Paper to accompany presentation at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Institute of Education, University of London, 5-8 September 2007

Christina MacRae Manchester Metropolitan Universityzavmac@btinternet.com

Getting Method into Perspective.

IntroductionJameson argues that “representation is based on an essentially realistic

epistemology: it projects a mirror theory of knowledge and art, whose

fundamental evaluative categories are those of adequacy, accuracy and truth

itself” (in Lyotard, 1984:viii). The eye as source of verification of the real is linked

to empiricism (Bailey, 2001:293). However, according to Foucault, the problem of

representation, is not “one that happened to pop up in philosophy and dominate

thinking for three hundred years. It is linked to the wide range of disparate, but

interrelated, social and political practices that constitute the modern world, with

its distinctive concerns with order, truth and the subject” (Rabinow, 1986:240).

Taking the lead from Foucault, I would like to explore some specific

social/cultural/political practices which have insinuated themselves into the

language of research methods. I would specifically like to turn my attention to

the notion of perspective.

As an art student one of my first drawing lessons was on the basic principles of

perspective. This kind of perspective, on the face of it, seems removed from the

social use of the word (one that is associated with subjective attitude) that we are

so familiar with and which saturates social sciences discourse. Learning

perspective in drawing is about learning to apply a mathematical system. It is a

technique that is based on measurement and the relationship of theoretical lines

that connect the viewer, the object being drawn, and the vanishing point. It is a

technology for framing, fixing, and measuring the view-point of the artist in

1

relation to the artists subject to create the impression of spatial depth on the flat

surface of a canvas/ paper. It is in this sense, as a technology of seeing, that it

has a particular history. To configure perspective as a specific technology of

seeing will problematise the generalised use of the language of perspective in

research methods discourse.

Definitions and paradoxes“The field of vision has always seemed to me comparable to the ground of

an archaeological excavation” (Paul Virilo, in Crary, 1998:1)

Perspective comes from the Latin word, pespicere; meaning, see clearly, to

examine, to ascertain, to see through (Jay, 1993:53). Here one gets an

impression of clarity, certainty, and transparency. Looking the word up on my

Encarta software, I find the following definition.

2

per·spec·tive n

1. A particular evaluation of a situation or facts, especially from one

person’s point of view

2. A measured or objective assessment of a situation, giving all

elements their comparative importance

3. The appearance of objects to an observer allowing for the effect

of their distance from the observer

4. The theory or practice of allowing for artistic perspective when

drawing or painting

5. A vista or view

In this definition there are echoes from the earlier Latin meaning, however, here

there are new dimensions. Both personal point of view, and space (distance)

have been introduced. There is an apparent paradox between Definition 1 (a

particular evaluation of a situation or facts, especially from one person’s point of

view) with Definition 2 - closer to the Latin word - (a measured or objective

assessment of a situation, giving all elements equal value). That contradiction is

explained in the way that ‘point of view’ has generally come to mean somebody’s

“particular way of thinking about or approaching a subject” (Encarta, 1999), but in

a strict art sense, it is “the position or angle from which somebody observes an

event or a scene” (Ibid). Thus, to see something becomes the same as

believing/knowing it to be true. This confusion at the heart of the notion of

perspective continues to be a stumbling block. a source of tension in the

language of perspective and it raises questions about the certainty of knowledge.

Following the denigration of vision as a scopic regime of modernity (chronicled by

Jay, 1988), the permeation of oculist language in ethnography has recently come

under sustained attack (for example, Tyler:1986, Trinh:1991). For me, these

writings called into question the very foundations of ethnographic methods, and

my initial impulse was to excavate, to search for sources and origins, as the first

step in exorcising ocular-centrism from my own methods. However, my diversion

into the history of perspective has proved far more complex than I had

anticipated. Vision, as a regime of the “master sense”, can be understood as a

“contested terrain, rather than a harmoniously integrated complex of visual

theories and practices” (Jay, 1988:4). This scopic terrain has subcultures, of

which perspective is one aspect, and one which can itself be further complicated

in terms of divergent and ambivalent, rather than integrated, conceptual terms.

