subject looks, he or she experiences a new center. Thus the subject is
continually decentered within an infinity of possibilities. In its ability to
reveal an intangible structure, geometry functions like music in its relation-
ship with the cosmos. Geometry does not represent; it makes the Real
present.
Ironically, although they deny the capacity of geometry for intrinsic
meaning, the comparisons employed by European art historians demon-
strate its communicative capacity. Describing a ceiling in the Alhambra
Palace, Jones likens the seven patterns to the seven notes in the musical
scale.^86 Similarly, Kühnel draws on the synesthetic terms of music to
suggest that the rhythmical alternation of movement enabled geometry
to render a harmonious effect.^87 Likewise, Grabar suggests that the ambi-
guity and ambivalence of arabesque give the viewer subjective freedom.
“Like the beads of the holy man, the meditation it suggests is not in itself
but in the mind of the beholder.”^88 Ignoring the utility of a rosary for a
believer, Grabar alienates the modern reader from a world in which mean-
ing emerges precisely through, and not despite, this internalization. Rather
thanfinding its limit, the possibility of understanding art begins in this
moment. Perhaps when Schjedhal suggested that Islamic art at the
museum was watching him, his intuition was not so far offthe mark (see
Introduction 0.1). Rather, although adhering to an essentially Kantian
supposed objectivity characteristic of art history, the recognition of artistic
affectivity in these statements resembles the anthropologist Alfred Gell’s
incorporation of abductive reasoning in his theorization of artistic agency
through the‘enchantment’of the observer.^89
The apparent opposition between Western and Islamic ways of looking
pertains not simply to art, but to our ideas of how subjectivity functions.
Necipoğlu notes the divergence between the geometrical siblings, perspec-
tive and pattern. She explains:
Geometricgirihpatterns, composed of interlocking stars and polygons rotating
around multiple foci of radial symmetry, embodied a multiplicity of viewpoints
contradicting the Renaissance concept of the picture plane as a window frame that
cuts through the spectator’s cone of vision on which rays converge at a central
vanishing point. The absence of afixed viewpoint in the abstract geometric
matrices ofgirihsyielded an infinite isotropic space that amounted to a denial of
the naturalistic representation of the visible world.^90(^86) Necipoğlu, 1995: 209. (^87) Necipoğlu, 1995: 75. (^88) Grabar,1973: 202. (^89) Gell,1998.
(^90) Necipoğlu, 1995: 166.
298 Mimetic Geometries