Looking Up, Looking Down, Looking OutVisual Angles on American Art

The Smithsonian Institution

Looking Up, Looking Down, Looking Out Visual Angles on American ArtAuthor(s): Jason WeemsSource: American Art, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Spring 2011), pp. 2-10Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art MuseumStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/660024 .

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2 Spring 2011 Volume 25, Number 1 © 2011 Smithsonian Institution

Jason Weems

Commentaries

Looking Up, Looking Down, Looking OutVisual Angles on American Art

On March 15, 1928, a young Walt Disney screened his first animated film featuring Mickey Mouse, entitled Plane Crazy. Depicting Disney’s now ubiquitous mouse as an amateur aviator, the six-minute cartoon chronicled Mickey’s experience of building, flying, and crashing an airplane.1 Like most animators, Disney used the elasticity of his medium to comedic and playful effect. The action opens in a barnyard, where a menag-erie of animals works in bouncy synchronization to construct a flimsy dog-powered monoplane. Rakishly tousling his hair in mimicry of American aviator-hero Charles “Lucky” Lindbergh, Mickey crashes this first plane without even lifting off the ground. Undiscouraged, the mouse fashions a second aircraft from a nearby Model T, complete with a tail of feathers plucked from a reluctant turkey. Plopping his amour Minnie in the copilot’s seat, Mickey manages to get this craft aloft through a series of absurd maneuvers that challenge every law of gravity, materiality, and sensibility. Hurtling down a rural road turned runway, the plane bounces over rocks and under cows, careens off telephone poles, flies through the radiator of an approaching automobile, and spins against the horizon line like a deranged gyroscope.

Things aloft are no calmer. Freed from the regulating forces of gravity and hori-zontality, Mickey pushes the aircraft into ever more maniacal maneuvers as he loops and snakes it in all directions and dimensions to impress Minnie and earn a kiss. Mickey soon loses control, however, and the plane noses into a vertical plunge. As the film’s gaze shifts to a through-the-propeller pilot’s perspective, the last sequence of the flight provides an unexpectedly disorienting and uncanny view of the farmstead below, whose flattened yards, roofs, and treetops spiral ever and irresistibly closer. As the plane augers into a tree canopy, the landscape suddenly disappears as the screen goes black, and the animated words “CRASH BANG” serve final notice of the mouse’s calamitous return to earth. Snapping back to a final horizontal shot, the film ends with Mickey thumping derrière-first to the ground followed by his lucky horseshoe, which plunks down on his head shortly thereafter. Although the wide-eyed Mickey soon regains his senses, we are left to wonder if he will ever see the world in quite the same way again.

Disney produced Plane Crazy in an era when technology was rapidly and insis-tently changing American life. The airplane was perhaps the most celebrated tool of this transformation, heralded for its ability to reshape the most basic element of human experience—its physical link to the ground below. By enabling mankind to “slip the



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Mickey’s takeoff, in Plane Crazy, 1928 © Disney

Mickey’s plane spirals downward, in Plane Crazy, 1928 © Disney

surly bonds of earth,” avia-tion prompted new ideas about formerly stable and anchored relationships between time and space, man and terrain, and vision and perspective.2 Disney seems especially to have appre-ciated the transformations that the airplane wrought on prac-tices of vision, and he devoted much of Plane Crazy to imag-ining how flight unmade the world, or at least its representa-tion. Indeed, Disney worked purposefully to picture the ways aviation’s unanchored aerial gaze deconstructed the conven-tions of horizontal looking. In the sequence illustrated here, Disney laid out a prototypical perspective system of orthogo-nal road edges, scaled telephone poles, and stable horizon and then pierced it with the veering four-directional motion of the airplane. In the second image, he removed the horizontal gaze en-tirely and embraced the new and unprecedented vertical viewpoint that eliminated depth, estranged objects, and flattened three-

dimensional landforms into patterned abstractions. In each instance Disney challenged his viewers to see the world from different angles and to recompose their understanding of both landscape and vision in new and unconventional ways.