What started out as a brief history of perspective, with a view to exposing the

3

tyranny of a western ocular-centrism dominating visual representation, became

less straight forward, and far from providing the clarity, it became a source of

confusion. As I write, it continues to be a source of confusion, and any resolution

that I might have hoped for remains elusive. However, what I have discovered is

a rich seam of thinking, into which I can throw myself, pushed by Lacan’s

exhortation: “I cannot urge you too strongly to a meditation of optics”, (in Jay,

1993:329).

Employing Foucault’s notion of ‘social technology’ (Harvey, 1996:53), I will

explore the notion of perspective and will briefly touch on some aspects of its

history. This short piece of ‘genealogy’ does not aim to pass as an exact history

of perspective or as a search for discursive origins, but it serves to unpick some

of the ideas that may contain traces from the discourse of perspective, and the

wider language we use in relation to seeing. If language constructs knowledge,

then at the same time its use “limits alternative knowledge forms” (Canella,

2002:13). I hope to open up possible spaces in which to consider validity through

a strategy of thinking through perspective, rather than either trying to recover the

word for my own purposes, or to banish it in order to free myself from its tyranny.

I will begin with a brief history of perspective, which I will then employ to look

again at the way that modernity casts perspective as objectifying subjectivity. I

take up the contradictions raised by the language of perspective in that of

research methods, concentrating on the paradoxes it raises in relation to

triangulation. Finally, I will argue that to see perspective as merely cultural

artefact, as a structuring device, misses its richness as epistemologically

generative.

A short history of perspective“One sees sensibly and rationally according to a science that is called

Perspective, arithmetical and geometrical” (Dante, in Baxendale,

1972:124)

4

The origin of perspective is popularly pinpointed with the Italian artist

Brunelleschi’s ‘discovery’ of mathematical perspective, which was codified by his

contemporary, Alberti in 1435, in a treatise called Della Pitturu (On Painting).

Alberti called his linear perspective system Construzione Leggitima (‘The Best

Method’), also known as ‘artificial’ or ‘scientific’ perspective. Before Alberti

codified the rules of perspective, formal projection systems based on Euclidean

geometry were employed using strategies such as proportionate diminishing size

of horizontals or squares (see Dubery and Willats, 1972). What Alberti did, with

reference to the work of Brunelleschi, was to systematize projection onto a

picture plane by means of plan and elevation. According to Panofsky this

elevated art to science (1991:66). It enshrined as foundational, a fixed point from

which to measure in order to accurately re/present what is seen from that

vantage point. This notion of ‘fixed point’ position is one that art teachers

continue to get across to their students when teaching perspective today:

“In perspective drawing the students cannot move their heads. The

position of the head and the view of the eyes must remain stationary and

in a fixed direction. Movement changes the perspective.” (Support for

Teachers in Art, 2005)

This fixed point creates measurable distance between the looker and the looked

at; “the first is the eye, the second is the object seen, the third is the distance

between” (Durer quoted in Panofsky, 1991:67). Fixed points give not just

distance, but distance which can be measured; “know that a painted thing can

never appear truthful where there is not definite distance for seeing it” (Alberti,

1966:57). If you can imagine your eye as the fixed point for viewing an object

(say a line from Point A to Point B), then the points A and B give you something

measurable, and the angles created by the visual triangle between Point A, Point

B and your eye allow you the project the image in a different scale. Alberti

described the lines (or rays) from the eye to the object as threads, which could

be imagined (or even actualised by attaching threads from an object to a viewing

5

point as he suggests) as a veil forming a cone/pyramid of vision from the looking

point to the object. This cone or pyramid of vision is at the heart of three-

dimensional projection. And so it follows, that the mathematics of triangles are

all-important.

“Vision makes a triangle. The base of [this triangle] is the quantity seen

and the sides are those rays which are extended from the quantity to the

eye. It is therefore, very certain that no quantity can be seen without a

triangle. The angles in this visual triangle are first the two points of the

quantity, the third that which is opposite the base and located within the

eye” (Alberti, 1966:47)

A painting is then conceived of as a plane (or frame) that intersects this pyramid

of vision, thus conserving proportion and creating the illusion of three-dimensions

on a flat surface.

