Projective Gaze
December 16th, 2009 | Published in Recurring Concepts in Art
Excerpt of Recurring Concepts essay [draft] on time in perception, and its role in dimensionality:
Figure 1: Illustration from definition of Projection (Wolfram MathWorld)
To illustrate the observer / subject’s imprint on an object (implicitly, the eye rests its gaze at a specific time), Joan Copjec reviews the importance of projective geometry in defining a viewpoint’s location. Briefly, projective geometry organizes its field “solely around an internal point, the point of infinity ” where parallel lines meet at this point (Copjec 40). There is no reference to a point outside the plane of vision. An image from a perceiver’s standpoint meets at one point of perception. Points and lines in one plane can be connected to another plane with lines, preserving the consistency of the object from plane to plane. However, the points on the line obscure the one behind. From an observational standpoint, we have something perceptually similar to looking down a barrel of a gun just right: you can only see the first point clearly, though the shaft of the barrel and each subsequent point (or annihilating circle, in this case) exists behind it. Each point then is actually part of an infinite line, as there is no distinction between one to the next. Projection provides “a method of revealing the existence of what it was impossible to see, what vision necessarily veils” (42).
What does this mean for us as perceivers? It places us and removes the frame: in viewing, we are at the vanishing point, the point of perception and infinity that all lines meet and pass through. As Copjec furthers “The world takes shapes, coheres, around the subject who constitutes it; and yet, the question suggests, this world is not subjective but objective” (44).
Before rushing to grapple with the question of an objective world, let’s examine our experience as subjects that inform how we see and sense. Time is crucial to determining perception. Visual experience highlights the coalescing nature of past, present, and future. Olafur Eliasson’s Remagine provides a topical example of both planar perspective and image to afterimage.
Figure 2: Olafur Eliasson, Remagine, 2002
In this piece, the observer experiences both her sensation of the image in time through image and the residue of the afterimage, as well as the artist’s construction of images in sequence and placement in time. Jonathan Crary, in describing Your Colour Memory, another Eliasson work, points out the afterimage’s temporal and empirical magnitude via “inscribing the effects of an earlier perception onto [a] new object” (Crary 209). The afterimage traces the memory of the image seen the moment before. Its existence is outside of a material reality, though irrefutable as a part of a corporal awareness. Crary beautifully presents this paradox of the afterimage’s objective reality by offering two viewpoints as “what belongs to the world and what belongs to us as perceivers” (ibid). Amelia Jones, however, imbues the embodied experience as one stance: “the objective world is thus always already permeated with bodily subjectivity” (9). Recall Copjec in defining the subject to object relation: the world is shaped and takes place around its observer, and I would add, in that instant of perception.
It is within the temporal construct that we can perhaps merge an understanding of realities from within and without. Drawing from our earlier lesson in geometry, we posit the objective world as the infinite, existing lines that form the vertices of images. As the subject, we occupy the point of perspective, the convergence of those infinite lines through the instance of our gaze. That point of convergence is dependent on where we individually are in space: we present it when and where we appear. The infinite lines that compose both the seen and suggest the unseen are always there. However, it is in the experience that they are shaped into an image of significance to the observer.
Returning to Remagine, the piece glimpses at this dimensionality and reliance upon the subject to shape the wall projection. Here, it is the artist who offers this play, and ascribes to the object an underlying representation of what is not (but could be) there (the area behind the wall, a depth in space), though it may appear differently. In positioning his work, there are certain experiences handed to us that remind of us the mechanics of our own volumetric gaze. For instance, a foreshortening of the ‘deeper’ or further levels is illustrated, mimicking how we would see the shapes three-dimensionally, if it were possible to see through the wall. Eliasson offers a horizon: the shapes reach a vanishing point, a construct of our own visual possibilities as seeing to infinity is beyond comprehension.
Similarly, his The Inside of Outside showcases an ocular gaze upon shapes on different or similar planes.
Figure 3: Olafur Eliasson, The Inside of Outside, 2008
Note his framing of the viewpoint. As if peering through a peephole, we are drawn into shapes between which only we can draw their relation: are they in the same space? Touching? Is one casting the illusion of nearness to one another? Are they moving, or are these deepening representations foisted on us? The artist can only suggest. We offer the infinite point of convergence and perspective.
In Remagine, Eliasson explicated a deepening space, providing dimensionality, a notion or illusion of depth, and the hint of continuing space beyond the provisions of the piece. In The Inside of Outside, this setup is left to the observer. The planes on which the projected shapes exist are unarticulated: they could be on one or many, depending on perspective. It could be said that these shapes exist in objective reality. Our subjective impression imparts and imprints how and where these images appear in our sense of space.
