Note to readers: this is excerpted from a work in progress called The Visual: How it is Studied. The second half of this text, titled “The Most Interesting Thing That Can be Done With Representation,” is forthcoming in a book on the artist Vik Muñiz. Portions not required for “Issues in Visual and Critical Studies” are in red. This text was originally posted on www.
Please send all comments, etc., to jelkins@artic. This text should be read onscreen; there are embedded links to illustrations, marked “(plate).” Some are noted as “not available.” I recommend skipping over those sections; the text is legible without them. The pages that follow are from a work in progress, a book called The Visual: How It Is Studied. The book is intended for first-year university courses, where I hope it will be used in place of the usual “art appreciation” textbooks.
Those books, which proliferate in all languages, are nearly always based on a rudimentary pedagogy of form, color, space, motion, and texture. In such textbooks, linear perspective is inevitably introduced as the centerpiece of the Western archievement in visual art. It was perspective, so these textbooks say, that allowed artists to develop realism and to represent the physical world in a quantitative, systematic fashion. Although such rudimentary instruction is often ignored by professional art historians, it is compatible with much of what the discipline currently does.
Monographic accounts of the Renaissance continue to stress naturalism as a sine qua non of the Renaissance, and textbooks of world art continue to emphasize linear perspective at the expense of the many other representational forms developed worldwide.1 I do not think The Visual will correct that imbalance, and I am not even convinced that it is correct to call it an imbalance. Linear perspective is a unique project, and I do not believe that a lengthy, sympathetic description of some other denotative system can realistically hope to replace the interest that perspective continues to attract. What I do hope The Visual will do is show students, right from the beginning, that there is a tremendous amount outside of normative Western scholarship that is genuinely interesting, and often more challenging than the familiar constructions and achievements -2- of linear perspective. Perspective has a traditional group of “others”: marginal and “incorrect” forms such as anamorphosis, “reverse” perspective, inverted perspective, curvilinear perspectives, “herringbone perspective,” stereoscopic perspective, anaglyphs, hyperbolic perspective, engineering drawing, and so forth.
Those “exotic” Others are actually the traditional accompaniments of the study of linear perspective, and they seldom reach beyond the West, or outside of painting. The Visual will revisit some of those, but my principal interest is simply to begin from a different dramatis personae, and see what kind of drama develops. 2 -3- A Multicultural Look at Space and Form The word space is a bit abstract. If we are talking about a particular picture, say Mu Ch’i’s famous ink painting of persimmons, then we can say certain things about the space, and about the forms in it.
The space in this painting, for instance, might be infinitely deep—perhaps it is a bright misty morning, hiding a view of blue mountains—or it may be paper-thin, no more than a film of dried ink on brittle silk. The persimmons may be as spongy as they were when Mu Ch’i painted them eight centuries ago, as fluid as the ink and water he used to paint them. Or they may be flat, fallen against one another like dried persimmon skins. This kind of indecisive meditation is part of what it is to look carefully at a picture.
Such thoughts on space and form may lead, as they often do, to more concrete questions—I might want to ask about the elusive nature of reality in Zen practice, or the Buddhist sense of the transience and eternity of the world. Thinking through space and form to other ideas is a stock in trade in the interpretation of pictures, perhaps even interpretation’s most indispensable moment. But instead of continuing down this path let me emphasize the strangeness of what I have just done: I have opened the discussion of the picture by talking about not persimmons, inkbrush painting, Mu Ch’i, Zen, or Buddhism in general, but space and form. Where did those ideas come from? Certainly not from the picture, which -4- says nothing about them.
And what do they mean? Are “space” and “form” so well understood, that I can just begin by naming them, without thinking them out first? The more carefully you consider this problem, the more you will be dragged away from the picture and pushed up against basic philosophic problems: What is space in any picture, and what do we want to call “space” itself? And what is a thing, that can exist in such an imaginary space?3 How is the space in a picture “in” the picture? (And as for sculpture: perhaps the space around a sculpture an essential part of the sculpture, but what exactly is that space? How far does it extend? Does it envelop the viewer, or glue viewer to sculpture?4 ) Can you think about space without forms in it? (If you think of Euclidean axes extending off to infinity, with nothing else around, then you are still thinking about forms in space.) And if it is not possible to imagine space without forms, how do the two depend on one another? Do we know what space or form are? Do we know what they are in pictures? These are the kinds of questions that sound simple, or vague—but they lie at the heart of everyone’s ideas of what visual art is about. Artists, critics, and historians continually use words like form, object, shape, and space, but the abstract tenor of the questions I have just asked sounds a little eccentric because those words are normally used to talk about particular artworks. Yet behind the great majority of descriptions of artworks there are assumptions about what space and form are and how they are related, and those ideas silently guide peoples’ thinking and writing. For that reason alone it may be worthwhile to pause try to think about the words themselves and how we want to put them to work.
