An American Perspective

Art Powerlines, once again, has me thinking (damn her) with Edouard Glissant's perspective on perspective....

"Even when an American artist uses the techniques of perspective, its use is not what accounts for the creative drive in the Americas. It has nothing to do with that. And that is something worth looking into. We are looking and haven't discovered yet. But the fact is that the arts in the Americas often do not conceive of emptiness as a natural setting. The canvases are always full, there are no vanishing points in an infinite space. What does that mean? Is it in someway related to a community of perception?"

Imagine a perfectly round hollow sphere. Nothing inside, not even you. Now we imagine the inside of that sphere is one seamless mirrored surface, without even a speck of dust on it. Now find your awareness in the middle of that sphere... not you, just your invisible imagination. Now... what is seen in the perfectly round mirrored walls? What color is produced? What is reflected to infinity?

I invented this puzzle when i was little and it took me awhile to figure out, and now it is becoming clearer in my old age why i would think about it...

The answer is unknown. It is the empty of all empties. The nothing of nothings. The darkest of darks. And we could never find out (no matter how much i try to build the model in my head). Why? There can be no light. And there can be no you. As soon as there is a you, there is a perspective. And something that is reflected. As soon as there is a light, there is a something... and it is no longer an empty sphere. It is something only your awareness can enter, a place where your eyes are useless (and most likely deceive you).

"There are no vanishing points in an infinite space." To be clear, the infinite space was defined (and no longer infinite) the moment four pieces of wood were nailed together and covered in cloth to make "a canvas". And there are no vanishing points in an infinite space, but there are no real vanishing points in any space. A vanishing point is an illusion.

For those of you reading that didn't have to take Drawing 101, a vanishing point is an idea used in Western drawing and painting defined as such: the point at which receding parallel lines viewed in perspective appear to converge. OR the point at which something that has been growing smaller or increasingly faint disappears altogether.

What is interesting is that around the same time the Euros started figuring out the world was round, was about the same time they started painting it like it was flat. The horizon became a straight line at eye level, and when something went far enough away... it vanished.

The vanishing point also relates to time. By acknowledging a vanishing point we place ourselves onto an infinite tightrope, aka a timeline. The future is "down the road", the past is "where we came from". Separations and Distances are soon to follow, as well as Hierarchies. "Those smaller things are far away from me." Again, we train our eyes to lie to us, based on what realities we want to believe. And what is it we want to believe in the US? (We're #1! We're #1!) But none of this is new, and since the new is now, let's "move on".

I think the internet, the "War on Terror", and the network culture, are actually having an interesting effect on USAmerican painting. I'm not sure we have actually come any closer to being able to stomach emptiness as USAmericans, but we are doing a really good job at killing context and mistaking it for infinite space and i figure that's gotta count for something... Emptiness, Weight, Dark, and Silence, are very much Un-American states (nobody tell 'em what it really means to be free... chaos will ensue).

But, "getting back to the original point", a canvas is not actually an infinite space. Just like a window is not an opening, and a door is not a portal. Nature is not outdoors. Out West is not out anywhere. And the New World is not new now and it wasn't new then. It's the same world of illusions it always was, and the only infinite space we can visit is when we close our eyes (so to speak). Magritte sums it up nicely: