Re: [-empyre-] eugenie's first post

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

Can you say more about Holbein's scheme? It's almost as if his painting
devours architecture and the situated body. Did he do other such work? Why
was this brilliance abandoned, if it was? Could his other work contain
secret geometries? (I realize not, but want to speculate.)

It reminds me, what you're saying, of the multiply perceived painting of
Kuo Hsi -

Alan

On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, eugenie wrote:

> hi all,
>
> big thank you to christina, melinda, michael and jim for inviting me to
> participate in this month¹s discussion.
>
> I¹ve just read troy¹s first post and it looks ­ interestingly ­ as though
> we¹re approaching the issue of anamorphism from two distinct angles ­ the
> discursive (troy) and the material (myself). my interest in anamorphosis is
> historically based ­ I arrived in the digital realm by the somewhat
> roundabout route of c18th landscape aesthetics ­ so I¹m going to begin by
> giving a bit of historical background.
>
> anamorphosis, for me, is a way of approaching the issue of ?embodied
> vision¹. the argument is simple and probably highly self evident to most of
> you posting to this list ­ vision and thought issue from an active body
> rather than a disembodied eye ­ but it¹s also one that western philosophy
> has traditionally had a great deal of trouble accepting.
>
> Hans Holbein¹s Ambassadors (1533) is a well-known example of an anamorphic
> picture and an excellent demonstration of the way that so called ?rational
> perception¹ has always involved more than just the perspectival eye/I.  The
> vanishing point and ?correct¹ viewing position in Holbein¹s picture are
> clearly indicated by the precise rendering of the various perspectival
> objects in the image. Looking from this position, the anamorphic skull in
> the foreground appears as nothing more than a meaningless shape. In order to
> see it properly, the viewer has to approach the painting and look obliquely,
> from a position on the right, about halfway up the frame.
>
> Viewing Holbein¹s picture was a sort of play in two acts. Holbein was quite
> specific about the manner in which the picture should be hung: in a room
> with two doors, each one corresponding to one of the picture¹s two viewing
> positions. In the first act, the viewer enters the room and sees the picture
> from the ?correct¹ point of view. Captivated by the realism of the painted
> scene, the viewer is also perplexed by the indecipherable object at the
> bottom of the picture. Leaving by the second door, the disconcerted viewer
> casts a brief backward glance at the painting, and it is at this point that
> the strange object resolves itself into an image.
>
> Traditional theories of representation have paid a lot of attention to the
> way the viewer is constructed as/at the ?correct¹ point of view ­ i.e. as a
> distanced, disembodied, monocular eye. they have had much less to say about
> the transient state(s) between points of view ­ what I¹m calling the
> ?anamorphic moment¹. Holbein¹s picture calls attention to those moments in
> the event of seeing where the viewer exceeds the Cartesianesque
> configuration of the disembodied eye. It foregrounds the subject in its
> environmental sense: a mobile, embodied agent that acts in the real world of
> objects. As a concept of transformation, then, anamorphosis allows us to
> understand subjectivity as a ?dynamic¹ condition, a matter of a constantly
> changing body schema rather than a fixed body image. Holbein¹s little
> theatre of representation, in other words, has a lot to tell us about the
> way we interface with virtual environments in the present day? and this is
> where it links up to my current interest in videogames, and affect, and the
> way that we traditionally understand the history of virtuality.
>
> wow, I¹ve run on and on. I¹ll leave it there for now.
>
> bests
> eugenie
>
>
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