The question of point of view—of where one stands in relation to the thing seen—lies at the foundation of all visual experiences and representations. In the realm of real-world encounters, we like to imagine that visual orientation is intrinsic to the act of seeing—that by virtue of inhabiting our bodies we naturalize point of view as being inseparable from our actual physical stature and orientation. Moving into the realm of representation, things become more complicated. In the very fact of their re-presentedness, pictures belie belief in sight’s directness and demand awareness of the ways that visual perspective is as much a product of knowledge and regulation as it is of something we might try to posit as unmediated visual experience. Yet whereas some artists have proven their willingness to breach the illusion of normative perspective and look from new angles, at least an equal number of image makers, viewers, and even art histo-rians have consciously or unconsciously suborned it. The aim of this essay and those that follow is to encourage a heightened skepticism of conventional perspective, its assump-tions and operations, by challenging, with Disneylike perception, the notion that the gaze has a stable angle or that an artwork possesses an order that is not illusory and already prefigured by culture.



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Out of Depth

Make no mistake, there has always been a conscious though somewhat paradoxical skep-ticism about the reality of any represented point of view. From Plato’s cave to Leon Battista Alberti’s window, early Western thinkers engaged in a delicate balancing act between the naturalization of illusion and its disavowal. For Alberti especially, the process of encoding a systematic point of view was at heart a complicated ruse embedded in a humanist faith that man’s tools of abstract description—mathematics, geometry, monocularity—were in some fundamental way commensurate with the observable world and that the visions they produced, while self-consciously constructed, also replicated a putatively normative viewing angle—that of a standing person looking along a horizontal line through and across space. Alberti’s desire to effect a naturalization of his linear system is evident in his writings on the topic and is made especially clear by his invocation of human bodies and, more interestingly, disembodied eyes, as seen, for example, in an illustration from a 1518 codex reproduction of his seminal 1435 treatise De Pictura.3 On one level, the intent behind these corporeal references was largely instructional, as bodies and/or eyes provided practi-cal and self-evident projection points from which his perceptual system could unfold. Yet Alberti’s identification of the eye and, by extension, the mind as the source of perspective also had the added rhetorical effect of infusing perspectival construction with metaphori-cal potential. Perspective became not only a window on the world but also a means for ordering individual and societal frameworks of cultural understanding. To varying degrees, both Alberti and the generations of artists and thinkers who followed him understood

that the implications of pinning the source of sight to embodied viewership amounted to a naturalization of ideology.4 Albertian perspective established the embodied, grounded, and horizontally directed gaze as the default standard of vision and culture more generally.

It is remarkable how quickly and completely Albertian perspective became the standard lexicon of Western representation, and it is equally surpris-ing how readily and complicitly artists and viewers alike naturalized its inherent abstraction. Those of us who study images also have not been immune to this latter tendency. These lapses in critical awareness can have potentially dire consequences, which James Elkins has described as a “corruption [that] settles at the heart of our accounts of pictures, shaping the coherence our ‘wider’ arguments can possess.”5 Yet historians of American art have been consistently aware of Alberti’s ideological implications, especially as they relate to landscape. Perhaps this criticality arises from the fact that the history of the American landscape, from the moment of encounter, has been envisioned as a story of insistent construction and transformation. Whatever the reason, when histo-rians of American art see the Albertian eye, as in Seth Eastman’s 1837 diagram on how to draw a perspectival landscape, we have tended to react with admirable skepticism and diligently to dissect the

Guide for the construction of Albertian perspective, 1518. Paper codex, ff. 62, ill., 8 1/2 x 6 1/10 in. Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, with permission of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, Ms. 1448, ff. 23r-v (facsimile)

Method for drawing a perspective view, from Treatise on Topographi-cal Drawing by Seth Eastman (Wiley and Putnam, 1837), plate 6



