Magritte Is Not a Surrealist

The new Magritte exhibition, opening at the Museum of Modern Art, offers a welcome opportunity to reassess the artist's place in the history of 20th century art.  Magritte was affiliated with the surrealists, and is often regarded as a paradigm exemplar of that movement--perhaps even it most recognizable exemplar.  That, I think, is a mistake.  Magritte comes into contact with surrealism and borrows aspects of the surrealist idiom, but he does not fit the surrealist mold.  Surrealists were concerned with alternate realities and dreams, with turning the ordinary into something bizarre, unstable, and irrational.  Surrealism was an assault on logic, and as escape from rationalism, fueled by an impression that reason had brought the world to war.  In his surrealist manifesto, Andre Breson defines surrealism as "Psychic automatism in its pure state."  He says it concerns "the omnipotence of dream," and he cites Freud as a central inspiration.  Magritte finds inspiration in Freud too, as we will see, but his agenda is very different.

As Michel Foucault observes in his short book on Magritte, Magritte is concerned with the nature of representation.  Foucault is impressed by the Belgian painter's canonical "ceci n'est pas une pipe," which reminds the viewer that pictures are not real.  When looking at a paining, we tend to speak of objects: there's a horse, that's Napoleon, look at the stormy sky.  When we talk that way, we implicitly endorse a mimetic or illusionistic theory of art, according to which art recreates or duplicates reality.  This idea about art's function was called into question by abstraction in the early decades of the twentieth century, but Magritte does something even more radical.  He suggests that even so-called representational art is not a mere copy of the world.  To make this case, he often asks about the relationship between art and language.  Language is widely recognized to be a set of arbitrary signs (the word "pipe" could represent anything).  Magritte draws attention to the possibility that mimetic images are also symbols.  The painting at the top is called The Palace of Curtains III.  Here image and language are directly compared.  We naively think that just one--the word--needs mastery of learned conventions to decode.  We think pictures give us the world more directly.  Magritte invites us to see both as curtains.  

 Curtains also appear in the next painting, called The Empty Mask (above).  Here we have a frame, which houses pictures rather than words.  The lower right contains a curtain (rideau), then we have the sky again above it, and a facade in the lower right.  Most intriguing is the upper right which contains the words "human body" in French, but then, parenthetically, "or forest."  Words can represent anything, recall, but so can pictures.

This point is made more directly and charmingly in Clairvoyance (above).  The title suggests that artist can see the future of the egg.  But the image of an artist faithfully copying an object and producing an image that bears no resemblance reminds us that the meaning of an image may depends on the artists intentions.  Consequently, we cannot read meaning off of a painting.  Meaning is not there to be seen. Pictures are as opaque as words.

Clairvoyance is not Magritte's only painting about the artistic process.  In another Attempting the Impossible, he depicts himself painting a nude woman (his wife, Georgette Berger).  This is clearly a Pygmalion allusion, but with a twist.  As the title indicates, the artist cannot in fact create anything real. The exhibition also includes a photograph taken while Magritte was making this work.  It serves as a reminder that the painter in the painting is no more real than his unfinished model.  They are equally impossible objects.

These paintings show Magritte's abiding concern with the nature of representation and the nature of art--hardly a central concern for most surrealists.   Other examples abound in the show.  One display case contains a palette with sky painting on it, as if the artist's raw material were the world itself, there are also two paintings of eyes, suggesting that artists paint ways of seeing, and a partially colored replica of the Venus de Milo, which may be a further commentary on the process of attempting to render things into reality.

Clouds are a pervasive theme in Magritte's work.  One work disrupts the illusion of painting by breaking a cloudy sky into four framed panels.  Another shows a cloudy sky next to suspended pink bells.  Magritte's interest in bells and music can also be found throughout the show.  Here bells stand in for sky, suggesting the music of the spheres, but also reminding us that sound is invisible.  These bells will never be heard.  This raises the question about whether all pictures contain invisible elements as well.

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Also on display is The Human Condition, which depicts a painting canvas in front of a landscape; picture becomes indistinguishable from depicted.  Though clearly a comment on mimetic painting, the title also indicates that human beings are trapped in a semiotic web, which we habitually mistake for reality. This reading finds support in a BBC interview (in full here), which Magritte conducted in 1967:

MAGRITTE: The actual tree in the landscape—you can’t see the tree itself. You can see the tree in the painting—right there. But you know the real tree is there behind the painting, because your mind projects it out there in the real landscape. The logic of the painting demands this. You picture it in your mind. And that is also how you see the real world in everyday life: you see the world as being outside yourself, but what you actually experience is a mental representation—(he taps his head)—a mental event, inside, in here.

