Look out

Imagine you are building the perfect lookout tower, a structure that will allow the best views of objects both up close and far away. All your effort goes into perfecting the view from inside the tower—it is as though you were building it from the inside. How the tower might appear to anyone not looking out of it has no influence on your work; the external structure follows entirely from the view outward.

This thought experiment occurred to me while I was looking for a way to make aesthetic sense of a sculpture at the Yale Art Gallery, an earthenware replica of a three-story temple whose manifest sensible form’s insistence on squares I found horrifying and inhuman. Perhaps it is uncharitable for interpretation of an artwork to begin by rejecting what it looks like (though such a strategy might be less crude than starting from the assumption that the work must have looked good to whoever made it). But imagine my hypothesis were true—if the form of the temple were nothing but the outer shape supporting an act of vision, and only accidentally a visible thing itself, what, then, would it mean for some second artist to exalt that form by making an earthenware sculpture of it? Locating the power of the thing in its inessential features can be gross idolatry, or it can be indirect, hermetic praise of a vision-moment that the artist recognizes cannot be made visible—if there can be no adequate representation of the thing, perhaps there is no better tribute than to name it falsely.