Beyond the Single Perspective

From Cubism to Meta-Liminalism

Howard Lamar and the Continuing Investigation of Perception

Howard Lamar did not reject the revolution begun by Cubism. Rather, he continued its investigation.

The distinction is fundamental to understanding both Lamar’s art and the philosophy he referred to as Meta-Liminalism. The influence of French Modernism on Lamar was plainly visual: it can be recognized in aspects of his color, line, compositional freedom, abstraction, fragmentation, and willingness to depart from conventional representation. But to understand that influence primarily as a matter of style is to miss what was most consequential about it. Lamar was influenced equally by the philosophical and investigatory character of Modernism, by artists who treated painting not simply as a means of depicting the world, but as a means of questioning how the world is seen, organized, represented, and understood.

Among the notable achievements of Cubism was its challenge to the authority of the single viewpoint. An object did not have to be represented as though artist, viewer, subject, space, and time were fixed in a single relationship; i.e. multiple aspects could coexist within the same image, and what could not ordinarily be seen simultaneously could nevertheless be acknowledged as present. Cubism thus did more than alter the appearance of painting. It made perception itself part of the subject of painting.

For Lamar, this was an extraordinary opening. But it was an opening, not an endpoint. He saw a limitation within the Cubist investigation that would become foundational to his own artistic and philosophical work. Cubism demonstrated multiple viewpoints, but those viewpoints remained constrained by the single perceptual field within which the investigation occurred. 

Lamar would come to describe this constraint as “flat-world, horizontal thinking.” His question was deceptively simple, but philosophically far-reaching: what happens if, rather than continuing to multiply viewpoints within the plane, we question the limits of the plane itself?

A Modernist Inheritance

Lamar’s relationship to Cubism belongs within his larger relationship to French Modernism. Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Dufy, Gauguin, and other Modernist predecessors differed profoundly from one another, yet collectively they helped dismantle inherited assumptions about representation, color, form, perspective, symbolism, and the relationship between an artwork and the reality it attempts to describe.

Their significance for Lamar was therefore not limited to what their paintings looked like. Of equal importance was what their paintings were investigating. The Modernist artwork could operate as a proposition, a question, even an argument: Is conventional perspective truthful simply because it is familiar? Must color describe the visible world? Is resemblance the principal measure of representation? Can different realities coexist within the same pictorial field? Can symbolic, psychological, emotional, or conceptual truth be as significant as optical fidelity?

Lamar inherited this spirit of inquiry as much as he inherited any visual vocabulary. His work reflects a conviction central to the most consequential Modernist experimentation: that the artist is not obligated merely to reproduce established ways of seeing. The artist can examine the assumptions embedded within those ways of seeing and, where necessary, devise another visual language through which to investigate them.

What Cubism Made Possible

For centuries, Western pictorial perspective had generally organized the painted world around an implicit agreement: the observer occupies a particular position, and the image describes what can be seen from that position. Cubism disrupted that agreement. A face could turn toward and away from the viewer at once; the front and side of an object could coexist; spatial relationships could be fractured and reorganized. The stability of the viewing position was no longer assured.

The philosophical significance of this shift was considerable. Once multiple viewpoints could occupy the same pictorial field, the single perspective ceased to possess an automatic claim to completeness. What one position revealed, another might conceal. The object exceeded any single view of it.

Lamar accepted this proposition and pursued its implications. If one perspective is insufficient, how many perspectives would be sufficient? Could an accumulation of perspectives eventually produce a complete account of the thing being observed? And what would “complete” mean if the very conditions under which observation occurs remained constrained?

These questions led Lamar toward what he regarded as an unresolved limitation within the Cubist experiment. Multiple perspectives could be represented, yet the perceptual investigation itself continued to operate within an essentially planar conception of experience. The viewpoints multiplied; yet the underlying field remained bounded.

For Lamar, this distinction was critical.

The Limitation of the Plane

Consider an observer standing at the center of a circle. Expanding that observer’s field of vision from 180 degrees to a complete 360 degrees would constitute a dramatic enlargement of perception. What had been behind the observer could now be considered alongside what was in front; left and right could coexist within a more comprehensive field.

