Cubism, Perspective, Belief¹

Abstract

Artists and even school children learn the techniques of representing in perspective, of creating representations involving points of view. As such it might seem that, as notions go, the notion of perspective is fairly straightforward; the sort of notion which is capturable within a simple teachable theory. Perspective, its various techniques and theories, can be seen as a relatively late development in the pictorial arts. It can be seen as a development which was eventually displaced from the centrality it had achieved during the Renaissance in the late nineteenth century. And in this frame of mind we can discuss the various techniques for achieving ‘illusions’ of perspective. We might, as ancillary to this discussion, engage in the psychological inquiry of uncovering the processes exploited by these various techniques and we might reasonably hope to achieve some considerable success in our endeavours. An important step towards this goal was taken by Ernst Gombrich [1962]. But there is a frame of mind, which is not so very hard to achieve, in which the notion of perspective is as peculiar and interesting as the mind itself. In this frame of mind the notion of perspective lies within a constellation of notions which together form a prototheory of agency in the world. To be an agent is inter alia but quite centrally to have a perspective on the world. In this frame of mind there is something in the very notion of a perspective which threatens irreducibility of the notion.