I find it is a good generalization to say that, in the twentieth century at least, space tends to come before form. Space may be the great topic of modern art, and it is difficult to find writing on architecture, photography, painting, or sculpture that does not depend heavily on the idea that space is what makes visual art possible. Buildings are said to construct space, pictures to depict it, and sculptures to mold it. Artworks are said to create and interact with space, so when it comes to thinking about art people tend to begin by positing some ideal empty space, and then they try to say what the artwork has done with that space.
Space is a natural first term in many discussions on art. Yet there are reasons to wonder about this. (Notice, for example, I just used the phrase “empty space.” But isn’t space empty by definition?)) It can be shown that the -5- preoccupation with space is typical of the twentieth century. In past centuries critics didn’t need to bring up space as frequently as twentieth-century writers did.
The architectural historian Peter Collins has made an important observation about this: “it is a curious fact,” he writes, “that until the eighteenth century no architectural treatise ever used the word” space.5 Today, I think, it would be literally inconceivable to write a book on buildings, sculpture, painting, photography, or any other medium of art, without mentioning space. “Space” is a relatively new word, but it is taken to be both universal and unproblematic. So it seems best to be cautious about space, especially when it comes to studying artworks made before the twentieth century. In this chapter I will go at this problem first by making an eclectic survey of kinds of space in visual art, trying not to emphasize what seems to be common or proper.
The single most important and universal kind of space in visual art, perspectival space, is a kind of roadblock to seeing other kinds of space. By largely avoiding it, I am going to try to see the possibilities of the concept space in a slightly new light. I want to widen the question and show how perspectival space does not have hegemony over the concept of space—and how spaces, in the plural, are more involved and less understood than they might seem. Toward the end of the chapter I will have two further points to make: one is that all such talk about space is flawed, since it does not present space and form as coeval partners, equally involved in the creation and meaning of art; and the other is that no matter how reflective we are about spaces and forms, there is no adequate way of addressing space or form in artworks, since artworks spill out uncontrollably into the world.
The whole subject, in this sense, is refractory. Space and form are not at all easy to talk about, unless you ignore what you do not know about them and simply begin, as I did here, with some particular painting. P ERSPEC TIVA L SPACE, EV ERYDAY SPACE, PSYCHOPHYSIOLOG ICAL SPACE, IMAGINARY SPACE Certainly the cornerstone of the current Western sense of space is perspectival space—that which is generated by applying the rules of linear perspective. (A perspective picture is immediately recognizable by its receding lines but it is not easy to tell when a -6- picture is in correct perspective.
The great majority of photographs, movies, billboards, and magazine advertisements are in correct perspective.) Art historians tend to say that a fundamental turning point in Western art came when linear perspective was invented five and a half centuries ago.6 Pictures made before the adoption of perspective in the Renaissance, or in cultures that did not use perspective, tend to look flat, while perspective pictures tend to look like they possess depth. Perspective was originally a series of methods painters used to give their pictures a quality that we now call “photographic” or “realistic.” To get that effect, perspective makes use of a particular kind of space. Linear perspective is based on the idea that space has four qualities: it is three-dimensional (two-dimensional surfaces like paper do not count as “space”), infinite (it extends in every direction without limits), isotropic (twelve inches is the same length whether it is measured vertically or side-to-side), and homogeneous (space is smooth and continuous, it has no lumps). If space is this way, then it is possible to construct perspective pictures, make photographic cameras, design video games that take place on infinite grids, and in general do everything that depends on three-dimensional, infinite, isotropic, homogeneous space: navigate the Atlantic to find the New World, measure the landscape of Venus, and image fetuses with ultrasound.
In visual art terms like perspective space are used to what the rules of linear perspective produces, and scientifically-minded authors tend to call space based on the four characteristics I have named “Euclidean space” or “rational space.” It is a powerful conception, and it underlies virtually every book on art history—but it is not the only available sense of space. Space is also something less formal and geometric, more like “an area provided for a particular purpose” such as sitting or walking around.7 It is simplest to call this second kind of space room or everyday space. Everyone needs a certain amount of room to stand or sit. That is different from the space occupied by an ocean or the solar system, because in order to measure such great distances you need some concepts of geometry, surveying, and astronomy.
Everyday space is intuitive, untechnical, and local—its limits are more or less those of the human body.