As in surveying the line at a right angle to the eye is all-important, “space is

measured and calculated from this line and the rest of what is seen is

constructed around the vanishing point and with the frame of the eye”(Cosgrove,

6

1985:48). And so, “by means of plane geometry based on the practice of

surveying, Alberti analyses the process of vision” (Spencer in Alberti, 1966:21).

That Alberti’s treatise is based on laws of surveying quantities (calculating

volume through measurement), as well as the rules of proportion indicates the

close relationship between painting and mercantile commerce.

“On the one side, many of the painters, themselves business people, had

gone through the mathematical secondary education of lay schools: this

was the geometry they knew and used. On the other side the literate

public had these same geometrical skills to look at pictures with: it was a

medium in which they were equipped to make discriminations, and the

painters knew this” (Baxendall, 1972:87)

In his book on Italian Fifteenth Century painting, Michael Baxendall explores in

depth the relationship between painters and their patrons in the context of the

social institutions and conventions – commercial, religious, perceptual – that

influenced what they produced. While I cannot spend more time on this

relationship, I flag it up to indicate the sense that a historically located

technologies of seeing and optics are emerging

As a way to underscore the idea of technologies of seeing, it is of interest to note

that alongside the increasing codification of technique, there is also an actual

mechanisation of optics. An array of ocular devices were invented to mechanise

(and simultaneously naturalise) drawing. For instance ‘Alberti’s grid’ is a device

that assists in the accurate mapping of the picture; it consists of a frame, divided

into a grid, with a small viewing circle in front to fix the eye.

7

Alberti’s Grid

Lens-based optics provide other examples of technologies that by fixing it, give

the eye primacy. Like framing devices, the use of lens’ and mirrors in painting

were crucial technologies that were able to represent the world photographically,

long before cameras. Both Jonathan Crary (1998), and David Hockney (2001)

explore the specific effects of the technology of the Camera Obscura on visual

practice. Hockney investigates the way that this “archetype” of the “ideal of

mimesis” (Kemp in Hockney, 2001:254) came to dominate visual representation.

Looked at this way, “it is possible to say that from 1400 to c.1860 the model for

painting was the optically founded record of the visual array in a ‘photographic’

manner” (author’s emphasis, Ibid).

“The power of the apparently ‘real’ in photographically based media is

huge – as is the power of what is seen as ‘scientific’. If it’s done by

8

instrument, without human intervention, if it’s precisely measured, if it’s set

up to declare scientific objectivity, it demands to be trusted” (Ibid: 248)

Crary, similarly, constructs the Camera Obscura as a paradigm for vision, but

emphasises its historically and technically specific role in disembodying the eye

and detaching it from the observer. Where Hockney’s account tends to unfold a

founding Renaissance mode of vision that anticipates and inexorably moves

towards the realism of photography, Crary’s account recognises a more complex

and shifting history.

“What determines vision at any given historical moment is not some deep

structure, economic base, or world view, but rather the functioning of a

collective assemblage of disparate parts on a single social surface”

(1998:6)

For Crary, the objective position of the observer constitutive of the perspectival

and Camera Obscura paradigm is ruptured in the early nineteenth century,

alongside the invention of the stereoscope which challenged binocular optics,

(unlike Hockney who locates this rupture much later, at the turn of the century,

with Cezanne’s ‘doubt’). According to Crary (well before the invention of

photography, Cezanne and the attack on vision mounted by the surrealists)

modernity remakes the objective observer as an observing subject, where “time,

flux and death”, replace “guarantees of authority, identity, and

universality”(1998:24). While his account alerts us to the dangers of

teleogological and causal linkages (for example between perspective and

photography), it has the effect of constructing discrete, contingent scopic

regimes. I prefer to work with the idea of a “contested terrain”, “rather than a

harmoniously integrated complex of visual theories and practices” (Jay, 1988:4).

So although visual territory may have shifted radically over time, there are

aspects of sixteenth and seventeenth century realist painting that can be

associated with photographed images in the way that they “do not seem to be

9

statements about the world so much as pieces of it” (Sontag, 1979:4). This ideal

of photographic depth and detail (captured in Dutch realist painters like Vermeer

and Van Eyk) is reminiscent of the slice-of-reality depth that is invoked in the

‘thick’ description of the ethnographer. As Denzin has noted; “the modernist

ethnographic text must be read as a photograph” (1997:44).

