Veiling and Looking, Unveiling and Hiding (Editorial 2014)

Abstract

The act of looking … is loaded—with power, with desire, with guilt, and with hope—and takes place within a complex and dynamic web of social rules and behavior. In particular, the look is embedded in relations of power. (Lau, 1993, p. 193)

We see the world not as it is, but rather like a palimpsest through the complex lenses of our cultural experiences, sometimes partially erased and often veiled in ways that obscure and codify our understanding of the objects, people, and images we encounter. As Lau (1993) notes, these experiences are loaded with relations of power. In each of the articles in this year’s volume, authors consider ways of looking and understanding themselves and others within the contexts of visual culture and gender. Clearly, their work conveys that “[t]he way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe,” as John Berger’s 1970s BBC series and influential book Ways of Seeing emphasized. These articles expose veils and unveil multiple and timely issues. They trouble the taken-for-granted and give us opportunities to reconsider our own participation in hegemony. Vincent Lanier (1982), an arts educator whose legacy brought attention to contextualized renderings of cultural meanings of everyday aesthetic experience, identified nine veils that filter how we perceive visual culture.