About Magritte (or not)

In case it still needs explaining, the whole point of René Magritte’s 1929 painting La Trahison des images is that the apparently inaccurate caption in fact tells the truth. It is not a pipe. It is merely a picture of a pipe. 

Unfortunately, like most jokes, it loses its effectiveness when repeated. I haven’t yet seen the newish Belgian TV show This is Not a Murder Mystery (which includes Magritte himself as a character) but it does appear to be a murder mystery, so it’s all wrong before its starts. (Of course, they could argue that the murders aren’t real, because it’s fiction, or maybe we find out who the killer is from the beginning, Colombo-style, so there’s no mystery, but I’m not hopeful.)

And there’s no get-out clause for the Belgian football team, which has put a tweaked variant of Magritte’s zinger on their shirts, which definitely are shirts, not pictures of shirts, so that’s just wrong. Although the fact they’ve tucked the words inside the garments, so they can’t be seen during the game itself, suggests they’re well aware of the cock-up and are a bit embarrassed about the whole thing.

PS: And in vaguely similar territory, another social media platform is encouraging me to purchase this natty garment, which apparently offers one the sensation of getting shot without the mess and inconvenience and possible death stuff of, er, actually getting shot.

About pumpkins etc

Far from new, stolen from Facebook, but it belongs here, I think.

And while we’re here, this can come out to play as well.

And then...

(And all the time I’m simultaneously worrying about and luxuriating in the exclusivity of all of these. Are they funny in spite of the fact that a lot of people won’t get the gag, or because of the fact? And somehow this ties into the most depressing article I’ve read this week, Elle Griffin on how nobody buys books any more.)

About etcetera

Back in the olden days, when I’d get nervous if I hadn’t blogged for 48 hours, I’d often end up with half a dozen half-finished, half-arsed posts, all entirely unrelated to each other, that I’d crunch together into a single slab of incoherence. Inevitably these would usually turn out to be more popular than the finely crafted single-issue bits.

In that spirit, but with considerably less bang for your digital buck: a fascinating look at the Tokyo that nearly was; then a slice of urban strangeness that actually happened, with Simon Reynolds interviewing the late Andy Gill about the Sheffield music scene in the late 70s/early 80s; and this:

and this:

PS: ....aaand how we feel when we realise exactly how bloody old our favourite music is.

About AI

We should no longer be surprised that Artificial Intelligence is generating much of what we are encouraged to call “content”, whether it’s words or pictures (ceci n’est pas your mum). The tipping point comes when it’s not just the product, it’s the consumers who exist beyond meatspace. As Max Read reports in New York magazine:

Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

Which raises all sorts of questions: can there be a valid Turing test if neither party is human (but each assumes the other to be)? And does Baudrillard’s hyperreality become hyper fraudulent? (“Wasn’t it always?” chuckle the cynics.) And if we’re not brains in vats, could we just be phones in racks?

About Stalin and Magritte

Don’t ask me why I ended up at the home page of the Stalin Society of North America. And, when you haven’t asked me that, don’t ask me why they’re co-opting Surrealist iconography (and my Blogger profile pic) for their murky ends.

About Picasso, sort of

I went to the Picasso 1932 exhibition at Tate Modern yesterday and was going to write something about it but on the way there my attention was grabbed by a different kind of art; dear old, dreamy, enigmatic René Magritte, ripped off, recuperated, to sell yet more glossy, vacuous apartments.

Anyway, my righteous indignation had eased a little by the time I got to the power station, and the Picasso show was good, a tightly packed capsule of life and creativity. We saw the ebb and flow of his little obsessions and what prompted them – he was seriously into octopuses for a few months – and the sheer volume of fact was delightful, from the make of his car to the fact that Carl Gustav Jung, of all people, wrote a really vicious review. And yet it was still tantalising in the details it missed; we learned that Picasso skipped the opening of his first Paris retrospective to go to the cinema – I wanted to know what film.

And, of course, the whole thing was sponsored by a big accountancy firm. So, maybe capitalism won in the end and we just have to live with the big dull flats and the bad Magritte clones. But I wouldn’t want to break the news to this enigmatic figure, for whom it’s still, clearly, all about the pictures.

PS: From Hyperallergic, more about what happens when art and capitalism and gentrification coincide.

About tattoos

I’ve occasionally toyed with the idea of getting a tattoo but was never able to decide on a design, which is probably why I live out my midlife crisis through this blog instead. But I saw this on Kingsland Road and... well, what do you think?