Furthermore, perspective (despite theoretical ruptures) remains dominant and

leaves its traces even in models of sight that appear to undermine its

foundations. It naturalises vision, by making seeing believing. Vision is at the

heart of certainty and “goes without deliberation” (Trinh, 1991:25). What is seen

and what is known become conflated; “looking, seeing and knowing have

become perilously intertwined” (Jenks, 2005:154). The problem lies not with

vision itself, but rather with its naturalised and totalising claims. Leonardo De

Vinci is famously quoted as saying that “perspective is nothing else than the

seeing of an object through a sheet of glass, on the surface of which may be

marked all the things that are behind the glass”. What he could just as well be

describing is observation as a straightforward method of revealing reality. Jenks

picks out three central characteristics of observation as metaphor: the finite and

visible nature of social phenomena; clear-sightedness; and a particular visually

constructed relationship between the subject and the phenomena studied. The

emphasis on what is visible to a detached observer (morally and politically

suspended), leads paradoxically to taking things at “face-value”, a “commitment

to surface” (Ibid: 161), rather than depth. And with the focus on the field of vision

lies another paradox: “positivist instructions for ‘good seeing’ are essentially

directives for partial sight” (ibid). This is because the cone of vision at the heart

of Alberti’s “best method” is a narrow and positioned view.

“This small section (or cone or pyramid) is in fact only a fraction of the field

of universal surround: this partial view cannot be cut out of the total

surround, singled out and made to represent the totality of the viewer’s

being” (Bryson, 1988: 100)

10

A final and crucial paradox (the one that lay at the heart of the contradictory

nature of the dictionary definitions of perspective) lies in the particular

relationship established between the observer and the observed. Separating the

viewer (self) and viewed (other) in a relationship defined by distance, has

simultaneously the effect of splitting the subject and object, and of making them

contingently implicated, In the same breath, “perspective creates distance

between human beings and things [ ] ; but in turn it abolishes distance by, in a

sense, drawing this world of things, an autonomous world confronting the

individual, into the eye” (Panofsky, 1991:67). Alongside this is the contradiction

that lies at the heart of humanism: Renaissance man emerging simultaneously

with something that negates that very humanism through its delineation of space

that freezes time and motion (Damisch, 1995:45). I will now turn to explore how

the ideal of observation in art history is entangled with the language of research

methods.

Triangulation: Observation as a Metaphor for MethodIt is from projection geometry (the system that Alberti used as a basis for

perspective) that triangulation is associated. This is the idea that the position of

one point in space can be verified by two other points, using the calculation of

angles combined with the measurement of distance. This formulation is based

on trigonometry as used in navigation and surveying, and education researchers

call upon land survey explicitly as an analogy to make sense of triangulation as

method.

“For someone wanting to locate their position on a map, a single landmark can

only provide the information that they are situated somewhere along a line in a

particular direction from that landmark. With two landmarks, however, one’s

exact position can be pinpointed by taking bearings on both; one is at the point

on the map where the two lines cross” (Hammersley, and Atkinson, 1995:231)

11

To translate this construct into applied research methodology, triangulation refers

to the idea of multiple bearings or locations. These external and multiple

bearings can be translated as the use of different methods, for instance; “The

use of several methods to explore an issue greatly increases the chances of

accuracy” (O.U. Research Methods Handbook, 2001:65). Another source of

triangulation is the notion of multiple data sources and respondent validation.

“….data source triangulation involves the comparison of data relating to

the same phenomenon but deriving from different phases of the fieldwork,

different points in the temporal cycles occurring in the setting, or as in

respondent validation, the accounts of different participants (including the

ethnographer) differentially located in the setting”. (Hammersley and

Atkinson, 1997:230)

Finally, using more than one researcher is cited as a form of triangulation, for

example using team research, and to “maximise its potentialities the observers

should be as different as possible, for example, adopting different roles in the

field” (Ibid: 231).

