective formation.” (p.95), meaning that humans have developed empathy exactly to be able “(…) to visualize [experience/reality] from the point of view of others” (p.96). John Berger also refers to this human capability in Ways of Seeing (1990), stating that the ability to see from the point of view of others makes us “(…) aware that we can also be seen” (p.9), thus establishing our presence in the world and influencing our behaviors.

    A great example of how ‘vision’ establishes our presence in the world is, for instance, the way we interpret art. How a painting or a sculpture can create and normalize certain social behaviors such as privilege, more specifically white patriarchal privilege. For instance, how Americans were portrayed during the “Manifest Destiny” age. Paintings – such as American Progress (1872) by John Gast or Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap (1851-52) by George C. Bingham – portrayed American expansion towards the West as an occurrence of divine proportions and divine responsibility in which occurrences such as the massacre of the indigenous populations were immortalized not as tragedy but as legend.

Works Cited
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin, 1990.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. How to See the World. Penguin, 2015.
Pilcher, Jane and Imelda Whelehan. Key Concepts in Gender Studies. Sage, 2017.

Ruben Costa (146233)