BBC: I get it now. The painting is a metaphor about how we see. A visual pun...

MAGRITTE: Indeed. Because it’s also a metaphor about how we don’t see. What’s out there— really?

Another intriguing painting is called The Alphabet of Revelations (below).  This one also contains two panels, or rather two halves separated, as Magritte likes to do, by a trompe l'oeil frame.  The use of frames, and especially merely painting frames, reminds us not to mistake painting for reality.  On the right the painting contains four ordinary objects from Magritte's lexicon in stat silhouette, as if to suggest these are important symbols.  The lower portion of that panel contains a trompe l'oeil rip.  The "real world" behind the rip is as black at the painted objects.  The panel on the right contains a tangled wire-like form.  This may be a comment on abstract art, placed here along side recognizable forms as if to say both are fundamentally the same.

Many of Magritte's painting contain cryptic collections of symbols.  Below, I've reproduced the Key of Dreams (left) and the Reckless Sleeper (right).  The form offers another quartet of ordinary objects, each inexplicably mislabeled.  Or are these labels accurate?  Perhaps the words have unconventional meanings in this context, or the pictures are being used as arbitrary signs.  The Reckless Sleeper contains a constellation of symbols embedded in an amorphous stone stella under the night sky.  These include Magritte staples like a bowler hat, an apple, a bird, and a mirror.  The sleeper, is nestled in a wooden box above.  Both these concern the interpretation of dreams (the former suggests this theme by its title, and the later more obviously).  This brings us back to Freud.  But unlike other surrealists, who who saw dreams as phantasmal alternate realities that defy reason and reveal secret desires, Magritte uses dreams as another opportunity to contemplate the nature of representation.  Dream interpretation becomes a special case of an overarching theme: the idea that meaning is never transparently given.  As with dreams, pictures aren't windows with transparent glass that we can simply peer through.

This, I submit, is the crux of Magritte's project.  He wants to raise questions about the nature of representation in art by reminding us that pictures are symbols and thwarting interpretation at every turn.  Where surrealists want to open up the door to other worlds, Magritte tries to close off all worlds, and leave us with symbols and surfaces to contemplate.

It must be added that representation is not the only theme in Magritte's work.  The MoMA exhibition also includes other works that show off Magritte's range and his intelligence as a painter.  For the most part, these other works reinforce my thesis that he is not primarily a surrealist.  Consider, for example, his wonderful Man With a Newspaper (above, left).  One panel shows a man reading at a table, and then three successive panels show his absence.  The first panel is taken from a turn of the century German health manual, according to the Tate website (above, right).  The subsequent panels suggest a narrative.  The man has disappeared, never to return.  Had one of these panels been painted in isolation, we would see it as a mere interior, but here they are conceptualized as pictures of absence, and the repetition suggests the passage of time.  They represent non-existence and duration -- two features that are normally thought to defy depiction.

Another canvas, The Menaced Assassin which MoMA owns, is more overly narrative in content.  It shows a murder scene.  The nude body of the victim is viewed by three identical men peering through the window.  Another man cavalierly plays a phonograph (might he be the killer?).  Two other men (the first appearance of bowler hats in Magritte's oeuvre) lurk behind an entrance way, waiting to to pounce with a cudgel and a net.  These figures are said to be inspired by Louis Feuillade's Fantomas films (see the still from episode 3), and the other elements may derive from true crime magazines or crime fiction.  Indeed, the image might easily be mistaken for an instance of those genres, but the three men outside the window suggest otherwise.  On one reading, this is a picture about viewing art.  Many pictures depict sex or violence, yet we watch casually. The bowler-wearing men (who are also identical) may stand in for Magritte himself, reduplicated and setting a snare.

Magritte's interest in the pornography of viewing can also be found in other works, like the two classics above.  In The Gigantic Days (above, left), we see a clothed man projected onto a nude woman's body who tries to push him away with the futility that some people experience when trying to rid themselves of traumatic memories.  The Rape (above, right) is even less subtle.  Here a woman's face become a nude torso, making viewers complicit in an act of sexualizing objectification.  Like other paintings I've mentioned, these are about viewing, but they are more overtly political.  They push even further and more chillingly on the idea that there is no innocent eye.

