…we will discover how within this landscape of linear
perspective vision the self becomes a spectator ensconced behind his or her
window on the world, how the body, now divorced from the self, becomes a specimen,
and how the world, as a matter for this detached and observing eye, becomes a
spectacle.
Page 31
Chapter Two
The Window and the
Camera
I. the window on the world
The invention of linear perspective painting in
fifteenth-century Italy is one such movement of change, and the tale to be told
in this chapter concerns how the invention and development of this artistic
technique became the cultural vision which has shaped our contemporary
technological world. Linear perspective
vision, in the worlds of the art historian Samuel Y. Edgerton, is the “innate”
geometry in our eyes,’ and although this way of perceiving space is no more
natural to humanity that, say, a Picasso canvas in which multiple perspectives
appear simultaneously, the latter remains for us abstract and unreal while the
former defines for us what is real and what is natural. Before we know that we know it, we have learned to see the world as a
three-dimensional plane where depth is a matter of spatial distance from the
viewer and where all objects decrease in size as they recede from the viewer
toward the vanishing point. In short, before we know that we know it, we have
learned to see the world as if we were focusing through the lens of a camera,
or as if we were standing on a railroad track looking at the parallel rails
converging in the distance.
Page 32-33
What linear perspective achieves is a kind of geometrization
of the space of the world, and within
that space we become observers of a world which has become an object of
observation.
…this technique, a
way of representing three-dimensional space on the two-dimensional plane of a
canvas, has become a cultural vision beyond doubt. The art historian Helen
Garner notes, for example, that linear perspective ‘made possible scaled
drawings, maps, charts, graphs, and diagrams – those means of exact
representation without which modern science and technology would be impossible.’
And William Ivins, noted cultural historian, supports this view. ‘Many reasons
are assigned for the mechanization of life and industry during the nineteenth
century,’ he says, ‘but the mathematical development of perspective was so
absolutely prerequisite to it.’ Finally, as if to secure this point beyond any
shadow of a doubt, Samuel Edgerton notes that ‘space built for zero gravity,
astronomical equipment for demarcating so-called black holes, atom smashers
which prove the existence of anti-matter – these are the end products of the
discovered vanishing point”
We shall hear how this vision has become our window on the
world.
Page 33
II Linear
Perspective: Some necessary Technical considerations
A An opening image
…the invention in 1425 of the techniques of linear
perspective by Filippo Bruneleschi and later codified in Leon Battista Alberti’s
treaties on painting, De Pictura,
which was published in 1435-6.
…with the advent of linear perspective vision we have
managed to spatialize time, to distance ourselves from the body, and to remove
ourselves from the midst of things.
Page 35
B Alberti’s linear
perspective technique
Alberti’s procedure for making a linear perspective drawing involves
two steps: the construction of a vanishing point and of a distance point.
1 The vanishing point
The term ‘vanishing point’ is not Alberti’s. it is of more
recent coinage. ALberti’s term was the centre
point, which, interestingly enough, was also called in his time thepunto di fuga, the point of flight.
One’s eye is always synonymous with the horizon which rises
and falls with exact concordance with one’s position, provided the viewer
continues to stare straight ahead. Edgerton notes that this concordance of the
vanishing point and the horizon line, the viewer’s eye level, was Brunelleschi’s
most important discovery.
Page 39
….’orthagonal’, are the lines Alberti draws from the centric
point to the base of his rectangle.
Perhaps the reader
has already begun to recognize how pervasive this way of perceiving the world
has become for us. But as natural as it may appear, it is important to say once
again that this style of vision is a historical invention. Nothing like it
appears earlier in medieval painting, for example, suggesting that men and
women of earlier ages simply did not see in this fashion.
Page 40
The construction of
the vanishing point imposes two conditions. The first one is that the painter
(and the viewer) imagines that he or she is looking at the subject to be
painted (the world to be viewed) as if through a window. The second condition
is that the centric (vanishing) point and the line which passes through this
point be placed no higher from the base line than the height of the subject to
be depicted in the painting. There are a number of implications to these
conditions, each one of which has had a decisive effect in bringing to birth
the technological world.
Two
conditions characterize Alberti’s distance point procedure. First, the distance
point, which makes the viewer’s position on this side of the window, is placed
at the same level as the centric or vanishing point. Secondly, the distance
point is fixed before the vertical intersection, which establishes the degree
of depth, is drawn. (FROM page 49)
Ensconced behind the window the self becomes an observing subject, a spectator, as against a world which becomes a spectacle, an object of
vision. Almost two centuries before Descartes will establish the philosophical
grounds of a consciousness, a self, separated from the world, the imaginal eye
of the artist has already prepared the space for that achievement.