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viewpoint’s underlying tenets. To do so we have invoked a range of ideas, from artistic dialogues on the sublime and picturesque to discourses of scientific empiri-cism, iconographies of Manifest Destiny, and ideologies of order and control.6 It is thanks to such scholarship that art historians may find it impossible to look at a paint-ing like Thomas Cole’s 1836 View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow) without invoking Alan Wallach’s characterization of the scene’s mountaintop perspective as an instrument for the conceptualiza-tion, codification, and naturalization of broad and diaphanous structures of order and control. As Wallach deftly demonstrates, the totalizing or “panoptic” quality of the paint-ing’s viewpoint demands a critical understanding that pushes beyond the equation of perspective with veri-similitude or an implied continuity between the space of the viewer and that of the representation.7

Wallach’s essay offers a powerful interrogation of motivations that underpin Albertian perspective and their impact on American art and culture. It also provides convincing evidence of how a change of visual angle—from a grounded horizontal

to a bird’s-eye oblique, for example—can dramatically alter the meaning and intentionality of vision and/or representation. By shifting the angle of sight a few degrees downward, Cole effected a subtle dehumanization of the Albertian view and transformed the gaze from that of an embodied individual to that of a more dispassionate and omniscient type of viewer. What happens when the shift in angle is even more acute, perhaps even to the point of rending the horizontality and linearity of Albertian sight lines? This question calls to mind another landscape, remarkably less discussed than Cole’s icon, that also takes sublimity as its subject but from a markedly different vantage. Painted in 1827 by a young George Catlin, Bird’s Eye View of Niagara Falls pivots its visual orientation from the horizontal to a sheer ninety degrees, or full verticality. Floating a thousand or more feet above the falls, Catlin’s point of view renders the great cataract in a manner so unlike those painted by his contem-poraries that it appears estranging, mildly incomprehensible, and, for lack of a better word, weird. Unlike other pictures that, in their more typical perspective, focus on the rush and plunge of water that exerted such dramatic and visceral force when experienced from ground level, Catlin’s painting appears static and analytical. Although the image is fundamentally

George Catlin, Bird’s Eye View of Niagara Falls, 1827. Gouache, 17 5/8 x 15 1/2 in. Private collection



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fundamentally about depth—the impressive vertical distance between viewer and land-scape is quite a plunge—the work offers few illusions of dramatic three-dimensionality.

Later practices of aerial survey photography bore out Catlin’s prescience in under-standing how the vertical gaze negated terrestrial depth. Catlin had correctly envisioned the plummeting and roiling waters as little more than flat patterns differentiated by simple changes in hue and line rather than more robust illusions of depth and distance. Understanding that vertical looking made it impossible to perceive variations in elevation, Catlin flattened the terrain into a single and continuous two-dimensional field. He also portrayed a remarkable appreciation of the abstracting potential of the vertical gaze. Such abstraction is pronounced, for example, in his transformation of the surrounding farms and orchards into maplike rectangles of land and carefully grouped dots denoting individ-ual trees. Indeed, the image’s mappishness quickly becomes its defining feature: the work is analytical, totalizing, and to a certain degree affectless. It feels as if we know more about the falls but relate to them less or at least differently. Perhaps sensing the disconnection, Catlin painted another view of Niagara, this from a bottom-up perspective. Placing us well below the landline and partially behind the plummeting water—a prospect that highlights power and drama over maplike objectivity—Catlin seems intent on reinstilling a sense of visceral engagement that the vertical image had drained from the falls.8

Considered in the context of a later entry in his diary, the ideas behind Catlin’s Niagara imagery take fuller form. Describing a vision he had during his adventures on the western plains, Catlin wrote,

I was lifted up upon an imaginary pair of wings, which easily raised and held me floating in the open air, from whence I could behold beneath me the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans—the great cities of the East, and the mighty rivers. I could see the blue chain of the great lakes at the North—the Rocky Mountains, and beneath them and near their base, the vast, and almost boundless plains of grass, which were speckled with the bands of grazing buffaloes! 9

Here, we sense a bifurcation in Catlin’s perspective. In language hovering between poetry and prose, he first waxes eloquently about the elation of flight with its overtones of ascen-sion and revelation, then describes his vision of earth with the ordered logic of a mapmaker. In more pointedly aerial terms, Catlin posits the ecstasy of Icarian self-awareness and dramatic fulfillment (the desire to touch/be god) poised against the necessarily dispersive effects of a totalized, unanchored, and disembodied cartographic gaze. Perhaps unwit-tingly, a few decades later John Gast literalized Catlin’s airy vignette in his 1872 painting American Progress. Stuck between the construction of spatial illusion and the articulation of an abstract continental (and, indeed, global) space, Gast explicitly allegorized Progress while also, implicitly, the complicated and overlapping representational schemas that enabled it.

