the contexts of politics but in that of the imagination. There, works
function through an interplay of the senses. Music or poetry may serve as
a better conduit for a painting than a label with dynastic and geographical
information. Geometry may function as music and thereby as image.
Painting may articulate commentary on text. As Graves points out, objects
that allude to other states of being may function not through the repre-
sentational trope of language, or the categorical distinction between text
and form naturalizing the modern distinction between mind and body, but
as signifiers through an“intellect of the hand.”^13 The identity of an object
may not lie only in its historical, but only in the plenitude of its intellectual
and bodily setting.
Understood as concept rather than commodity, culture, thought, and
belief can be owned by all with loss to none. They are magically suspended
in and between the potential infinity of our sharing. Cultures function not
in discrete units, but as mobile interactive spheres. The recognition of this
multiplicity situates us all in a perpetual exile in the world. It thereby offers
a means to welcome everybody home. By building a culture based on the
symbolic sharing of passions, we may contribute to a world of physical
compassion. We may recognize the need to share our materiality. This
hope renders the unfamiliar not as foreign, but as an enriched expansion of
ourselves. Not simply to tolerantly shake hands with the Other who has
already come halfway to us through the ladder afforded through a dis-
ciplinary perspective, but to climb together, building unforeseen ladders.
Multiplicity enters us not as something alien, but as a form of nourishment
through which we can approach the world anew, refreshed as though
through slumber.
If geography and time are the warp and weft structuring (art) history,
perceptual culture is like the pile of a velvet cloth that, without altering the
warp or weft of the fabric, reenchants its texture and depth. It treats Islam
as the Simurgh, and objects as its feathers. Like the galleries in China full of
representations futilely and obsessively trying to reconstruct the bird from
its feathers, the museum is a monument to our inability to feel what we are
trying to represent. And yet like the three princes seeking the hand of the
Chinese princess in the gallery of creation, we can also discover through
objects the spirit we can never expect to pin down in our hands.
With these hopes tucked in between the warp of evidence and the weft of
interpretation, this book would like to quote a certain textile from a very
long time ago:(^13) Graves, 2018 : 215.
334 Out of Perspective