THE ALLURE OF THE VENEER201tival construction of space typical of quattrocento painting. The relation-
ship Wölfflin wanted to see established between viewer and object was one
of affirmation, one in which absolute clarity, a positivist clarity inherited
from the scientific optic of the classical age, could enable the ideal episte-
mological conditions for seeing and saying. In defending the essential
importance of this viewpoint, Wölfflin even dismissed the usefulness of
obtaining multiple photographic images of the same sculpture for the study
of art.^27 “Few know that, by doing so, in most cases the best quality [of the
sculpture] is lost. One destroys the silhouette on which the artist has set
himself and this does not only mean that the lines are brought out of har-
mony, no, this means much more: great artistic effort was expended pre-
cisely in laying out the entire sculptural content in one plane.”^28 Wölfflin
allowed that a sculpture could also demonstrate aesthetic value from a side
view, but he negatively judged these instances as most regularly producing
distortions and unclear seeing. He conceded that there might be a pleasure
in displacing oneself only momentarily in front of the original sculpture,
but only to allow the viewer’s gaze to produce affirmation. Only this per-
spective would enable “that purified image to emerge, which stands calm
and clear and in the true sense is felt to be a liberation.”^29
In some ways Wölfflin’s unease with photographs of classical sculpture
resonates with Harman’s argument that “we do not grasp a tree or mail-
box by seeing it from every possible side. The object is attained not by
adding up its possible appearances to us, but by subtracting these adum-
brations.”^30 Yet this conception seems at odds with the very important
avant-garde work of Cezanne, for instance, and subsequently with the
cubist experimentations of Picasso and Braque, all of which seriously
considered the implementation of different viewpoints of objects in the
painting of new epistemic spatializations. What is really at stake in the chal-
lenges involved in seeing more?
QUASI-ANIMALSThe economies of visibility and object/materialist theories just discussed
can help to better grasp the agency of Inert, by Alaskan-born artist Nich-
olas Galanin. The piece engages in an interplay of three-dimensionality