The amalgam of perspectives invoked by Gast’s image relies on shifts in visual angle, to be sure, but not only in the literal line-of-sight sense. One of the more interesting (and

George Catlin, Niagara Falls, 1827–28. Oil on canvas, 16 3/8 x 85 1/2 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison Jr.



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compositionally awkward) features of the painting is its precipitation of westward expansion’s unified narrative into discrete icons of its players and processes placed in measured order across the canvas. These items—settler’s wagon, stagecoach, loco-motive, farmer, miner, Indian—illustrate the multiple forces that transformed and gave meaning to the American landscape. Unconventionally, however, Gast made little attempt to draw these items together into a continuous and unified illusionistic space. Instead, he scattered them like so many nuggets of information across the unscaled and largely undifferentiated con-tinental plane of his canvas. In the context of conventional landscape painting, the result is clumsy, comic, and ineffectual illusionism. From an informational point of view, however, the tableau is full of useful symbolism and didactic content.

Rather than evoking an Albertian window, Gast provided a conceptualization of the land-scape that, following Nelson Goodman, might more appropriately be called a description than a depiction.10 Where the latter is concerned with creating singularity, continuity, and wholeness, the former, à la Gast’s pioneering bricolage, is conspicuously combinatory in its structuring of vision, space, and knowledge.

All of this suggests yet another angle of perception that we might call diagram-matic perspective. In a recent groundbreaking study, scholars John Bender and Michael Marrinan define the diagram as “a proliferation of manifestly selective packets of dissimilar data correlated in an explicitly process-oriented array that has some of the at-tributes of a representation but is situated in the world like an object.”11 In other words, diagrams are not compositions but disparate items drawn together to allow for the cre-ation of meaning through a process of comparison and contrast. Gast’s painting may not be a diagram, but it is diagrammatic in the way it lays out bits of information in a relatively uniform way and leaves the work of linking these objects up to the viewer. In doing so, Gast replaced the singular gaze of Albertian perspective with the possibility of multiple and overlapping vantage points. As the work’s title indicates, Gast intended viewers to incorporate all elements of the image, from the global curve of the horizon to the westward march of figures, into a universalizing allegory of national progress. Yet the image’s schematic quality also leaves open the possibility of making cross-references among some but not all of its individual elements. Like a diagram, Gast’s painting enables viewers both to see the landscape as a whole and to assemble its meaning in selective ways.

The new and substantive attention being paid to the American landscape’s “other” representations—scientific, geologic, biological, cadastral, administrative, for instance—further demonstrates that Albertianism is no longer taken as the default perspective but is instead understood to be one angle among many.12 Moreover, we have gained new subtlety in understanding the extent to which these nonartistic, diagrammatic perspectives move beyond the configuration of data to inculcate meanings both cultural and aesthetic. Take, for example, a 1939 aerial survey photograph of rural Iowa. Snapped by an automatic

John Gast, American Progress, 1872. Oil on canvas, 11 1/2 x 15 3/4 in. Museum of the American West, Autry National Center of the American West, Los Angeles



