Vision is one of the most unique and intriguing things about human beings. The vision humans have today has taken many centuries to develop and refine. Through vision human beings are able to perceive the world around them, the world of shapes and colors which makes their lives more enjoyable but also more informed and reflective. However, there are still many limitations to the human vision which is an idea that has been explored throughout the history of human art. In the chapter Las Meninas, Michel Foucault goes into the details of exploring how the painter of the painting Las Meninas played with the vision and created a complex masterpiece of painting in the process. In the article, The Spiral Jetty Robert Smithson focuses heavily on the color red and how important it is in our world and its ability to lead to different states of consciousness and to make contact with another world within our world. He also discusses the spiral shape of the jetty and the many different textures, colors, and shapes of which it is made up, all the while maintaining a strong focus on human vision. Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin explores the idea that architecture requires a sensitive use of all five of the bodily senses as through the use of all five senses one can build a structure that pleases in every aspect and stands strong in its unique space.  All three of these works and writers place a strong emphasis on the human vision, senses, the shape and color of structures, and how they are ultimately gateways to connecting with different dimensions of the world. The human senses and perception are the windows that shape and define objective reality and transform it into an experience out of the ordinary.

Foucault’s argument focuses on the visual representation of the thoughts of the painter inside the painting and how it correlate with the eyes of the world around. Diego Velazquez’s painting Las Meninas became the inspiration for Foucault’s discourse and in his writing he explores several aspects of what the painting represented and how it was perceived. “Foucault insists that Las Meninas, being an example of the Classical representation, resembles the painter’s thought communicated metaphorically in the invisibility of the “real” painter in the depicted mirror.” As Gugleta points out Foucault’s exploration of the painting focuses on that which is absent from the painting itself but which exists in the ideological domain of the painting. The point of reference in the painting is, in fact, the painter with a palette and brush in hand, looking at an unseen place on the canvas, and lost in deep thought. Thus, Foucault’s summarization makes it true that the absent object is the focus of the whole painting as the painter’s thoughts, the characters of the painting’s perception, and the vision of the audience of the painting are all focused on that one invisible point in the painting which falls, even from the painting, into a blind spot. As Foucault explains “The spectacle he is observing is thus doubly invisible: first, because it is not represented within the space of the painting, and, second, because it is situated precisely in that blind point, in that essential hiding-place into which our gaze disappears from ourselves at the moment of our actual looking.” Thus, the doubly invisible object becomes the subject of the whole painting itself and the discourse through which the stream of ideas runs. In his writings, Foucault shows that the vision of the three points of perception all converge on a point in space and time that is not solidly present anywhere in the material world itself but which, nevertheless, exists more present than the whole painting itself.

The Spiral Jetty was constructed in April of 1970 as many artists moved beyond the confines of artwork that could be captured as museum pieces. Robert Smithson’s The Spiral Jetty is one of the greatest examples of such art and sculpture. In his article The Spiral Jetty he discusses the many natural aspects that he came into contact with. As with any artist the idea of ‘seeing’ and ‘vision’ remained an important one in his writings and explorations. He deconstructs his process of building the Spiral Jetty and takes the readers along on a captivating journey and expounds on how he has structured the jetty focusing on the ideas of shape, vision, and color and how a simple change of angle could change the picture, an idea that Foucault discussed in length in Las Meninas. Smithson points out “The scale of the Spiral Jetty tends to fluctuate depending on where the viewer happens to be. Size determines an object, but scale determines an art.” Here, Smithson makes it clear that vision has a strong link with the shape of a structure or an object, and as the vision changes so does the structure or object change its appearance. Therefore, the most important thing then is the eye that sees as it is the only constant while the object or structure remains fluid and temperamental changing itself according to the changing vision. It is perhaps strongly related to the idea of presence and absence in Las Meninas as Guglets says “Las Meninas, it will be argued, is a paragon, not of pure representation, but of self-referential representation or structure, that is, a representation understood in relation to the structural dialectic of the sign – as shown in the interplay between absence and presence, between the absence of the model (the royal couple) and the (material) presence of the image or signifier.” Thus, the presence or absence does not matter, and neither does the shape and size of a structure or object rather what determines the conception most is the point of perception as from the eyes of an ant the crack in a wall can seem like the Grand Canyon itself. Therefore, it can be construed that any structure or object can never stand in isolation from its audience as it is the coming together of the two forces that create an experience that defies objective reality and creates a new dimension in which ideas beyond the ordinary surface and bring into light a different world of perception.

