THE SPECTATOR PHENOMENON AND THE POWER OF THE GAZE

Abstract

This paper explores the relevant knowledge in philosophy, psychology, art theory, and visual culture dealing with the phenomenon of the spectator. Spectatorship is explored through complex relationships between authors, works, observers, and the environment, which condition the view and consider how social and cultural patterns mediate the image. In this approach, interest is no longer primarily focused on the visual object but on visuality, a complex set of conditions in which a work of art is created, observed, and interpreted, researching the history of the gaze theory: perception and its physiological and cultural conditioning, the implicitness of the observer in the aesthetics of the reception, psychoanalytic theories about the constitution of the subject with a gaze, feminist ideas of voyeurism, and the male gaze, theories on technological and cultural conditioning of the scopic regimes, the cultural history of gaze and the gaze politics that approach viewing as possession of power. An analysis of the theory shows that the role of the body as a perceiving mechanism is present in the naturalistic approach to observation but is avoided due to its subjectivity and relativity. Although it was created in the 1960s, the theory of gaze has roots in the hermeneutics of art history and the aesthetics of reception. The cultural determination of gaze, its dependence on social norms, and the technological conditions of the medium indicate that our view of art and the visual world has been learned, which opens spaces for the acceptance of other gazes that are equally valuable.