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camera mounted in the belly of an airplane flying fourteen thousand feet above the earth, the photograph is one of almost two million similar views created in the 1930s as tools for New Deal agricultural programming. Treating the photographs as matters of fact, local agricultural agents used them to calcu-late the exact size of the individual farms and to identify farm operators’ mode of practice. At a higher and more ideologically aware level of oversight, governmental central planners deployed the insistent and mechanical pat-terns thus revealed as a means to reorient the agrarian landscape away from older notions of rugged isolation and toward new ideals of streamlined production and standardized social relations. Responses from the landscape’s inhabitants were perhaps the most compli-cated, as they combined these notions and introduced new ones. For some farmers, the vision of an endless cadastral geometry actu-alized long-standing notions of Jeffersonian individualism and square-dealing that had become one mythic framework of American agrarian identity. For others, the view’s dis-tanced verticality and panopticism dissolved

rural life into unrecognizable abstraction. Animating such interpretations, however, was a self-conscious dialogue about the image’s contingency to point of view and deep skepticism that any picture could ever be fixed to only one meaning. This skepticism held up against claims of indexical truth and mechanistic objectivity often ascribed to both camera and air-plane—reminding us that even everyday viewers perceive that images have many angles.

Conclusion: The Mouse’s Eye View

Returning to Plane Crazy, we might now be tempted to view Disney’s topsy-turvy re-ordering of the rules of perspective as a metaphor for the work of art historians.13 Like Disney in 1928, scholars today are proving equally animated in their willingness to chal-lenge the hegemony of the horizontal. The essays that follow—drawn mostly from areas of twentieth-century art—address the question of perspective from an array of angles across both the visual and the conceptual spectrums. Essays by David Peters Corbett on John Sloan and Charles Sheeler’s New York images and by Judy Annear on Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of sky and ground illuminate instances where actual shifts in visual orienta-tion (from the horizontal to the vertical axis) provided a means to reconceptualize nature and the city in the context of modernity. Bryan Wolf anthropomorphizes the dialogue of up/down and embeds it in post-1960s racial discourse in a delicate reading of two sculptures by Martin Puryear. Sandy Isenstadt and Katherine Roeder each explore, in the forms of the picture window and the comic strip respectively, the material frameworks that orient, refract, and disperse the linear vision and its attendant narratives. Janet Berlo, in her essay on Navajo cosmoscapes, eschews the linear model of Albertianism altogether,

Aerial survey view of Grundy County, Iowa, 1939. Records of the Farm Service Agency, Record Group 145, Photograph no. BZQ-3-23. National Archives and Records Administration, Greenbelt, Maryland



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noting that its way of seeing is only one option among many. Underlying all of the essays, however, is a deep appreciation of the elasticity of vision and an abiding skepticism toward structures that seek its codification.

Amid such criticality, it seems important to remember that among the visual’s many ends, wonderment—the pleasure and exhilaration of ocular perception—has remained a constant across periods and purposes. Such a sense of pleasure in seeing lies at the heart of Disney’s experimentation in Plane Crazy and in his other great laboratory of American experience: Disneyland. In this land of mechanical confection, vision reigns supreme and vantage points are myriad, from the constructed heights of Splash Mountain and depths of Submarine Voyage to the diagrammatic globalism of “it’s a small world” and the surreal perspective-bending architecture of Toontown. Disney’s utopia is, not surprisingly, a place where one can see everything from seemingly every angle.

Notes

1 Walt Disney, Plane Crazy, animated motion picture, 6 min., 1928 (sound version 1929), distributed by Celebrity Pictures and Buena Vista.

2 John Magee, “High Flight” (1941), in The New Treasury of War Poetry: Poems of the Second World War, ed. George Herbert Clarke (1943; Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), 130.

3 Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura, ed. Martin Kemp (New York: Penguin Press, 1991). Alberti completed De Pictura in 1435, and his ideas quickly were disseminated throughout Europe, including production of numerous manuscript versions of the text. Because of this, the precise attributions of illustrations that appear in many manuscripts remains difficult. For scholarly discussions of this problem, see Howard Burns, “A Drawing by L. B. Alberti,” Architectural Design 49, nos. 5–6 (1979): 45–56. Evidence supports the claim that Alberti regularly used human figures and eyes in illustrated form, however, including his use of the winged eyeball as his personal emblem; see Renee Watkins, “L. B. Alberti’s Emblem, the Winged Eye, and His Name, Leo,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 9, nos. 3–4 (November 1960): 256–58.