I will end with one last image, that is a bit of an outlier in the MoMA show.  Young Girl Eating a Bird is a grizzly image of a female figure biting into a bird, with blood covering her fingers and dripping down her lacy collar.  Behind her stands a tree with other exotic-looking birds, monochrome and improbably poised, like illustrations from a field guide.  One has the impression that each will be consumed one by one.  The girl has a doleful expression as if her feast were a tiresome obligation or mourning right.  This takes on special irony given the picture's subtitle: The Pleasure.  Here at last one might think we have found the surrealist in Magritte: the painting seems to be an essay in bizarre incongruity, an image taken from a nightmare, inexplicable and otherworldly. 

But there is another interpretation more in line with the themes adduced above.  Perhaps the activity of feeding on brightly colored exotic birds is a metaphor for seeing art.  We are encouraged to take pleasure in that aesthetic repast, but it can also be a mechanical activity, foisted on us by the demands of class identity.  Seeing itself can also be a brutal act.  As Magritte teaches, eyes can distort reality; eyes can even rape.  In this image, the violence of seeing may even be part of a subtle revenge plot.  Think of images like the one of the left, from a turn of the century crime magazine, which Magritte might have seen.  The world of things is a hostile place (Magritte's mother committed suicide).  Through paintings, we can regain a kind of control.  Paintings may cut us off from reality, but in doing so, they can also be empowering.  If this reading has any merit, Magritte has not given us a dreamscape here, but rather a further commentary on the function of images.  Where surrealists seek an alternate reality, Magritte keeps us firmly planted in the gallery, drawing attention to the nature of art itself. 

Mayan Murals

For many tourists from the U.S., Mexico is associated with great food, glorious beaches, and melodic mariachi bands.  Less adequately appreciated is the fact the Mexico boasts some of the most extraordinary archeological treasures in the world.  The great Mesoamerican civilizations that thrived there left many stone sculptures, wall reliefs, and architectural monuments behind, including the most impressive pyramids outside of Egypt.  They also produced painting.  Though highly vulnerable to the ravages of time, some of these paintings survive, in various states of disrepair.  The most impressive are the wall murals of Bonampak.  On a recent trip, I was lucky to see these first hand, and I can say that no encounter with art has been more thrilling.

Mexico's pyramids do attract some tourists from around the world.  Most frequented are probably the extraordinary ruins of Teotihuacan, outside of Mexico City.  The pyramids there (see above), built by a mysterious civilization that thrived between the second century BCE and the 4th century CE, are as grand as the pyramids in Egypt.  Standing atop the Sun Temple there was more moving for me than seeing the acropolis in Athens.  No landmark can better reveal the grandeur of ancient civilizations.  The area surrounding Teotihuacan was once a thriving city, larger than almost any other in the world.  Then, for unknown reasons, the civilization came to an end.  Its remnants were discovered a millennium later by the Aztecs (14th to 16th century), who appropriated elements of Teotihuacan religion and architecture, building their own pyramids in the heart of what would become Mexico's capital.

Mesoamerica's most enduring civilization was the Maya (about 2000 BCE to 1100 CE).  They were also prodigious builders, and their pyramids are among the most beautiful in the world.  The most popular for tourists is a step pyramid called El Castillo, or the Temple of Kukulkan, at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan (above).  It is a pristine and impressive site, which I visited along with other Yucatan ruins, a few years ago.  It shows off Mayan architecture at its peak (so to speak), with a grand stairwell that whose flanking sides look like who serpents bodies, which culminate in carved stone heads.

Though bowled over by the Yucan sites, I was hardly prepared for my recent trip to the southern state of Chiapas, which swelters under a tropical jungle.  Here between the dense trees are some of the finest remnants from the Mayan culture.  Most renowned are the grand ruins of Palenque (above), which thrived from about 226 BCE to 1123 CE.  Replete with pyramids, temples, and an imposing palace crowned by a lofty tower, Palenque is a marvel to explore.  Its harmonious integration with the surrounding nature distinguishes it from Chichen Itza, an brings to mind the great Incan ruins of Peru.