Although Hammersley and Atkinson advocate using the analogy ‘loosely’, as a

metaphor, it is extremely confusing. At once it is constructed as a tool for

convergence and mutual verification of inferences from data, and yet “even if the

results tally, this provides no guarantee that the inferences involved are correct”,

since this could be as a result of “systematic, or even random error”, all the same

leading to (incorrect) conclusions (Ibid: 231-2). Gorard and Taylor (2004)

highlight this confusion. Their paper specifically discusses the strategy of mixing

quantitative and qualitative methods as a source of triangulation. They take up

the difficulties in pursuing a construct of convergence and concurrence, when

what researchers really seem to want to generate an idea of complementarity,

which aims to build a bigger picture through many ‘view points’. They posit that

12

the trigonometric analogy is misleading, and put forward the idea of multiple-

perspective as more relevant to building up a research picture. According to this

analogy, a cylinder might appear as a flat circle from one side, and from another,

a rectangle. According to the logic of binocular vision, when these two views are

synthesised you see a cylinder: you get spatial depth.

“When we view an object from two perspectives, or study a social

phenomenon using two methods, then we expect to find something new

as a result – whether that is point C, the binocular vision of a cylinder, a

‘gestalt’, or simply a more well rounded theory of the wider phenomenon

being investigated.” (Gorard and Taylor, 2004:7)

I am less optimistic than Gorard and Taylor (2004), that a perspectival model can

used to recover the concept of triangulation as an unambiguous basis for multiple

view points and depth of vision, rather than a singular and converging view point.

As we have seen perspective and trigonometry are inextricably linked. Both are

concepts that are inescapably underpinned by the idea of viewing from a fixed

location, of observation. Whether lens-based, or measurement based, they are

both systems that create the illusion on spatial depth from a fixed point/s. Here

we should pause to consider “observation’ in the double sense of the word: both

in the sense of seeing, and in the sense of observance of regulations (this follows

Crary:1998). Observation as procedure, replicates what is seen. It reflects, as

mirrors do, but it disguises these reflections as laws of nature, as a translation

”between nature and art, setting out, with nature, the causes of nature’s

phenomena regulated by nature’s laws – how the likenesses of objects adjacent

to the eye converge with true images to the pupil of the eye” (Leonardo Da Vinci,

In Baxendale, 1972:119). Gorard and Taylor emphasise the epistemological

break between ‘objective’ observation (a single view-point associated with

monocular vision) as opposed to ‘subjective’ observation (multi-viewpoint,

associated with binocular vision), a shift in attitude that Crary explores

historically. But what is striking in attempts to delineate, name, and fix different

13

visual practices (different realist narratives), is how confused and paradoxical

such attempts are. Like Jenks, I have used observation as a metaphor for

method as a way to interrogate its privileged place as positivist research tool.

“As a metaphor for method or technique within the social sciences or

cultural studies ‘observation’ drags behind it an excess baggage of

ontological and epistemological assumptions, albeit unexplicated, that can

direct us to the origins of ‘our ways of seeing’ through modernity” (Jenks,

2005:158)

According to Jenks, while a critical engagement with the complexity and paradox

surrounding contemporary visual practice has long been a topic for fine art, and

even psychology, it has been late coming to social theory (Jenks, 2005; 162).

With its insistence on value-free method, of which observation is a crucial

technique, theory masquerades as generality. Just as sight is always partial,

Jenks draws our attention to the necessarily partial nature of socio-cultural

theory, in the sense that what the researcher chooses to look at is “always

chosen in relation to some set of interests” (Ibid: 162). In order to maintain

authority, method must be externally located and it must be observed (in the

sense of following its logic). This is how method disciplines us, in the name of

validity.

“Now, obviously, in the process of fixing meaning, not every explanation is

valid. This is where the expert anthropologist comes in and where

methodologies need to be devised, legitimated, and enforced….In the

name of science, a distinction is made between reliable and non-reliable

information…The unreliable constructs are the ones that do not obey the

rules of anthropological authority” (Trinh, 1991: 45).

How we select what we look at becomes legitimated through the methodology

employed to order and classify the fragments of reality that we collect. It is a

14

methodological frame that insists we edit out the messy bits, the things we do not

want to see. While multiple-view points may trouble an overarching version of

reality, they can be subsumed as simply more slices of reality to collect.

Likewise, the problem of subjectivity – the personal point of view - is ironed out

through technique of visibilising the self, of self- observation: reflexivity.

