David Peat

The End of Representation 105the inherent falseness of that image, the fact remains that all thesepaintings, based upon a perspectival geometry, are about a form ofcertainty. They say, “this is the way the world is,” or “this is the way theworld should be.” There is no room for doubt in such paintings, noplace for paradox or complementarity. Such paintings seek to representreality, yet at the same time they really do not engage the essentialway in which we actually see the world.Art as a Scientific TheoryMuch of the world’s nonrepresentational art is concerned with visualdesigns, symbols, signs, maps, diagrams, indications, records, andcalligraphies that delight the senses and stimulate the eye. At the sametime they are often pointing to something that lies beyond them. Theymay express beauty, pattern, harmony, and order but also a sense of thesacred and the numinous and a connection with all living things andthe energies of heaven and earth. Rather than being purely concernedwith the visual surface of things, they point toward their inner structure,to an underlying order of the world, a reality beyond appearances.Islamic art, for example, employs highly repetitive patterns in itstiles and ironwork. The meaning of these patterns is that they leadtoward the infinite—not so much an infinite that lies away from us“out there” but the infinite within, the infinite of the endlessly divisibleand repetitive. Islamic art is a device for the mind’s eye. It is a tool fortransporting human consciousness toward pure contemplation of theboundless infinite. Similarly, the mandalas in Tibetan art are a way ofbringing consciousness to a still center and placing the mind within itsproper relationship to the powers of the cosmos.In this sense such art has something in common with a scientifictheory. A theory is not so directly concerned with reality but ratherwith a model of reality. In turn, a model is not the thing in itself, for italways points beyond itself. Think of a toy train. A model train runs ontiny railway tracks. It has a smokestack, a tiny driver, and all the appearanceof a real train. It looks like a train and, in its motion, evokes atrain, yet at the same time it is not a train. There are no living passen-