During my years as a teacher and tutor, lecturer and adult educator, 1967 to 2005, I used various television documentaries. The doco I used more than any other was Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark, a documentary series outlining the history of Western art, architecture and philosophy since the Dark Ages. The series was produced by the BBC and aired in 1969 on BBC2.2

1. WAYS OF SEEING
Part 1:
During my years as a teacher and tutor, lecturer and adult educator,
1967 to 2005, I used various television documentaries. The doco I
used more than any other was Civilisation: A Personal View by
Kenneth Clark, a documentary series outlining the history of
Western art, architecture and philosophy since the Dark Ages. The
series was produced by the BBC and aired in 1969 on BBC2.2
I was in the first two years of my marriage, working in a small town
in rural Ontario in 1969 as a teacher, and as secretary of the local
Baha'i community. I did not come to know of this series until 1974.
Both the television scripts and the accompanying book version were
written by art historian Lord Kenneth Clark (1903–1983), who also
presented the series. The series was considered to be a landmark in
British Television's broadcasting of the visual arts.
Clark as a person was sealed off; he was a mystery, even to himself.
"I have no aptitude for self-analysis," he wrote in his memoirs. "When
I try to examine my character, I soon give up in despair." Perhaps it
was simply that, for Clark, it was better to look out than to look
within, to see the barbarians at the gate not as the enemy, but as a
helpful, even soothing distraction. One cannot help but feel thankful
that Clark looked out and, in the process, gave us Civilization.
The series had a groundbreaking format in which an expert presenter
was combined with a lavish budget for a crew accompanying him
around the world to illustrate his thesis over many episodes. With a
heavily illustrated book version, the series became a template for later
programs. I used all of the following series as well in my teaching
and/or in my personal life: Alistair Cooke's America (1972), Jacob
Bronowski's The Ascent of Man (1973), Life on Earth(1979) and the
many sequels by David Attenborough.

2. Part 2:
Robert Hughes' series on modern art The Shock of the New (1980),
and John Berger's BBC series, Ways of Seeing (1972) would have
been useful when I taught the sociology of art in 1974. Berger's series
was partly a response to Clark's views. Clark was an ardent pro-individualist,
humanist, and anti-Marxist. Berger presented a radical,
Marxist viewpoint. A few years later Clark made a similar but shorter
TV series, The Romantic Rebellion, beginning with a book in 1973
on the art of Romanticism. This, too, would have been useful back in
1974. I knew nothing of Clark's work on Romanticism in 1974 up-to-my-
ears, as I was at the time, in a relationship which became my
second marriage. Another Baha'i community occupied my leisure
time keeping me busy, with my work as a tutor in education studies,
for at least 60 hours a week.
Ways of Seeing was a 1972 BBC four-part television series of 30-
minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike
Dibb. Berger's scripts were adapted into a book of the same name.
The book has contributed to feminist readings of popular culture,
through essays that focused particularly on depictions of women in
advertisements and oil paintings. Ways of Seeing was and is
considered a seminal text for current studies of visual culture and art
history.
I did not even know about this series when it came out in 1972 since I
had just arrived in Australia from Canada and had no TV. I was also
heavily committed to at least 60 hour weeks teaching high school, and
serving as the secretary of the Baha'i community of Whyalla, the only
locally elected Baha'i body outside Adelaide, Darwin and Perth in
western and central Australia.
Berger's series and his book criticized traditional Western
cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in
visual images. The series was partially a response to Kenneth

3. Clark's Civilisation series, which represented a more traditionalist
view of the Western artistic and cultural canon. Ways of Seeing is
still considered a seminal text for current studies of visual
culture and art history.1
Part 3:
At the opening of Ways of Seeing John Berger notes that the cultural
presence of the woman is still very much different from that of the
man. Berger argues that a man's presence in the world is all about his
potency and is related to what he can do, his power and ability. On
the other hand, Berger says, a woman's presence is always related to
itself, not the world, and she does not represent potential but rather
only herself, and what can or cannot be done to her, never by her.
Such was Berger's view some 40 years ago; so I came to learn some
15 years after I had retired in 1999 from a 50 year student and
employment life. In 2014 I read about Ways of Seeing. The sources
of a woman's identity are, for Berger, the age-old notion that the
woman is destined to take care of the man. He argues that, as a result,
the woman is always self-conscious, always aware of her own
presence in every action she performs. The woman constantly
imagines and surveys herself and, by this, her identity is split between
that of the surveyor and that of the one being surveyed.
These are the two rules that she has in relation to herself. For this
reason, Berger notes, her self-value is measured through the manner
in which she is portrayed, in her own eyes, in others' eyes and in
men's eyes. Following Kenneth Clark John Berger, in Ways of
Seeing, distinguishes "naked" or "nakedness" from "nudity" in the
European tradition, with nakedness simply being the state of having
no clothes on and nudity being a form of artistic representation. The
nature of this artistic mode is related, according to Berger, to what he
terms "lived sexuality".
Part 4:
Being naked is just being yourself, but being nude in the artistic sense
of the word is being without clothes for the purpose of being looked
at. A naked body has to become an object of a gaze in order to

4. become a nude representation. Being naked means being without any
costume that you put on, but being nude means that you become your
own costume. Painting and photographs which portray nudity appeal
to the viewer's sexuality, the male viewer, and have nothing to do
with the portrayed woman's sexuality – women are there for men to
look at, not for themselves, for man's sexuality, not their own. When
there is a man figure in nude painting the woman seldom addressed
him, for she is aiming at her "true lover" – the viewer, which is the
central figure of the painting without even being present in it.
In "Ways of Seeing" Berger also discusses the meaning of being
naked outside of the artistic context. He argues that in nakedness there
is the relief of finding out that someone is indeed a man or a woman,
and that at the moment of being naked an element of banality comes
into play and that we require this banality because it dissolves the
mystery which was present up until cloths were taken off and reality
became simpler. Therefore nakedness in reality, unlike representation,
is for Berger a process, not a state. In concluding "Ways of Seeing"
John Berger holds that the humanist tradition of European painting
holds a contradiction: on the one hand the painter's, owner's and
viewer's individualism and on the other the object, the woman, which
is treated is abstraction. These unequal relations between men and
women are, in Berger's view, deeply assimilated in our culture and in
the consciousness of women who do to themselves what men do to
them –objectify themselves.-Ron Price with thanks to 1 the cultural
studies reader and 2 Kenneth Clark, Civilization, 1969 and Richard
Dorment in The Telegraph, 14 May 2014.
Your whole existence, Kenneth,
was centered on art: as collector,
museum director, curator, writer,
patron, social figure, and, finally,
educator in the series Civilisation.
I used the series at least twice over
my 32 years in classrooms as tutor
& as lecturer in the social sciences.
It was a way to tell your life's story

5. along with several hundred paintings,
sculptures, works on paper, & objets
d’art. You were taught how to look at
art by the best of mentors & you could
write about art with the best of them.
Men survey women before they relate to
them. Women's actions and appearances
show the ways in which she would like to
be treated. A woman's actions indicate the
way she would like to be observed, & this
is contrary to man's actions which are just
actions. Such was Berger's take on women.
He simplified this notion by saying that
"men act and women appear"....Women
objectify themselves as the subject of the
gaze of men; this is the meaning of his title:
Ways of Seeing, essentially meaning that the
ways of seeing men & women are different.
In other words ways of seeing are ways of
subjecting women to men's gaze, for Berger.
Ron Price
24/8/'14.