User:Astrid van Nimwegen annotation Brackhage/Hokney/the gaze

‘The way we are used to see and how we are influenced in our seeing’.

Mothlight (1963) is a 16mm film about what a moth might see. Brackhage collected moth wings, other insects and leaves from plants and stick them between two splices of tape; afterwards he brought it to the lab to let it print onto 16mm film. The result is an ongoing stream of the detailed wings and leaves, it looks like a movement that is converted or translated into another movement. The film gives us a completely different approach of seeing.

After reading a couple of texts about this work and seeing ‘Mothlight’ on the internet (youtube.com ‘Mothlight’) the most interesting thing about the work was that it is not about what a moth would see, ‘instead, Mothlight is Brackhage’s imagining of what a moth might see’ (Camper F. ‘Mothlight and beyond’) So by doing this he actually tries to let us, as a viewer, be aware of and reflect on our own way of watching towards the world. In other works from Brackhage the same thing is going on, he tries ‘to imagine seeing through eyes other than his own’ (quoted from Camper, F ‘Mothlight and beyond’) and by that he questions our way of looking.

The same thing occurred to me after reading ‘Secret knowledge’ a book by David Hokney in which Hokney tries to demonstrate the use of lenses in paintings from the 14th century on. ‘This book is in the form of a visual argument’ (quoted from Hokney D. 2006, Secret knowledge rediscovering the techniques of the Old Masters, p.21) It made me conscious about how our ‘seeing’ is influenced by the use of lenses. How our viewing as we once had, has changed into another way of looking nowadays. There is a big difference between a lens-based viewing and the so-called ‘eyeballed’ viewing. Hockney introduces the term eyeballing as a definition of ‘the way artist sits down in front of a sitter and draws or paints a portrait by using his hand and eye alone and nothing else, looking at the figure and then trying to re-create the likeness on the paper or canvas’ (Secret Knowledge 2006, p23). The realisation of our viewing being transformed into a different viewing became very obvious to me in the example Hockney gives us (p.142-143) where he compares a drawing of a field of weath next to Durer’s watercolour ‘Large Turf ‘ (Durer A. Large turf, 1503, Watercolour, pen and inkt) this comparison really is not about demonstrating the use of lenses but just used here to point out the change of our looking. The big difference between a lens-based picture and an eyeballed viewing is that ‘a camera looks through one lens; we look—most of us, at least most of the time—through two eyes’. (Gayford M. 2011, The Mind’s eye)

(‘The gaze’ chapter from The practices of looking is also linked to this subject)