"Both Jacque Lacan and Martin Jay posited theoretical disadvantages to the construction of single point perspective paintings. These two theorists lead a drive to embrace anamorphosistic, baroque and modern art as the more productive and enhancing experiences for the viewing subject. According to Lacan, what the subject desires most is to be recognized as a distinct individual, unlike any other. The subject wants others to see her as she sees herself. This fundamental lack of true or real subjectivity drives the subject to work ceaselessly to shore up her constantly dissipating sense of selfhood. The subject ardently wants to establish her identity as a fixed thing, something constitutive of her being, but she simultaneously intuits that her subjectivity is not fixed. So she makes or acquires pictures, purchases objects and property, espouses or rejects values and ideals all in the name of "who she is"; all the while, the subject never consciously realizes how fragile, unstable and derivative her subjectivity truly is.
Lacan's notion of why we look at pictures starts with the gaze. The gaze is desire. Rather, the gaze is the tool of the desiring subject, what she sends out into the world to secure a sense of self or at least shore up her deficit of subjectivity. Lacan says that a subject's recognition of herself is dependent upon "misrecognition" or "meconnaissance" because the subject assumes its own concreteness and uniqueness. Prior to Lacan, the gaze was characterized as something a subject does to the objects in the world around her. Lacan, however, changes the terms entirely and speaks of visuality, which is something quite different from subjects gazing upon objects; Lacan's view of visuality and the gaze is much more complex--he speaks of gazing as a chiasmic function. He uses a diagram of two triangles superimposed upon one another to illustrate how the picture and the subject are both held within the matrix of the gaze and the subject of representation. Put more simply, when a subject masters a picture by gazing upon it, she is at the same time formulated by the picture. In other words, to achieve the goal of being recognized, the subject must become an object, seen and recognized by the very things she makes objects of.
Lacan believes that the subject gazing upon a single-point perspective painting, such as Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin (mentioned earlier in this essay), starts to see herself as the center of the universe. She regards the world and its objects from a choice vantage point; everything in her line of vision conforms to Brunelleschi's mathematics of sight. Mathematically-plotted pictures enable a way of seeing that seems at first to support the subject's notions of distinct and masterful selfhood. This rationalist perspective satisfies the subject's urge to see herself as fixed and complete until she contemplates the vanishing point. When, in her perusal of the picture, she encounters the vanishing point, she becomes troubled by the reciprocal relationship between subject and object. If her object recognizes her, as she indeed wishes it to, then it becomes unclear to her, symbolically speaking, whether she still occupies the vantage point or has become the vanishing point.
"From Lacan's point of view, rationalist or scientifically informed painting, despite the fact that it is apparently easy to see and digest, menaces the subject, forcing her into an endless series of psychological maneuvers to avoid confronting the nothingness that the picture's vanishing point shows her she is. Rationalist paintings provide the viewer with only two alternatives of being: master of the universe (at the vantage point) or cipher (at the vanishing point.) Each alternative fails to accurately encapsulate who the subject is. Lacan seems to propose that innovations to single-point perspectivalism, may offer the viewing subject an escape from the master/cipher straight jacket. Lacan says that paintings are a trap for the gaze, and once trapped, the gaze is temporarily calmed and pacified. This tamed gaze or "dompte regard" gives the viewer rest from the athletics of the master/cipher dichotomy. Caravagio presented innovative art to his patrons in the church five hundred years ago when he created paintings that broke with single point perspective in favor of picture planes containing foreshortened space and subtly engineered multiple perspectives. Gazing upon a Caravaggio, the subject is no longer forced into the inherently false role of master of the universe, nor does identification with the vanishing point annihilate her. Instead, she may adopt any or many of the positions that the picture plane offers. In this respect, art that departs from Renaissance notions of single point perspective constitute a constructive difficulty for the viewer, one that allows the viewer to see herself more honestly, as a split and multiple subject."
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