Brunelleschi’s experimentAt this point, I would like to return to and unsettle my initial construction of the

paradigm of perspective as necessarily objectifying the self. This will have the

effect of challenging the idea that I am already in the process of formulating; that

the subjective reflexive mode has progressed from a previous representative

mode based on mimetic reflection. This reinterpretation undermines the idea that

subjective reflexivity is, after all, so easy to separate from straightforward

objective reflection. Objective observation is a particular regime of seeing that is

cast as classical re/presentation. Here, paintings and pictures show us what we

already know (reality). On the face of it, the re/discovery of perspective as

chronicled by Alberti bears out this conception associated with Enlightenment

thinking. However, closer examination into the supposedly originary moment of

Brunelleschi’s ‘discovery’ of perspective, reveals other narratives. Alberti is

popularly credited with codifying a perspective system that was deployed by

Brunelleschi. Alberti dedicates his treatise on perspective to Brunelleschi, but

does not actually describe the famous painting that is popularly credited with the

‘origin’ of perspective. However, Manetti, Brunelleschi’s biographer, gives a

detailed account of this ‘discovery’ (Duberry and Willats, 1972: 53).

Brunelleschi’s breakthrough is in the form of a small painting of the octagonal

Baptistery in Florence. The picture is thought to have been painted as a mirror

image, and it is unknown if it was painted directly on top of the polished silver

panel (literally traced out onto a reflection), or was painted through a projected

geometry system. The aspects of perspective that Alberti focuses’ on are the

line of sight from the viewer to the centre of the picture, at the vanishing point,

which is fixed at the centre of the picture at the same height as the viewer. He

15

highlights the geometric rules of projection and how these produce an accurate

representation of the baptistry. The emphasis on accuracy is echoed in Manetti’s

account where, he describes the effects of viewing the painting: “it seemed that

one was seeing truth itself” (in Damisch, 1995: 116).

There are, however, other ways of reading this story where the importance of the

mirror plays a greater role. Damisch (1995), paying attention to the detail of

Manetti’s account, provides a counter history that puts the play on mirrors at the

centre of the story, and further claims that the role of mirrors in this event has

tended to be suppressed. Brunelleschi created a unique way to view the

painting. He made a cone shaped aperture at the back of the picture and he

then “directed that the spectator, holding the picture in one hand, should look

through the aperture [] to a mirror held in the other hand” (Duberry and Willats,

1972: 52). The viewer was directed to stand in the place that the painter

originally stood, and to view the picture facing the baptistry itself. From this

vantage point, the copy, the picture could be compared directly with reality,

Brunelleschi’s experiment

Damisch places emphasis on the experimental nature of this viewing procedure:

the way that it physically demonstrates the relationships between viewer and

viewed. Not only does the experiment demonstrate perspective as rule, a rule

16

that can be replicated through repetition of the experiment (or for that matter

each time a painting is painted according to the rules of projected perspective). It

also demonstrates the effect of physically placing the viewer at the fixed point of

the painter’s eye.

Foucault famously deconstructs Velasquez’s Las Meninas in terms of a play on

the impossibility of a centric self as projected through perspective; the way it

“makes us look ourselves in the eye, impossibilities notwithstanding” (Stronach et

al,2007:194). In Las Meninas the mirror acts as a “metathesis of visibility”

(Foucault, 1970:13). In his book “The Origin of Perspective”, Damisch explicitly

develops this idea further in relation to Brunelleschi’s peep show. A peep show

that at the same time as projecting a realist three-dimensional image of the

Florentine baptistery also has the effect of allowing you to see your own eye

reflected back at you at the centre of the picture, at the vanishing point. This

reflected eye of the ‘I’ is surely more in tune with a surrealist attitude, than a

vision of reality. In this sense it fulfils the transformative task of interrogating the

nature of ‘seeing’ and ‘seen-ness’ as advocated by Jenks.