4 The literature on perspective is vast and is most completely captured in Kim Veltman’s useful bibliography The Sources and Literature of Perspective (www.sumscorp.com/img/file/2004_Sources_of_Perspective.pdf). Works consulted specifically for this paper include Hubert Damisch, The Origins of Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995); James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994); Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993); and, in a slightly different vein, Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).

5 Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective, 12.

6 It would be impossible to make a complete survey of now-seminal texts on the history of landscape rep-resentation in United States. Some that seem most useful with regard to this essay include Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, c. 1830–1865 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993); Joni Kinsey, Plain Pictures: Images of the American Prairie (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996); James Corner and Alex MacLean, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1996); and, more recently, Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850–1890 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2007); and Kenneth Haltman, Looking Close and Seeing Far: Samuel Seymour, Titian Ramsay Peale, and the Art of the Long Expedition, 1818–1823 (University Park: Penn State Univ. Press, 2008).

7 Alan Wallach, “Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke,” in American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), 83. Wallach’s conceptualization of the panoptic is indebted to the work of French theo-rist Michel Foucault; see esp. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1979). First published in French in 1975, Foucault’s text has had a substantial impact on American landscape studies.



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8 Catlin is known to have completed several other paintings and sketches of Niagara Falls. William Truettner adds further nuance to Catlin’s unique sense of perspective by relating it to nonlinear Native American modes of landscape description; see his “Plains Geometry: Surveying the Path from Savagery to Civilization,” Winterthur Portfolio 38, no. 4 (2003): 199–219.

9 George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians; Written during Eight Years’ Travel (1832–1839) amongst the Wildest Tribes of Indians in North America, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Press, 1973), 1:258.

10 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett Press, 1976), 229–30 and passim, as discussed in John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of the Diagram (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 2010), 6–7.

11 Bender and Marrinan, The Culture of the Diagram, 6–8 and passim.

12 A few recent examples include the works by Kelsey and Haltman already listed as well as Rebecca Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001); Rachael DeLue, George Inness and the Science of Landscape (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004); and my Barnstorming the Prairies: Aerial Vision and Modernity in Rural America, 1920–1940 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, forthcoming).

13 My understanding of the term “topsy-turvy” is shaped by its use in Scott Bukatman, “The Ultimate Trip: Special Effects and Kaleidoscopic Perception,” Iris, no. 25 (1998): 75–98.

Navajo Cosmoscapes—Up, Down, WithinJanet Catherine Berlo

Around the time Leon Battista Alberti was codifying the rules of linear perspective that revolutionized European ways of representing the visual world, Navajo ritual specialists in the American Southwest were beginning to formulate their own ideas about the structure of their world and ways to represent it pictorially. The tremendously poetic and eloquent cosmology of the Navajo was not set down in writing, nor in lasting visual form, until the end of the nineteenth century, when Washington Matthews and a host of others who followed in his wake elucidated for the outside world the rich system of Navajo thought.1

Yet for untold generations, Navajo hataali (ritual specialists whose expertise is the result of years of apprenticeship and formidable powers of memorization) were creating the sand-paintings that provide momentary glimpses into this complex epistemological landscape.

Navajo sandpainting (or drypainting, as it is sometimes called) is an ephemeral art made of the crushed minerals of the land itself. Those who make sandpaintings for ritual purposes seek to create ideal cosmograms of relationships among the Diyin Dine’ é (the Holy People or Supernaturals), Dinétah (the Navajo land), and the Dine’ é (the Navajo or “Earth Surface People”). Navajo sandpainting—like related imagery in other media such as weaving or drawing—seeks to be merely a reminder of a multidimensional universe in which there is no viewer per se, only participants.

All Native American epistemologies are built on premises that differ markedly from those of the Eurocentric world. Two premises that undergird a Navajo worldview make clear how visual practices locate the viewer in relation to the image. First, the world is not anthropocentric; humans are simply one part in a complex web of interrelationships of Supernaturals, animate landscapes, and animals. Second, Navajo systems of thought, language, and art focus on dynamic motion: in language, the verb “to go” rather than the verb “to be”; in art, a propensity for dynamic symmetry and motion rather than a captured

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Looking Up, Looking Down, Looking OutVisual Angles on American Art