Yet the apparent completeness of that 360-degree view is deceptive. The circle remains horizontal. It describes an expanded circumference, but it does not account for what lies above or below the observer, nor for the potentially innumerable oblique, peripheral, internal, external, and relational positions that do not conform to the plane.

This was the limitation Lamar recognized in what he called “flat-world, horizontal thinking.” The problem was not that Cubism had failed by remaining within this field. Cubism had accomplished the revolutionary work of demonstrating the inadequacy of a single viewpoint. Lamar’s insight was that the logic of that discovery did not require the investigation to stop there.

If perception could be liberated from one fixed viewpoint, why should it remain confined to one perceptual plane?

That is the essential question that marks the transition from Lamar’s Modernist inheritance toward his own philosophical territory.

Beyond the Horizontal

To move beyond the plane requires first imagining what the plane excludes. If a horizontal circle represents perception extending around an observer, then releasing perception from that horizontal constraint allows the field to extend upward and downward as well as laterally. What had been a circumference acquires depth and multidirectional possibility. Conceptually, the circle becomes spherical.

The sphere is useful here because it makes the limitation of the plane immediately apparent. Perception can now be imagined as extending above, below, before, behind, between, and around the observer. Yet for Lamar, the sphere itself was never a satisfactory final boundary. Once the observer moves, another center becomes possible, and with that center another potential sphere of perception emerges. Alter the position, scale, time, or consciousness of the observer, and the organization of the perceptual field changes again.

What begins as a problem of geometry consequently becomes a problem of epistemology: How do we know what we believe we know, when every act of knowing occurs from a subjective orientation?

This is the point at which Lamar’s investigation moves decisively beyond pictorial technique. Multiple perspective is no longer simply something that can be represented within a painting. It becomes a way of interrogating the conditions under which perception itself occurs.

The Problem of Objectivity

Cubism’s multiplication of viewpoints could suggest the possibility that an object might be understood more completely by representing more of its aspects. Lamar accepted the value of expanded perspective, but questioned the assumption that an accumulation of viewpoints could ultimately resolve itself into an objective whole.

For Lamar, every observation necessarily originates from a position. That position may be physical, temporal, psychological, cultural, experiential, or conceptual; usually it is several of these at once. The observer cannot remove himself entirely from the act of observation, because observation without an observer is in itself a contradiction.

Adding perspectives can therefore enlarge understanding, sometimes profoundly. What it cannot do is create a position outside perception itself. There is no final vantage point from which all other viewpoints can be assembled and certified as the complete, objective account.

This is a critical distinction between the Cubist investigation as Lamar understood it and the inquiry he continued through Meta-Liminalism. Cubism challenged the adequacy of the single viewpoint. Lamar went on to challenge this possibility, including the existence of a hypothetical position from which all other viewpoints might finally be reconciled.

The implications extend well beyond painting. If there is always another possible position, then the boundaries of perception cannot be assumed to coincide with the boundaries of reality.

Multiple Viewpoints in Lamar’s Art

These ideas were not merely philosophical propositions that Lamar subsequently attached to his paintings. They were intrinsic to his artistic practice. Throughout his work, Lamar frequently employed multiple points of view within a single image. Different elements may imply different relationships to the viewer, to one another, and to the pictorial space they inhabit. A composition need not resolve itself according to one stable location from which everything can logically be seen.

Here Lamar’s debt to Modernism and his departure from it become visible at the same time. The Modernists had demonstrated that representation need not remain obedient to conventional optical perspective. Lamar absorbed that freedom, but he increasingly used it to investigate a broader question: not simply how an object might be represented from several viewpoints, but what happens to our understanding of reality when the position of the observer itself becomes unstable.

The distinction is subtle but consequential. A viewer confronting one of these works may initially try to determine the “correct” spatial relationship among its elements. Yet the inability to stabilize that relationship can itself become meaningful. The painting makes us conscious of an assumption we ordinarily overlook: that somewhere there ought to be a single position from which the image resolves.

Lamar asks why.