“Trans-formation is not a gathering of the world through vision, it is a re-

ordering of the world within vision” (Jenks, 2005:169)

The reflected eye acts to prevent this ordering as naturalised perception, as a

universal truth, and imbues Brunelleschi’s painting with the uncertainty of

partiality. At the same time as it’s logic restricts vision, it creates an opening,

literally through the painting. It is a theme taken up modern artist, Lucio Fontana,

who used holes and fissures on the canvas to create an ‘infinite dimension’; “ I did

not make holes in order to wreck the picture. On the contrary, I made holes in

order to find something else” (Fontana, 2006). It is in this generative play and

experimentation with the nature of vision and the nature of reality that

transformation can occur.

17

Damisch also points out another function of the role of mirrors in undermining the

logic that would associate perspective with the accurate representation of reality.

In Brunelleschi’s painting the sky was left unpainted. This meant that ‘actual’

clouds (outside the stability of the cone of vision) were reflected in the image

seen through the peephole.

(Damisch in Krauss, 1992)

The unpainted sky and mirror was vital in order to sustain the illusion of seeing

reality, because it meant that the clouds could move as they would if you were

looking at the baptistery itself, rather than at a representation of it. However, that

Brunelleschi had to leave the sky unpainted has the effect of revealing, very

materially, the artificiality of perspective as a system. Perspective is unable to

capture time and movement. In its attempt to stabilise vision, perspective reveals

the transient nature of vision. This paradox is brought to the fore by juxtaposing

the fluidity of the clouds, which disrupt the static rule-bound quality of the

baptistery building. It is in this sense that the cloud decentres knowledge,

operating “ as the lack in the centre of that knowledge” (Krauss, 1992:161). And

it is through this crucial failure, “that painting understands its scientific aspirations

– toward measurement, toward the probing of bodies, toward exact knowledge -

as always being limited or conditioned by the unformed, which is unknowable

and representable” (ibid). Highlighting the artificial nature of perspective has the

effect of challenging the narrowing of vision that perspective appears to insist on.

18

Perspective as technique and observation as method are ways to show us what

we know. In contrast, Brunelleschi’s play of mirrors, and of holes that pierce the

canvas can be read as generative play and experimentation with the nature of

vision and the nature of reality. They lead you to question the validity of what

you see, rather than simply believing what you see. Putting perspective into play

can make us aware of our own blindness and incite us to new seeing. So it is

that a painting “not only shows but thinks” (Damisch, 1995: 446).

Validity through transgressionI return to my present research, not as a grand entrance, with the certainty of

“best method”, or even the selection of the best method ‘for me”. Here I draw

upon my early drawing lessons yet again. This time not the mathematical

formulas for correct perspective, but instead the relentless weekly life drawings,

observing and drawing a model in the studio. The discipline here is not as you

would assume, drawing what you habitually see, it is more about unknowing what

you see. I tried to describe the process early on:

“I have to look in a completely questioning way, not the habitual way that I

usually see, already knowing what I see. When a picture becomes

successful it is because I am looking at the form as an unfamiliar whole,

not parts of an all too familiar body. I have to see each part of the body in

relation to the rest, the toe in relation to the chin; the shoulder in relation to

the elbow. It is hard mental work this kind of looking, never taking

anything for granted, always asking questions and always trying to make

relations between the parts and the whole, without assuming what they

are. Things are not as they seem and the more you engage with what is,

the more intimate you become with it” (MacRae, Personal Journal 2004)

Here looking (active) rather than seeing (passive) is at the heart of method. In

this thesis, looking will be from the idiosyncratic positions that I have selected.

This point of view is partial and deeply personal. Rather than setting up

observation and participation as something to be balanced, my aim in this work

19

will to “establish a creative tension” (Grimshaw, 2005, p.23) between them.

Because looking is active and changes what is seen, this point of view is always

shifting. This movement is in response to the constant unsettling of coherence

and consensus as different viewpoints undermine each other.

Rather than adopting Gorard and Taylor’s strategy of ‘synthesising vision’ to

reproduce something already known, I am more interested in raising questions

about seeing itself. Perspective as technique and observation as method are

ways to show us what we already know. In contrast, Brunelleschi’s play of

mirrors, and of holes that pierce the canvas can be read as generative play and

experimentation with the nature of vision and the nature of reality. They lead you

to question the validity of what you see, rather than simply believing it. Putting

perspective into play can make us aware of our own blindness and incite us to

new seeing. Here I turn to Irit Rogoff who uses the idea of the ‘curious eye’ as a

counterweight to the ‘good eye’:

I have settled on the notion of the ‘curious eye’ to counter the ‘good eye’ of connoisseurship. Curiosity implies a certain unsettling, a notion of things outside the realm of the known, of things not quite yet understood or articulated, the pleasures of the forbidden or the unthought, the optimism of finding out something one had not known or been able to conceive of before (2000, p.32).