Palenque is not as touristy as Chichen Itza, but it is still a developed site, and its boulevards are lined by local vendors trying to sell their wares.  Considerably more isolated are the ruins of Yaxchilan.  To get there one has to drive a couple hours from Palenque and travel 20 minutes on a small boat (above).  Then, an unpaved path though the consuming forest leads to an impressive complex of buildings.  At the center is a grand stairway, taller than any pyramid I've climbed, peaked by a rectangular temple with a gridded stone top (below).  Of all the ruins I've seen, none gives a better sense of discovery than Yaxchilin.  One can imagine the excitement of finding this ancient capital nestled deep behind the wall of vegetation that lines the brown waters of the Usamacinta river, which flows along Guatemalan border.

Yaxchilin thrived for hundreds of years, waring with enemies and winning victories until it fell at the turn on the 9th century.  One of its conquests was Bonampak, a site some 30 minutes drive from the Usamacinta shore.  Bonampak was under control from Yaxchitlin from about 600 CE until both cities came to an unexplained end two hundred years later.  Though much smaller and less sprawling, the ruins at Bonampak are a fine example of Maya architecture during the classical period (below).

Bonampak was unknown to non-Mayans until 1946.  American and British explorers were then led to the site by local guides, and they were astonished to find three small chambers (above on the far right ) with richly colored paintings (below), created in fresco, filling the triangular walls.  At that time, these were coated by a nearly opaque layer of calcite.  Early visitors used kerosene to help reveal the images, causing irreparable damage.  In the decades that followed, less harmful techniques were used to reveal the paintings that had been hidden for centuries.  Now the humid jungle air is taking its toll.  These paintings may eventually flake away, and many of them are already difficult to make out.  Conservation work has been pursued by archeologist Mary Ellen Miller at Yale, whose team produced rich reconstructions, revealing many details no longer discernible to the naked eye.

Still, seeing these decaying murals is about as impressive an experience as one can have with art.  The chambers are nestled in the white stone surface atop a wide and imposing stairway, which rises up from an expansive plaza leveling the forest green.  Nothing in this austere backdrop can prepare you for the discovery within.  In my experience, it compares only Giotto's Arena chapel and the finer tombs in Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

The murals were commissioned by Bonampak's leader, Chan Muwan, who was appointed by the authorities in Yaxchitlin around in 790 CE.  That's probably him in the left, with jaguar boots and a menacing spear.  Chan Muwan commissioned painters to create scenes honoring his heir and celebrating his military prowess.

The first chamber shows various nobles, dignitaries, and musicians gathering to pay tribute Chan Muwan's young son, and perhaps also to consecrate the building site. Here, and throughout, there are processions showing lavishly adorned figures, playing maracas, blowing horns, or dressed in fine garments with with elaborate headdresses, as in the images below.  There are some 200 figures in all.

Many of the finer details are difficult to make out, because of the decaying paint, the dim lighting, and the overwhelming opulence of the surrounding scenes.  Mary Miller's conservation team has done much to reveal what these figures originally looked like, and the results are often astonishing.  The picture below can be instructively compared to a reconstruction printed in a 1996 Scientific American article by Miller, reproduced below my snapshot.  The restoration reveals four figures with dazzling animal masks, one of whom has enormous crab claws, hovering dynamically above a seated nobleman.

 

The second chamber shows great battles with enemies being conquered and tortured.  On the back wall, above the entranceway, we find the gorgeously twisted corpse of a defeated warrior.  Beside him, another figure begs for mercy, and a third, with a feathered hat, has had his fingernails torn out.  He turns inward to watch the blood flowing from his hands.

On the main wall, an enormous battle rages, which is, unfortunately, in a bad state of disrepair.  We also see a warrior (Chan Muwan?) taking an enemy by the hair, while tormenting him with a spear.  Hair pulling is a common motif for displaying conquest in Mayan art, but the curling anatomy of the victim is more expressive and naturalistic than what can be found at other sites.  This is the high-water mark for Mayan graphic arts, and it stands up to the best work in any cultural tradition.

The third chamber shows dancers and other celebrants, honoring the young heir again.  In an elevated triangular region, one can see a person holding a your child (presumably the heir) below a platform on which a group of woman piecing their own tongues (below).

This is not the only act of self-directed violence on display. There is a beautifully painted pair of warriors, in opulent regalia, one of who may be piercing his own genitals.  These acts of bloodletting are presumably ceremonial, and are presented here in a positive light, contrasting with the horrific warfare in the preceding room.

