W. J. T. Mitchell
Christo's Gates and Gilo's Wall

Of all the media and genres of imagery, landscape is the one that makes the constitutive blindness and invisibility of the visual process most evident. We notice this even in the most common injunction in the presence of a landscape prospect: "look at the view." What does that mean? How can one "look at a view"? One looks at objects, figures, faces, bodies, and signs. Our visual system learns to pick out things that have names: this tree, that house, those fence posts. So what are we looking at when we look at the view? Everything and nothing. The view is the totality of the objects in our visual field, the relations among them, the entire system or syntax that underlies the language of vision. Looking at the view is like looking at the grammar of a sentence, while forgetting what it is saying. Or it is like looking at looking, a process that invariably reveals to us the paradoxical invisibility of vision itself. We will never quite see what vision is, no matter how precisely we may describe or depict it.

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W. J. T. MITCHELL is editor of Critical Inquiry. His most recent book is What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (2006). He is currently at work on the book Claiming Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.