References

Alberti, L.B. (1966) On Painting, Yale University Press, Conneticut

20

Alberti’s Grid , image, http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/MAGIC_MACHINES_1.html

Bailey, C. (2001). To speak: Problematising of the use of personal stories in early childhood research. In J.Jipson & R. Johnson (Eds) Resistance & representation: Rethinking childhood education. Peter Lang, New York.

Baxendall, M. (1972) Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, O.U.P., Oxford

Brunelleschi’s experiment (image), accessed, 05-10-2007, www.hccs.cc.tx.us/.../ Brunelleschi.html

Bryson, (1988), The Gaze in the Expanded Field, in (Ed. Foster, H.) Vision and Visuality, Bay Press, Seattle.

Canella, G. (2002) Deconstructing Early Childhood Education. Peter Lang Publishing, New York

Cosgrove, D. (1985), “Prospect, perspective and the evolution of the landscape idea” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 10, 45-62

Crary, J. (1998) Techniques of the Observer, MIT Press, Massachusetts.

Damisch, H. (1995) The Origin of Perspective, MIT Press, Massachusetts.

Denzin, N (1997) Interpretative Ethnographic Practices for the Twenty-First Century. Sage, California

Duberry, F and Willats, J (1972) Drawing Systems, Studio Vista, London

Encarta (1999) World English Dictionary, Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Fontana, L, Last Interview (members.aol.com/mindwebart3/page65.htm) last accessed 2006

Foucault, M, (1970) The order of things. An archeology of the human sciences. Tavistock, London.

Gorard, S. and Taylor, C (2004) ‘What is Triangulation?’ in Building Research Capacity, (Journal of the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme Research Capacity Building Network) , (Feb 2004, Issue 7), Cardiff University

Grimshaw, A. (2005) Eying the Field: New Horizons for Visual Anthropology, in (eds.) Grimshaw, A. and Ravetz, A. Visualizing Anthropology, Bristol: Intellect Books

21

Hammersley, M. and Atkinson, P. (1997) Ethnography. Principles in Practice. Routledge, London

Harvey, P. (1996) Hybrids of Modernity. Anthropology, the nation state and the universal exhibition. London; RoutledgeHockney, D (2001) Secret Knowledge, Thames and Hudson, London

Jay, M (1988) ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’ in (Ed. Foster, H.) Vision and Visuality, Bay Press, Seattle.

Jay (1993) Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought, University of California Press, California

Jenks, C. (2005) Culture, Routledge, London

Krauss, R. (1992) ‘ The/CLOUD/” pp.155-165, in Haskell, B. Agnes Martin, New York, Whitney Museum Of American Art

Leonardo Da Vinci; www.acmi.net.au/AIC/PEEP-SHOW.html

Lyotard, J, (1984) The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Open University (2001) Research Methods in Education Handbook. Open University, Milton Keynes

Panofsky, E. (1991), Perspective as Symbolic Form, Zone Books, New York

Rabinow, P. (1986) ‘Representations are Social Facts’, in, , (Ed., Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.) Writing Culture. The poetics and Politics of Ethnography, University of California Press, California.

Rogoff, I. (2000) Terra Infirma. Routledge, London.

Sontag, S (1979) On Photography, Penguin, London

Stronach, I., Garratt, D., Pearce, C., Piper, H. (2007) Reflexivity, the picturing of selves, and the forging of method. In Qualitative Inquiry. 13; 179.

Support for Teachers in Art Website, www.openc.k12.or.us/.../ drawing/v-bas1e.html (accessed 25-11-2005)

Trinh, (1991) When the Moon Waxes Red, London; Routledge

22

Tyler, S (1986) ‘Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document” in Ed., Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.) Writing Culture. The poetics and Politics of Ethnography, University of California Press, California.

23