The gaze

Today I went to see and listen Miron Zownir. Switch Lab - a surrealistically nice place, with three working class frescoes from the 50ies still in place, after the Universul Palace became a newspaper’s headquarters and then was reclaimed as an art venue - organized this meeting between Miron and us. A bunch of people, more or less known one to another, scattered on the three types of chairs in the nice hall with a nice polished parquet and a bad acoustic.
It started with a show of his photographic work, on jazz, after some 20 minutes when the organizers pondered whether we should get rid of that bright sunset light coming from the back of the room straight to the large projection screen or just watch it on that Mac 21-inch Mac screen. The author was definitely in favor of the Mac and I could see why – his very black-and-white vision of the world was better served by the distinctive contrast of the Mac screen. And as we got to watch it on that much smaller screen, we had to come closer, packed together in our seats. Mine, quite a treat, a rocking chair I spotted right on and claimed, was at the back of the room. Each of the people from the back had only a narrow passage between the bodies and heads of those in front of them to stare (gaze?) at the screen.
The display of his photographic work was dotted, here and there, with images of men from all over the world, street people, showing off their penises. Otherwise, at least partially dressed – their sexes exposed, rather flaunting them than just showing them to the camera.
My own passage (gaze couloir) was even narrower, I couldn’t but notice, each time a penis was being shown on the screen. The fat cow in front of me (please, notice the irony here, it was me the fattest cow in the room!), a 40-something, artsy-fartsy woman, black dress, red and green sandals on blunt calves, couldn’t stand to look at the raw images on the screen and turned her head towards her right at each and every one of them, obscuring half my view to the screen with half her face. She didn’t glance back, to turn her face to the screen as soon as the disgusting piece of meat gave room to another image, but waited for a while – maybe not wanting to be judged as a prude by the others she would imagine will see her looking away.
And yet, she didn’t turn her face away from the screen at a crippled body or a face, so I wondered whether she tried really hard to look at those – was it so much against her grain, so to say, to watch the world through Miron’s lens?
The whole show I couldn’t focus on anything else but on guessing what reaction the next photograph might yield from her and when will she turn back to the screen again. And all this made me think about this powerful concept of gaze - the sort of look that has, encoded in it, the whole set of expectations one might imagine - the voyeuristic look, where desire, lust, disgust and horror are knitted together in the same fabric.
After a while, when the Q&A session began, she just seized the chance and left, confirming all my theory that, somehow, prevented me from adopting the same gaze.