12/14/21

Is there a "This is not a pipe" for dummies? Asking for a friend. ( )

Suggestiva e bizzarra, irrazionale e un po' accademica è apparsa l'opera di Magritte a gran parte del pubblico e della critica. Per dissipare questi equivoci Michel Foucault mette in luce tutte le implicazioni figurative e filosofiche di una ricerca artistica tra le più importanti del secolo. Dopo avere mostrato le forti analogie che legano l'opera magrittiana a quelle di Klee e di Kandinskij, l'autore ci rivela la rottura decisiva compiuta dal pittore belga nei confronti di una tradizione plurisecolare. Il principio cardinale della pittura classica stabiliva un legame tra segno e cosa, secondo il dogma assoluto che " dipingere è affermare "; l'opera di Magritte costituisce un ribaltamento di quel principio, una liberazione della pittura dalla dittatura del verosimile e di una supposta realtà oggettiva di cui l'opera sarebbe supina imitazione.

Points of Interest:

RENE MAGRITTE TO FOUCAULT
The words Resemblance and Similitude permit you forcefully to suggest the presence – utterly foreign – of the world and ourselves. Things do not have resemblances, only thought resembles. It resembles by what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it. Things do or do not have similitudes.

Painting interposes a problem: there is the thought that sees an can be visibly described. Las Meninas is the visible image of Velasquez’s invisible thought. Then is the invisible sometimes visible? On the condition that thought be constituted exclusively of visible images. For a time a curious priority has been accorded the invisible, owing to a confused literature, whose interest vanishes if we remember that the visible can be hidden, but the invisible hides nothing; it can be known or not known, no more. There is no reason to accord more importance to the invisible that to the visible, nor vice versa. A painted images hides nothing, it is intangible by its very nature. The tangibly visible object hides another visible thing, if we trust our experience.

What does no lack importance is the mystery evoked in fact by the visible and the invisible, and which can be evoked in principle by the thought that unites things in an order that evokes mystery. Sometimes the name of an object takes the place of an image. A word can take the place of an object in reality. An image can take the place of a word in a proposition.

FOUCAULT ON KLEE, KANDINSKY, AND MAGRITTE
The calligram is tautological, it has a triple role: to augment the alphabet, to repeat something without the aid of rhetoric, to trap things in a double cipher. It lodges statements in the space of a shape, and makes the text say what the drawing represents. The calligram uses the capacity of letters to signify both as linear elements that can be arranged in space and as signs that must unroll according to a unique chain of sound. As a sign, the letter permits us to fix words; as line, it lets us give shape to things. ( )

Short essays by Foucault exploring modern and modernistic art and literature.