*obvious in non-obvious ways

Perspective, while not the total range of perception, is nonetheless in our culture the most obvious, “it is the form that consciousness has to have in order for consciousness to be consciousness of space.” [i]   In his 2010 book on Architecture, space and the construction of subjectivity, Lorens Holm examines the shared origins of the built environment and our inner-most conceptions of self. Indeed, both space and self are necessarily invisible, ungraspable―both are delineated by notions of perspective views from the interior/exterior.

Holm discusses the exchange between painting and architecture, 2D and 3D forms to show that how we know ourselves is the result of exchanges between art and architecture. As Alberti has written, from architecture fine art adopts the metaphor of the window, conceiving of paintings as bounded, framed views onto creatively determined vistas. The bull’s eye of the cone of vision, a picture is first a façade. At the same time, architecture takes its ideas about space from fine art. Of course space exists independently of painting, but our extant urban environment is a result of 2D planning and principles.  Do we draw the way we see, or do we see, the way we draw?

 

What does this mean? To begin, it suggests that our language for knowing our self emerges simultaneous with our language for describing space, and vice versa. We may be more deeply context-dependent than we’d like to think. Holm explains:

“If perspective is one spatial experience among others, and not the general form of spatial experience, then architecture is a species of representation. What it represents is a form of space. Perspective is just the form of spatial experience represented to us by a certain kind of architecture like Brunelleschi’s nave, which has been designed to represent space in accordance with that spatial epiphany, the one-point perspective drawing. The form of space we call perspectival…must compete with other forms of space, its claims to naturalness and its links to optics notwithstanding….Architecture is not space, but a picture of space ” [ii]

Painting and photography obviously represent space, yet to suggest architecture is also representation threatens to confuse image for reality. And if we confuse image for reality, we begin to believe reality should exist somehow outside of space. But how can it? Where is outside of space? Beyond nothing? This is similar to the artists’ conundrum of neutrality. There is neither any outside of subjectivity. Connected to the concrete world of measured increments and vanishing points of the design of our cities is the anxious struggle for self that is always behind, or ahead of, it’s own “arrival”. Despite having taken the habit of projecting ourselves there, we (necessarily) never reach our desires, we never arrive at the sun.

 

In a delicate reflection on Vitruvius’ writings of the Greek temples, Holm recounts what might have come before perspective, at least according to the western history of the world.  According to Vitruvius’ rhetoric, the subject could not be in the Parthenon, but among it―“irrespective of how complete or ruined its walls. No amount of being among it would ever count as being inside it.” [iii] This is amazing. How can we compare this with the trajectories, the narratives that modern science has laid for knowing each other? Is it possible then to exit Modern notions of alienation, of being trapped inside our selves? How would it be to imagine, symbolize, and realize being among selves? No longer in the city, but enmeshed within it? No, that is still inside/outside. So, what then? This is a culture of anxious blends and liquidity, as Zygmunt Bauman writes, but yet something more also. As Holm notes,

“The reality effect is symbolic and imaginary; it configures what for most people counts as reality. We regard the world through glazed eyes; the symbolic and imaginary are the glaze of experience. What does not configure to the symbolic and imaginary remains outside our reflections upon experience as either incomprehensible or unrecognizable (sic) “ [iv]

 

Is it the strength of vision to see somehow beyond this ‘reality effect’ that so traumatizes artists; that so shook Charles-Édouard Jeanneret on his first visit to the Parthenon? No, it is unknowable by definition. Rather I would say that the artists’ stress stems from so impassioned desire for a reality without effects.  Lacan suggests that this split―this gaping maw between reality and our infinitesimal view of it―is the missed encounter, an accident of repeated, unavoidable cultural conditioning.

Yet, if we know space through architecture, it seems possible that new approaches to design will disengage perspective from common sense, even if replacing it with some other. Certainly before the grid of the city there were more aural patterns for knowing the way: perhaps smoke and songs sooner than smoke and mirrors. While “New Yorkers see themselves through the eyes of others, or from the space they attribute to others with whom they cannot identify, [becoming] strange to themselves” [v] we might imagine much stranger ways of knowing.

At least for now we are in pictures. While inhabiting and imagining our actual environment as well as in our predominant means of communicating, we *naturally plan and organize according to these laws. At home also now in the internet, many are beginning to notice the omniscience of mediation, which seems almost as given as representation. We are of course cyborgs and even a handshake is, at base, a form of designed interaction.[vi]  Remembering this is a good way to remember that the possibilities are endless.

sb 09 2011

 

Tags: architecture, art, Butler, design, exhibition, media, psychoanalysis, Sarah, technology