[ARTWORK INSERT: Lamar work demonstrating simultaneous points of view]

[ARTWORK INSERT: Lamar work demonstrating above/below or multidirectional perception]

[ARTWORK INSERT: Lamar work in which the viewer’s perceptual position cannot easily be stabilized]

These works will allow the philosophical argument to be encountered visually rather than merely asserted in prose. Lamar’s paintings become evidence of an inquiry that took place simultaneously through image and thought.

From Perspective to Perception

Once the position of the observer becomes part of the investigation, perspective acquires a different meaning. It is no longer merely a technical problem concerning how three-dimensional space is represented on a two-dimensional surface. Perspective becomes a condition of consciousness.

Every viewer arrives somewhere. Each brings memory, knowledge, culture, experience, intuition, expectation, and attention to the encounter. What one viewer perceives may be overlooked by another; what appears central from one position may become peripheral from another. Even the same individual, returning to an artwork at another moment, does not return from precisely the same experiential position.

This does not imply that reality is arbitrary, nor that the artwork possesses no structure independent of the viewer. Lamar’s paintings are deliberate constructions. His recurring Icons, compositional relationships, and visual decisions establish fields of possibility within which interpretation occurs. But the viewer cannot occupy a neutral position outside those fields. The act of looking becomes another relationship within them.

Here the Modernist investigation of perspective begins to open onto one of the foundational propositions of Meta-Liminalism: subjectivity is not simply an imperfection to be eliminated from perception. It is a requisite of perception.

The Continuing Modernist Investigation

Seen in this context, Lamar’s relationship to French Modernism becomes more substantial than the familiar language of artistic influence ordinarily suggests. To say that an artist was “influenced by Picasso” or “influenced by Matisse” can easily reduce influence to recognizable formal characteristics: a use of color, a treatment of line, a fragmented face, a flattened space.

Lamar’s inheritance was also investigatory. He took seriously the questions embedded in Modernist experimentation and treated them as questions that remained capable of further development. The freedom Modernism created was not only a freedom to paint differently; it was a freedom to think differently through painting.

In this sense, Lamar belongs to the lineage not because he reproduces its visual achievements, but because he participates in its intellectual method. He receives a proposition, tests its boundaries, identifies what remains unresolved, and continues the inquiry.

Cubism had established that the world need not be represented from one viewpoint. Lamar’s next question was whether the field within which those viewpoints operated, had itself been examined rigorously enough.

His answer led beyond the single plane.

From Cubism to Meta-Liminalism

The relationship between Cubism and Meta-Liminalism can therefore be understood as a progression of inquiry rather than a contest between artistic movements.

Conventional perspective privileges a single viewpoint. Cubism fractures that authority by introducing multiple viewpoints within the pictorial field. Lamar accepts the significance of that rupture but identifies another boundary: the perceptual field itself remains constrained. He expands the inquiry beyond the horizontal plane and, in doing so, encounters a further problem. If perceptual positions can proliferate in potentially innumerable directions, no single position, and no finite collection of positions, can plausibly claim absolute authority.

At this point the investigation ceases to concern perspective alone. It begins to concern the nature of perception, the role of the observer, the provisional character of boundaries, and the impossibility of locating an entirely objective center from which reality can be apprehended whole.

Lamar’s contribution included the recognition that once the authority of the single viewpoint had been challenged, there was no compelling philosophical reason to preserve the authority of the single plane, or ultimately of any supposedly final perceptual position.

The investigation could continue outward and inward; above and below; before and behind; toward the center and toward the periphery; across boundaries and into the spaces between them. Each change of position could disclose another relationship, while each newly established center could itself become the subject of examination.

That continuing movement leads toward Meta-Liminalism.

Cubism had demonstrated that there is always more to an object than can be seen from a single point of view. Lamar accepted the significance of that discovery and then widened the question: What if the limitations we encounter belong not only to what we can see from a particular position, but to the perceptual framework through which we have defined the available positions in the first place?

It is there, at the point where the observer begins to examine not only the world but the structure of his own seeing, that the Modernist investigation becomes Lamar’s own.