Curiously, the third chamber also includes a row of elegantly rendered seated figures whose faces have been carved out from the plaster walls.  These figures are modestly dressed, but have decorative and distinctive head wraps, indicating that they might be nobility from neighboring areas.  The defacing (quite literally) of images was common in Mesoamerica and among other civilizations of the past, including ancient Egypt.  It continues to occur today when images of deposed leaders are destroyed by angry mobs or new regimes.  Perhaps these sightless faces provide a clue about the fall of Bonampak.

We don't know how Bonampak fell, but we do know the end came shortly after these painting were created.  Indeed, some elements remain unfinished, including panels that would have contained names identifying depicted individuals.  All this suggests a sudden demise.  The Maya had the only written language in Mesoamerica, and inscriptions here tell us something about the creators of this extraordinary site, but many more questions remain unanswered.  Fortunately, the pictures can speak to us without captions.  Centuries before Giotto, these unknown Mayan artists were creating compositionally complex, radiantly colored, evocatively posed, engagingly narrative, monolithic figure paintings that rival the greatest masterpieces of Europe.  We think of pre-Columbian civilizations as great builders and carvers.  Bonampak shows that the Maya were among history's greatest painters as well.

It's About Time

Fine art tends to exist in three dimensions.  Painting and sculpture are the most traditional media, and both deliver works with spatial, but not temporal qualities (except for the unwelcome fact of deteriotion over time).  Artists have often puzzled over how to bring time into their work, exploring everything from dynamic forms to decay.  Continuing in this tradition, The North Carolina Museum of Art is currently hosting an exhibition called 0-60: The Experience of Time Through Contemporary Art.  Here's a speedy tour of some highlights.

A number of regional artists are featured in the show, like Tom Shields, currently a resident at Penland, North Carolina, whose deconstructed chair appears at the start of this post.  The work by locals holds up well in the show.  I was very taken with the work of Virginia-based Sonya Clark, for example.  The piece above is a digital print, in a scroll of a 30-foot dread lock.  Other work uses hair to track the years since the Emancipation Proclamation.

The show also includes many national and international artists.  It opens with a number of clocks made by the ever-inventive Californian, Tim Hawkinson.  The examples above are a dried banana skin and a medicine cabinet filled with toiletries, all of which have moving parts that keep time.

Hawkinson's banana expresses time through its movement and also it's ongoing process of degeneration.  More subtle--and stunning--is Tara Donovan's cube made of thousands of toothpicks.  Talk about transfiguration of the commonplace!  Donavan is a master at making the mundane marvelous.  This toothpick monolith looks like it is about status rather than temporality, but a brief look at its periphery reveals the fragility of what appears structurally implacable.  The assembly could not survive transportation, and will likely loose parts over the course of the show.

A bit more conservative, but also impressive are some photographs created over long periods of time.  There is an imposing triptych by the German photographer Vera Lutter (not pictured here), which used a camera obscura to document an afternoon at Frankfurt airport.  The image above is a remarkable 3-year (!) exposure made by Michael Wesley using a pin hole camera which remained on during the construction of the renovation of the Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition also included two large installations of the excellent Mexican-born Montreal-based artist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.  The piece above uses a respirator to inflate a paper bag continuously using the breath of a Cuban singer.  It inflates 10,000 times a day, the breathing rate of a typical human adult.

Another room-sized installation includes a small hole where visitors can insert a finger.  The hole captures the fingertip on video and measures the pulse, resulting in an encompassing montage of fingers and nails.

One of my favorite pieces in the show is a one-room apartment made entirely of sheer fabric by Korean, Do Ho Suh, one of the most interesting artists active today.  Do Ho Suh is interesting in biographical time, and this room is part of a larger project in which he creates fabric scale models of every home he has lived in.


For me, however, best in show was an old classic.  It celebrates a piece by one the legends of performance art, Taiwan-born Brooklyn-based, Tehching (Sam) Hsieh.  Hsieh's performance works of the late 70s and early 80s were true tests of endurance.  In one he avoided anything having to do with art for a year.  In another he lived outside for a year, never entering any enclosed space, including vehicles.  In a third, he spent a year in a wooden cage, not speaking, reading, or watching television.  The exhibition documents another performance from this period, in which Hsieh took a photograph of himself every hour on the hour for a year.  The photos have been assembled into enlarged contact sheets and a video, which document his hair growth, and his amazing punctuality.  Day or night, he managed to be on time for his hourly photo.  The work is about the passage of time, but also about life on the clock--a ineluctable aspect of modern life.  If artists strive to represent the world they live in, the Hsieh's pieces does a better job than any other on display in representing what time has become.