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On the third floor of the Architecture building at Cooper Union, between the main studio room and the smaller thesis studios, is a hallway that typically features dusty black-and-white prints of architectural works we have studied in history class. They are something to stare at while you wait for your friend to come out of the bathroom. It wasn't until several months ago, when Kerry Rose Shear's artwork went up, that this hallway deserved to be called a "gallery," as it is officially designated.
Shear's work was part of an exhibition that included ten lectures on the history of perspective. The artwork and the lectures together constitute a work in progress that eludes classification: typed pages of research, corrected with lively strokes of watercolor and pen; original poetry with painted illustrations that sometimes bleed into the poems; a very stream-of-consciousness art, but with a specific goal in mind. The writings are about art history, about herself, about Giotto and Saint Francis and Aristotle and deconstruction and all the other subjects that make up this mammoth project she has taken on, the project she calls "Illuminated Perspective: A Mongrel Work in Progress."
Ah-hah! you may be saying about now. Another one of those weird so-called artists, like that woman who appears onstage nude, covered in chocolate, or the guy who painted the Virgin Mary with elephant dung. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but if you are in the mood for a good rant, you'll have to look elsewhere. Kerry Rose Shear is sometimes maddeningly obscure, it's true, but there is nothing phony or self-indulgent or perverse in her quest.
When she's talking to an audience, Shear is never still; her hands move, she shifts and paces and fiddles with a bright purple filmy scarf draped over her all-black ensemble. She begins every lecture as a bundle of nerves, and only gradually warms to her subject and begins to speak freely.
Perspective, she says, was invented as a new way of seeing things:
The journey through history to the site or origin of perspective gradually teaches us the new mode of seeing, and so gradually brings the new lens into being. Thus the image of the world seen in and through the found object gradually infuses the act of finding the object, even before it is found. At the instant of the finding, finding as noun and verb both coalesce in an epiphany. Here, the found object—that is, the finding—reads as the image of the act of finding it.
I'm trying to grasp what she has just said, getting my bearings by comparing it to what we have been taught about the history of perspective. According to the standard account, scientific perspective was invented by the fifteenth-century architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, who sought to create the perfect constructed space. Using monocular (one-point) perspective, Brunelleschi did a painting of the Florentine baptistry, an outdoor public space. Then he placed the painting in the space, but backward, and in front of the painting he placed a mirror. Finally, he poked a hole through the vanishing point of the painting, so that, viewing the mirror image, one could see a constructed reality. His contemporaries were amazed; no artist before him had acheived such authenticity.
I can see how this fits with Shear's talk about finding: the image of the world seen through Brunelleschi's construction is the image of the construct, and the found object, the painting, is both an object and the act of creating the object. I feel that I am on the verge of making an important connection, but while I have been thinking, Shear has continued to speak. Now she's summarizing the conventional view of perspective: "The viewer is represented as a disembodied site in space, no longer bound to determined history or symbolic meanings." But, she adds, there is a fundamental problem with this conventional account—namely, that our whole language is based on meaning as derived from symbols. The only way to free perspective from the iconic and meaningful context in which it was created—in Catholic symbolism—is, Shear says, to embrace that context. By ingesting and consuming the symbols, one also digests them, and so eliminates them from the picture.
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