Plurality of Perspectives

In “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” Jay examines the advantages and drawbacks of different types of perspective in art, especially Cartesian Perspective, eventually concluding that there is no “best” perspective in art. Jay hypothesizes that, “Western scientific tradition may have only been made possible by Cartesian perspectivalism or its complement, the Baconian art of describing.” The advantage of Cartesian perspective is that it gives society a mathematically set view of space, which may have been what enabled great strides forward scientifically in Western civilization. Personally, I don’t know of any evidence that the art is the cause of scientific advance. I would guess that the more likely scenario is that society was moving towards a more mathematical view of the world (at least in the academic and philosophical circles), and the Cartesian perspective was one of many byproducts of this new way of thinking. Either way, Jay is commenting on an advantage of Cartesian art.
He also fairly notes the disadvantages of Cartesian perspective, saying, “the participatory involvement of more absorptive visual modes was diminished, if not entirely suppressed, as the gap between spectator and spectacle widened.” Cartesian perspective is ultimately a barrier of the communication of emotion between the artist and the audience. Despite Cartesian perspective’s attempts at creating an accurate copy of the world, we can see places where it fails in its completeness as a form of expression. If Cartesian perspective’s only failings were technical (for example, we need to take into account the more complicated physics of a spherical eye, or the even more complex situation of having two eyes), then the movement’s ability to represent nature would not be impossible. Technical failings could have been fixed in art as our understanding of physics and optics became complete enough to account for the complex optical system of the way the eye view reality. These fixes wouldn’t have been a revolutionary break from Cartesian perspective, but only an improvement upon the mathematical details of the movement. The fact that Cartesian perspective made specific emotional barriers to proper representation shows that it cannot, no matter how many improvements to the mathematics, create an exact copy of nature as each individual sees it. This theme has been brought up before in “Pygmalion’s Power,” when Gombrich makes the point that the artist is not (and cannot) simply copy, but must create due to the nature in which humans on a whole process and perceive what we see in the world.
Jay goes ultimately goes beyond analyzing Cartesian perspective, and proposes a manner in which to view the history of different movements in artistic perspective. Jay states, “Rather than erect another hierarchy, it may… be more useful to acknowledge the plurality of Scopic regimes.” This statement summarizes the point of this essay. Through the study of art perspective history, Jay believes that “We may wean ourselves from the fiction of a ‘true’ vision.” This goal goes beyond what we normally see in artistic revolutions (at least from how I understand it so far). A revolution is characterized by one new type of art (or in this case, perspective in art) overtaking another. The artistic community sides with the new art, and the general consensus is that one is better, or closer to the direction of progress. Jay’s point is that with these new discoveries, we are really diversifying the ways in which we can express ourselves as a society through art. The old ways aren’t better or worse than the new ones, but both can be used for different purposes in art. This view of art is truly progressive; instead of picking one perspective as better than another, Jay proposes that we characterize each objectively. This manner of studying history of art is less tainted by our time periods and the societal lens through which we view art, thus making art history a more enduring and rigorous study.