commanders, tactics, heroics or suffering.
Looking at the eyes of this goat helps us see how the earliest humans saw. There were more animals a million years ago, and far fewer humans – in the African grassland savannah there were just two people per square mile – so those there lived much closer to animals than most of us do today. The first humans would have recognised this goat picture. They would stare into an animal’s eyes as a preface to killing it, perhaps, or to see if it was about to flee. Another kind of looking game. Do we see fear in the goat’s eyes? Does it see fear in us? Does it look like a beast, or like me? Is it possible to say that the first humans respected animals? Understood them? When they looked into their eyes, did they wish that they were them? Or is the stare too intense, embarrassing or short to allow such reflection? Maybe the thinking you do, if you do any, happens after the look has finished. Maybe the goat’s eyes are a false mirror. The moment is fleeting, but in his poem ‘Two Look at Two’, Robert Frost suggests the opposite, that it is rock-like:
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall, as near the wall as they.
She saw them in their field, they her in hers.
The difficulty of seeing what stood still,
Like some up-ended boulder split in two,
Was in her clouded eyes: they saw no fear there.
The intensity, startle and portal of eye contact electrify our looking lives because they give us the sense of seeing into another consciousness. Artists have long understood this eye-lock voltage. It is often said that a painting’s eyes follow us around a room. As with the Mexican clay sculpture, the intensity of eyelines in paintings makes them seem present tense.
In 2010, the Serbian artist Marina Abramović turned the eyeline lock into a Homerian epic. For 736 hours, she sat in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, staring into the eyes of anyone who chose to sit in the chair opposite her.
In a public place, in the bustling modernist city of New York, where to hold someone’s stare on the subway can be seen as a threat or a come-on, Abramović stared into the eyes of other people the way Tarkovsky’s goat looked at Ivan, the way the early humans might have held the gaze of an animal. Her looking cancelled out the fleetingness of city life. Though the event was always observed, many people felt that she and they were the only two in the room, that their surroundings blurred. Some cried. In the documentary Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, we see that she cried too. Close-ups show how exhausted she was, and how moved. The relevance of the clay sculpture, the Soviet film or Abramović’s artwork to our story is not how they are depicted, but what they show. The sculptor, the film-maker and the performance artist are our surrogate lookers. They are drawing our attention to one of the earliest and most powerful aspects of the looking lives of an individual and of our species.
LOOKING AND MOVEMENT
Blur, depth, colour, eye contact: the child is learning to look, the species is learning to look. They are tuning into the visual world. It is a world that is not static, of course. What happens when the zebra or antelope we have been staring at on the savannah moves, or when the baby’s mother’s face moves away from her, into the world, so that it becomes part of a fuller picture? Looking becomes dynamic. It connects one place with another. It draws an imaginary line between the former place and the new place. Let’s imagine that the child or the hunter is static, and that they are surveying a scene. Their eyes have a lot to respond to: faces, colours, depth, brightness, movement. Muscles around the eyeball pull and push it in all directions.
In the next image, three young women are walking towards us.
That is what is happening, that is the action. But it is not all that is happening or even the main thing that is happening. It takes up no more than a twentieth of the overall scene. Instead, other things catch our eye. They dart to the red flowers on the left, up to the red of the large sign, and then to the red of the smaller, distant sign which is perhaps ten metres away but which looks as if it is on the same visual plane as the large sign. There is no ‘distant’ red here. All the reds are red, and so our eyes skip between them, connecting them, as if z-ness does not exist.
From the signs, our eyes then spiral down to the girls’ reds – the dress of the one on the right and the satchel of the one in the middle. Thence we are back at the flowers. A clockwise, spiralling, visual journey in red. The girls walk in this image, but the colour takes our eyes for a walk, a different kind of walk, a walk on the surface that undermines, or rather, counterbalances, the girls’ walk. The other colours help corral our looking, like sheepdogs corral sheep. The pale-green fence blocks the left flank, and the dark building on the right ensures that our looking does not get lost on the other side. The black verticals of the telegraph poles trisect the scene, almost as if it is a triptych: as if the flowers, the girls and the enshadowed building are three separated scenes, three different times, combined. Yet the light reassures us that it is not – the shadows in all three fall leftwards. The image is from a film by Yasujiro Ozu, one of the great lookers. He understood that, from the earliest times, our eyes have seen things as surfaces, patterns, as well as actions in depth. In doing so, they are searching. Looking is always searching, just as Gombrich listening to German radio signals was searching.
In this image, taken eighty years ago, a woman is eating a crisp, or some kind of snack. It is an everyday event, and yet engaging. Her lips are so perfect – a sheared heart. They and the moment of eating are caught in what almost seems like a searchlight, as if she is someplace where eating crisps is illegal and she is doing so illicitly and has just been spotted. Or maybe she is in a cinema, near the back, and she has been crunching on crisps and someone’s complained and the light is the light of an usher’s torch, accusing her of breaking the spell of the movie? It is her eyes that make us imagine that what she is doing is not quite right. The light has not quite caught them yet, but they have flicked rightwards, alerted by some observer. They are not relaxed the way they would be if she was going to eat uninterrupted. If the light is from an usher’s torch, she would surely be looking at its direction. But she is not, so it is either not an usher or she is insouciant, which quickens the heart, gives her a spark, a hint of personality. She looks caught in a moment, but someone with an eye for such eyes and skin and such a mouth has worked hard to make this image so appealing.
That someone was film-maker E.A. Dupont, and the woman in the image is Gilda Gray, who was born in Poland, married at fourteen, became famous for her shimmy dance move, lost her savings in the stock market crash in 1929, and raised money for her fellow Poles during the Second World War. We can see none of this in the image, of course. Looking can seldom tell us such things. Instead, by gathering visual clues and connecting the dots, as it were, looking asks us to imagine what is not in the image. She bites the crisp, but then what? Is she caught? Does she skip onwards? We do not know. What kind of looking are we doing as we have these thoughts? We are doing detection looking. We are like police looking for clues. As we look at Gray, we are bringing our own knowledge, or our desires perhaps, to the scene, to make it come to life in space and time, to set it in a place, a building, and to extend it backwards and forwards in time, to the before and after.
The visual world has got an innate mystery. It is begging us to know it more, to flesh it out. Just as when we see old photos, archaeological sites such as Pompeii or a crime scene, looking on, we become Sherlock Holmes. We detect.
Let’s detect this moving image.
Instantly, we can tell that it is a moment. This is not an image that tries to present to us a season, or a week, or a day, or a morning. If we looked only at the muddy foreground, we might be able to think of such lengthy time frames, but as soon as our eyes clock the man with the gun running, just to the right of centre, we know