10 Perspectives on Perspective
Since the early twentieth century, art-historical writings have imbued
perspective with a foundational role in Western subjectivity, associated
with reason, objectivity, mastery, and, implicitly, masculinity. Elkins dubs
this“metaphorical perspective.”He explains:
As we try to articulate a thought, to‘plot it out,’to‘map’its contours, we are
‘drawn’towards perspectival metaphors. Any opinion is a‘standpoint,’a‘point of
view’;we‘approach’problems; we‘draw parallels’or speak of the‘convergence of
ideas’;we‘project,’measure,’survey,’and‘sketch’continuously. Every thought, to
the degree that it is in our possession, contributes to our‘perspective.’^1
Contemporaneous with a political economy of European colonial domin-
ion over the Global South, the understanding of Islamic art as‘lacking’
perspective frames Islamic cultures within the broader associations of
Orientalism: examined rather than examining; static rather than progres-
sive, traditional rather than scientific, passive and feminized.^2 Signifying
the supposed prohibition of the image and the supposed absence of
naturalism equated with the use of perspective, the supposed meaningless-
ness of polyhedral geometry has symbolized a lack set against the significa-
tion of rational plenitude attributed to perspectival representation. Yet, as
shown inChapter 9, geometry has meaning. And, as this section will show,
the meaningfulness of perspective is as artificial a construct as the mean-
inglessness generally attributed to Islamic geometries.
Destabilizing the ideology of perspective, this chapter examines how
a mere technique of three-dimensional spatial representation has become
symbolic of Western subjectivity as the measure of reason, naturalizing
global hegemony in the twentieth century. It argues that far from presaging
a modern, secular, and supposedly objective way of looking, discussions of
perspective in the seventeenth century were deeply engaged with proofs of
the existence of God. This limited the potential that perspectivalism held
for enabling multifaceted ways of looking comparable to those emphasized
in Islamic spatial theories. Instead, the insistence on a singular perspective(^3001) Elkins, 1994 : 29.^2 Yeğenoğlu, 1998.