The five senses, of the physical body, collectively contribute to the perception of the world around us. This idea of the five senses being equally important in making deductions about something is explored extensively in Juhani Pallasma’s The Eyes of the Skin. Being an architect himself, Pallasmaa, was able to understand the contribution of each of the senses in the process of construction. He argued that depending solely on the sense of vision greatly limits one’s potential of what could be done within a given space. The senses of touch, smell, hearing, and tasting are all equally important in determining what goes into the construction of a certain project. For example, the sense of touch dictates the quality of the space that is available and how it could be molded to its most beautiful form by utilizing all of its aspects. Pallasmaa’s argument is centered on experiencing every space using all the senses of one’s body and experiencing it with each one of them. The smells of places make a distinction between them more than their physical appearance does, the taste of things also varies depending on their region, the sounds make up the environment of any place combined with its smells, and the textures, shapes, and colors each contribute to make each place unique in its own right just as each human sense offers a variety of new experiences for them to culminate in a united perception. Pallasmaa is also of the view that the sense of sight is supported by these other senses and each works in conjunction with the other to give us a better experience and a fuller perspective. He claims that “…the privileging of the sense of sight over the other senses is an inarguable theme in Western thought, and it is also an evident bias in the architecture of our century.” Pallasmaa points out that in the current century, architecture has become too functional and limited as it is driven by a focus on the sense of sight and concepts of functionality and organization whereas before the technological revolution, the architecture was much more stylized and imaginative than it has become now. “The negative development in architecture is, of course, forcefully supported by forces and patterns of management, organization, and production, as well as by the abstracting and universalizing impact of technological rationality itself.” Pallasmaa then goes on to discuss how the places seen in a movie or novel, which is made up of a fictional world, can absorb the viewers into the scene itself because the viewers experience the place using all of their senses. The writer or the architect includes elements that appeal to the different senses such as the background sounds, the smells wafting around, etc. Pallasmaa says that these places remain forever ingrained in the experience of the viewer despite being fictional is because the many sense of the human body remembers them and it is stored in the physical memory of the senses so that it remains an important part of that human’s experience. As Pallasmaa says the interaction between architecture and human beings is reconciled with the use of the senses and the individual becomes reflected in the work that they behold. The interior of the iWeb was designed by Kas Oosterhuis, who constructed it in such a way that the immediate sense of sight leads the person closer to the structures, but the curiosity that has been aroused by the sense of sight can only be satiated, by actually making physical contact with the surface itself. Although this structure is dedicated to technology itself it defies all the norms of how technology can be constructed and perceived and that it has to remain outside of most physical sense focusing just on the sense of sight. This is a good example that shows the connection between vision, shape, and perception and shows how a structure can grasp the attention of multiple human senses and by doing so define their experience from being ordinary to extraordinary. Thus, Pallasmaa is right in claiming that all of the human senses play an important role in how we view objective reality which in turn itself becomes dependent on its perception by the physical senses that give it form and existence just like the object in Las Meninas is brought into existence by the use of sensory perception and its resultant idea.

To sum up, human vision defines many aspects of how a certain structure or object is viewed, but the vision itself is informed by several other bodily senses, each connected with the other. While Foucault’s focus has been on the presence of a subject in its apparent absence, so that the viewer is able to perceive that object or idea despite its absence, Smithson has been devoted to the construction of such structures that make its boundaries fluid as it could change shape and size depending on where it is being seen from. Pallasmaa goes further into the understanding of the connection between vision, shape, and architecture by bringing in the other sensory details that contribute to making the experience wholesome and memorable. Thus, objective reality is only defined by its perception, and its features are defined by the way in which it is perceived.

Bibliography

Foucault, Michel. “Las Meninas.” In The Order of Things: an archaeology of the human sciences, by Michel Foucault, 3-16. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

Gugleta, Zdravka. “Michel Foucault’s (Mis)Interpretation of Las Meninas or Pure Representation as the Tautologous Structure of the Sign.” Linguistics and Literature, 2011: 1-12.

Pallasmaa, Juhani. “Part 2.” In The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, by Juhani Pallasmaa, 39-73. Great Britain: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2005.

Smithson, Robert. “The Spiral Jetty.” In Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, by Jack Flam, 143-153. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996.