The Lived Perspective

Stone contains a history that is maintained as people carve into it. Because the rock and therefore a carving cannot be taken out of its context, layers of imagery represent a past that is contained within a single space. Accordingly, viewing a rock carving includes a knowledge of the space. Light and shadow as well as subtle environmental changes all affect the quality in which an image is perceived. Perhaps even tracing an outline of an image with your hands (more of a haptic perspective) might give you as much or more information than you might acquire from viewing the carving.

Because the images exist within a fixed space we experience it kinesthetically; our bodies become “the measure of all things.” (Tilley 40). In a sense the viewer (as he moves around the space) is as much a part of the aesthetic of rock art as the carving itself. We are orchestrated within and respond to a constructed environment. In this respect Bergson states that the body provides the ground for all perception throughout time. As matter is connected to memory the act of being becomes our selves. Does modern day installation art or modern architecture produce a similar response to life than that of rock art?

Merleau-Ponty suggests that painting is philosophy in action and states that we perceive space neither geometrically nor photographically. According to Cezanne, the landscape “thinks itself in me... and I am its consciousness.” The painter’s body is both a subject and an object, seeing itself seeing as it interweaves vision and movement as it makes images visible. Art objects are enchanting in a sense because of the skill that is required to make them and as Gell suggests, because of the actions of agency, intention, causation, result, and transformation that are performed through it.

Cezanne’s paintings were concerned with the subjectivity of sight and the illusion of surfaces. In his own words he was “trying to translate... what is entwined in the very roots of being.” Reality is not waiting to be witnessed but is created or constructed by the mind as the cells of the visual cortex use photons to construct sight. Within Cezanne’s images, largely because of their oscillating forms, he forces us to see both the beginning and end of our sight. There is a tension in them, in their division, because they capture a moment in time (the moment when our vision is being constructed as reality) and suspend it in a kind of vibration.

The neurologist Oliver Sack’s patient, Dr. P., suffered from a cortical lesion that caused him to receive virtually no input from his brain as he constructed vision, so that he saw the world as entirely unprocessed fragments of light and masses of color. Although he saw reality as it actually exists, his sensations were so surreal that he could not ever comprehend photographs or complete scenes. This might be somewhat unfortunate for Dr. P., but it further proves what Cezanne’s work says about reality. Because we see everything as an abstraction, the described reality in his work was life.

Art is a means of communicating this nature. The lived perspective that we see (in which objects appear larger farther away than they would up close and how receding planes seem to bend in slight ellipses opposed to perspectival construction) is also supported by Cezanne’s work. This work is so wonderful not just because it communicates an idea but because it records the experience and emotion of human vision. If you look at a painting as an event, and the sum of events is equal to a lifetime, then a group of paintings must represent a life.