ABSTRACT
Term invented in the later 1970s with a variety of senses – though its core theoretical^ significance lies in the consequences psychoanalytic^ concepts appeared to produce for the study of the use of visual^ representations. If it was agreed, for instance, that looking at representations (not just pictures or sculptures, but at real people seen as images in the day-to-day world) was a process that encouraged viewers to identify with or against others in a variety of ways – e.g.: sexually, racially, or in terms of age or nationality – then the question arose as to how these patterns or structures of identification and ‘dis-identification’ (producing pleasure or repulsion) were located in what became known as the gaze of both men and women. The psychoanalyst and friend of the surrealists Jacques Lacan had formulated an intellectually difficult account of the gaze understood as a gendered, sexual psycho-biological property and drive, in writings that, in the 1980s, powerfully influenced the development of semiological and poststructuralist currents in the new art^ history. From another perspective, however, visual pleasure was simply a
fancy new name for the enjoyment that scholars, critics, and art appreciators had always got from looking. Traditional phrases such as ‘art appreciation’ and ‘art lover’ indicate that matters of pleasure and satisfaction had never actually been absent from the activities of those who went to museums and galleries, who bought art, and who chose to study it or become its teachers and historians. The invention of the concept of visual pleasure, however, was designed to subject these historical and contemporary experiences to new theoretical scrutiny – psychoanalytically, socially, and politically – by asking how the individual and subjective pleasures got from looking at art, and everything else, might be related importantly to background collective factors, such as class, ethnicity, and regional identity, as well as to matters of gender and sexual orientation. A passage in an 1953 essay by Ernst Gombrich turns to the visual
pleasures and tastes of the old and young, people from different cultures, and from upper and lower-class backgrounds, suggesting that this, then unnamed, ‘experiential reality’ was beginning to come under scrutiny. Gombrich, talking initially about food, remarks: ‘The child is proverbially fond of sweets and toffees, and so is the primitive, with his Turkish delight and an amount of fat meat that turns a European stomach’. Moving on to art, he claims that an ‘odious’, ‘atrocious’, and ‘disgusting’ late-nineteenth-century neoclassical
painting of the Three Graces by the French artist Bonnencontre could be improved if it was viewed behind a sheet of wobbly glass – creating a kind of cubist effect. This technique could be used, he says jokingly, to improve a picture of ‘The Monarch of the Glen’ or ‘Innocence in Danger’, meaning that ‘you need not throw it away or give it to the charwoman’. Gombrich, perhaps unconsciously, reveals here how senses of pleasure, consumption, and satisfaction are intimately bound up with many different aspects of social identity. Written over fifty years ago, his essay also indicates how what were once acceptable judgemental statements about others may appear shockingly rude at a later moment. This is partly ironic given that Gombrich may have had in his sights at the time the stuffy puritanism of some contemporary modernist critics (such as Clement Greenberg) who had wished to separate off a supposedly-pure aesthetic^ value from all other kinds of interest – including, for example, the pleasures of immersion in pictorial narrative and emotional identification.
