The second piece of writing I did about art – aged 17 – was a study of 4 portraits in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art by Alexie Jawlenski, Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde and the Scottish artist James Cowie. They were all painted around the same time – 1930s – and were portriats – one a self-portrait – and I was fascinated by the way they looked out of the image and the way that the viewer was asked to look back.
This interchange – between gaze and gazer has consistently fascinated me (and many other people) – but I new none of the theoretical ground work then about the pyscho-sexual power relationships played out in the act of looking and representing – replicating and repeating the gaze in art.
Golan Levin’s Eye Robot is fun …..
The first piece of writing was a confusing ramble on the problem of time in Constable’s Haywain ….. little did I know that this would also be another constant problem that I would return to in my thinking…. that’s for another day