Page 42
Alberti, as we have already said, draws a line through the
centric point, and this centric or horizon line produces two more implications.
Insofar as the line is fixed at the eye level of an observer imagined as
standing on a horizontal plane, staring straight ahead at the world, it
established the human eye, human vision, as the measure of the world’s horizon.
Page 44
The eye as a measure
of the world’s horizon is, moreover, a special eye. It is characterized in the
specific ways by the very conditions which give it its central place. It is an
eye fixed in its place, a staring eye, an eye focused straight ahead on the world. Such an eye
by definition does not wander over the landscapes of the world, nor does it get
distracted to wander over and about things which lie off to the side of its
vision. Fixed opposite the horizon, this eye which stares straight ahead has a
purposeful intensity, a singular vision. ==Not
Close-Up Double Vision
Page 47
Two conditions
characterize Alberti’s distance point procedure. First, the distance point,
which makes the viewer’s position on this side of the window, is placed at the same level as the centric
or vanishing point. Secondly, the distance point is fixed before the vertical intersection, which establishes the
degree of depth, is drawn.
…the first condition
makes it quite clear that the eye which is the world’s measure belongs to a
fixed, immobile viewer.
Page 49
It has been seen chiefly since
the fifteenth century that we have moved over the face of the earth,
charting its landscapes and its oceans, this fact of immobility seems an error.
It is not, however, a mistake when we realize that the immobility of this eye
which takes the world’s measure has nothing to do with literal movement or its
absence. Rather, this immobility describes a shift in attitude, according to which our movement into the world
proceeds on our terms, which are,
moreover, prepared in advance for our encounter with the world.
Page 51
The invention [of linear perspective] means, therefore, only
that with linear perspective space a new vision of the world and a new world is born.
Page 52
C Echoes
The invention of linear perspective space inaugurated a
revolution in human life. In multiple ways, unforeseen at the time and
certainly unintended, these procedures have been taken up, elaborated, and
amplified to follow the development of a technological world. The window of
Alberti has undergone many changes and we have played out in plural fashion the
role of being as onlooker on this side of the window observing a world which in
myriad forms has become something to be observed. We have taken the worlds
measure with a distant vision which truly does seem infinite, and in the
process we have, it seems, also fairly well succeeded in remaking the body we
first abandoned.
Page 57
III The camera eye of
distant vision
Linear perspective vision is inherent in photography. The camera
is the technological incarnation of the linear perspective eye. Through the
lens the world is opened up as a landscape which converges on a vanishing
point.
With the camera we do become a fixed and focused eye, a
spectator observing a world which has become a spectacle, an object of vision.
A Hockney and the
camera
Camera vision is monocular, fixed, and disembodied. It is
the vision of a single, staring eye whose body has been left behind.
Page 58
The abandonment of
the body in camera vision is an issue with Hockney has explicitly challenged. The
photographs which Hockey takes are, he says, much like Cubist paintings. They
present multiple perspectives simultaneously, and in this respect they
introduce time and the body into the photograph and into the viewer’s
experience of the photograph. With a Picasso painting, for example, one sees
things as one sees them while living in the world and moving through it, His
paintings, like that earlier view of Florence, capture time by appealing to the
moving body. Cubism restores the body to the viewer. Out of the paralysed Cyclops,
it resurrects the living human body engaged with the world over time. In
Hockney’s words, ‘Cubism…is about our own bodily presence in the world. It’s
about the world, yes, but ultimately about where we are in it, how we are in
it. It’s about the kind of perception a human being can have in the midst of
living.’
Page 59
Hockney’s work, however, has not been without its own
difficulties, and his struggles are an important witness to how persistent the
camera eye of distant vision is in our daily experience. His polaroid collages,
like that of Celia, for example, are
composed of a square matrix-grid pattern which gives the viewer the sense that
he or she is looking through a window. At the very same moment, therefore, when
Hockney is introducing time and the moving body to the photograph, he is still
caught in placing the viewer outside, on the other side of a window.
In any case, the viewer is not only a paralysed Cyclops,
staring and unmoving, but also only
an eye. Camera vision not only paralyzes the body it also anaesthetizes it.
Page 60
A significant achievement of Hockney’s work is that it shows
quite clearly that what happened over five centuries ago is not simply past but
continues today. In the camera the origins of linear perspective have been
instrumentalized. The hegemony of the eye, the character of distance, the
window aesthetic, the paralysis and anaesthetization of the body, the
sterilization of the world of all sensuous qualities save what is visible and
observable, are all incarnated in the camera.
Page 63
No comments:
Post a Comment