Wysocki Reading Response

Summary

           

In her article, “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty,” Anne Frences Wysocki seeks to explain to fellow teachers and scholars how an image can both please and infuriate her. She notes the inability of current scholarship on form to explain this emotional contradiction, and explains through an analysis of Kant the separation that is inherent between object and form. This separation allows for the objectification of the woman’s body in the Peek ad, which is the source of Wysocki’s displeasure. She feels she needs to explain the reason behind her anger to other teachers so that they in turn might revise their pedagogy to endorse not an abstract view of the object used but a universalizing view.

 

Synthesis

 

Wysocki’s discussion of the universalized versus the real image reminds me of Berger’s discussion of the naked and the nude in his article “Ways of Seeing”. For Berger, the nude is a universalized, idealized image, and the naked is an individual. Likewise, Wysocki cites one of the reasons for her anger at the image of the woman in the Peek ad as the fact that the woman is universalized and so able to be objectified. She wants teachers and students of visual texts to be able to accept and appreciate the strangeness and otherness of the image in a visual text, and this embrace of reality and individuality is akin to the figure of the “naked” woman in Berger’s article.

 

Pre-reading Exercise

 

This ad is kind of cute at first glance, and pleasing to the eye because of the background. However, something about the word-man coming out of the wall, yet still attached to it creeps me out. This ad doesn’t really make me angry per se, but I definitely oscillate between pleasure and discomfort when looking at this ad.

 

Questions for Discussion and Journaling

 

1) Wysocki says that it is socially acceptable to feel pleasure about the article because the image of the woman is universalized and therefore made to be an object, whose sole existence is for our enjoyment. I agree that before I read the article I thought the ad was visually appealing and well done, but her argument has now made me guilty for feeling that way, so I am working to adjust my view.

 

2) Wysocki’s text is highly visual. It utilizes many of the visual principles Bernhardt mentions in her article, and Wysocki, unlike Bernhardt, actually utilizes these principles in her own writing.

 

Applying and Exploring Ideas

 

2) I definitely agree with Wysocki that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. While you can play the numbers game and choose an image that will appeal to the largest number of people, it is a well known fact that you can’t please anyone, and one only need to look at beauty through the ages (think Rubenesque women) or beauty across cultures (tribal tattoos and piercings) to see that beauty is absolutely something that is socially constructed.

 

Personal Thoughts

 

I thought some of the visual elements in this piece were off-putting. For example, what on earth is with the text in the wreath on page 82? Also, sometimes Wysocki would set off her own statements like block quotes, and it confused me as to whether she was citing something or not at first. I am not sure if the visual confusion if from this article being reprinted into ROW, or if the original was also a little confusing.