A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women

The fragmentation of knowledge is nothing new, but it is safe to say that in the twenty-first century the chances of a genuine conversation among people in different disciplines has diminished rather than increased

Feeling, however, is not only unavoidable; it is crucial to understanding a work of art

Two central claims I make in this book are that all human knowledge is partial, and no one is untouched by the community of thinkers or researchers in which she or he lives.

We are all also creatures of ideas.

This fury belongs especially to women making art, art of all kinds, because women artists are put into boxes that are hard to climb out of. The box is labeled “woman’s art.” When was the last time you heard anyone talk about a man artist, a man novelist, a man composer? The man is the norm, the rule, the universal. The white man’s box is the whole world. Louise Bourgeois was an artist who made art. “We are all male-female.” All great art is male-female.

I have long argued that the experience of art is made only in the encounter between spectator and art object. The perceptual experience of art is literally embodied by and in the viewer. We are not the passive recipients of some factual external reality but rather actively creating what we see through the established patterns of the past, learned patterns so automatic they have become unconscious.

German word Einfühlung was first introduced by Robert Vischer in 1873 as an aesthetic term, a way of feeling oneself into a work of art, a word that through various historical convolutions would become “empathy” in English. Contemporary neurobiological research on emotion is attempting to parse the complex affective processes at work in visual perception. As Mariann Weierich and Lisa Feldman Barrett write in “Affect as a Source of Visual Attention,” “People don’t come to know the world exclusively through their senses; rather, their affective states influence the processing of sensory stimulation from the very moment an object is encountered.”

What constitutes rigorous thinking? Is ambiguity dangerous or is it liberating? Why are the sciences regarded as hard and masculine and the arts and the humanities as soft and feminine? And why is hard usually perceived as so much better than soft? A number of the essays in this book return to this question.

Feeling, however, is not only unavoidable; it is crucial to understanding a work of art. Indeed, an artwork becomes senseless without it.

I do not see myself as I look at a painting. I see the imaginary person in the canvas. I haven’t disappeared from myself. I am aware of my feelings—my awe, irritation, distress, and admiration—but for the time being my perception is filled up by the painted person. She is of me while I look and, later, she is of me when I remember her