Walk away René Magritte

I very rarely find myself in an “I-wish-I’d-had-a-camera” moment because I’m hopeless at taking pictures and in any case deep within my DNA I think there’s a little bit of that superstition (Amish? Inca? Nepalese? Can never remember...) that capturing someone’s image is a way of grabbing their soul. And I’m really rather shy, so I could never do that thing of stopping perfect strangers on the street and asking to photograph their groovy clothes; and I’m also very wary of confrontation, so I could never risk taking pictures surreptitiously, in case the subject objected. No, words is what I do, which is why I was massively tempted to turn the end of that last sentence into a pun about word order, by inserting the word “verb” but I didn’t, so hurrah for me.

But anyway, on Saturday night, in the gift shop of a posh hotel in Bangkok, I wished I’d had a camera. A youngish couple walked in; from what I could hear of their conversation I think they were Korean. He was wearing a blue-and-white striped polo shirt and on the right breast was Magritte’s pipe. Oh, you know the one:

That’s the chap. Except he just had the pipe – not the words. The words that seem to be a lie and then you suddenly realise they’re telling the truth, because it’s not a pipe, it’s a picture of a pipe. The words that encapsulate Magritte’s dry, self-deprecating, deliciously Belgian wit; the words that brought metafiction to visual art; the words that make you look at all art before or since through different eyes; the words without which it would still be a pipe, because nobody’s telling you otherwise. But I didn’t take a photo, for all the reasons I mentioned.

And because I don’t know the Korean for “Do you mind if I take your photo for my new website youvecompletelymissedthebloodypoint.tumblr.com?”

All the somebody people

I used to write letters to newspapers and magazines. People did, way back then. Possibly inspired by Morrissey, I began with the weekly music press (something about an album of Velvet Underground out-takes, I seem to recall) before moving on to the broadsheets, and also the likes of Time Out, Esquire and the Modern Review (which used to offer free subscriptions for every letter published – I got a free subscription for writing a letter asking how many free subscriptions Germaine Greer had earned). Here, from 2004, is an epistle to The Spectator:

Roger Scruton’s invocation of Manet in his attempt to demonstrate the existence of the soul is flawed (‘What it means to be human’, 20 March). ‘Bar at the Folies Bergère’ ‘is’ a young woman only in the sense that the viewer, familiar with the conventions of Western representational art of the 19th century, puts that interpretation on it. As Magritte pointed out, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe.’ It is, rather, we who translate the artist’s efforts into a woman, a pipe, sunflowers, etc... Similarly, ‘the soul’ exists within human existence only to the extent that believers interpret existence thus. The idea that a work of art is ‘real’ and the idea that God is ‘real’ rely on the same intellectual and emotional characteristic — suspension of disbelief. 

But five years ago today, I started blogging, an idea that seized several other people around the same time. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the letters ceased. But as you can see from the above example, the content has remained pretty much the same. In this case, the message transcends the medium.

This is not a crime

Some rapscallions have swiped Magritte’s Olympia from the museum based in the artist’s former home in a Brussels suburb. Painted in the 1940s, it’s not one of his better known works; I touched on this relatively undocumented period a few months ago.

In fact, because of its obscurity, most media outlets have had trouble tracking down an image of the half-inched canvas. The Times showed some initiative and came up with this:

Which of course puts one in mind of one of Magritte’s more totemic works, the one that provides my blogging avatar. Is that Olympia? Is it a postcard of Olympia? Is it a photograph of a postcard of Olympia? Or even a digital, on-screen representation of a photograph of a postcard of Olympia?

I’d like to think the robbers were suitably attired, in high collars and bowler hats.

Ceci n'est pas une langue

Sorry, but I’m still on about words.

Small Boo has given me a rather splendid book about my favourite painter, René Magritte. Not only does it include all the images that have become stale through repetition on postcards and tea-towels, it also devotes a lot of space to some of the less familiar pieces, including paintings from the 1940s, when Magritte experimented with a looser style, some of them strongly influenced by Renoir and Matisse; as well as photographs and bronzes.

Throughout the shifts in style and medium, however, Magritte’s big idea persists: superficially ordinary, even banal subject matter, rendered bizarre and even threatening by juxtaposition and tweaking. A man with an apple for a face; boots becoming feet; a flaming euphonium; a pipe that isn’t.

The only downside is that the accompanying text seems to follow a similar trajectory. It’s comprehensible as English, but not comfortably so; the reader just about understands what’s meant, but every few lines, there’s an eye in your slice of ham. This may be the fault of author Jacques Meuris, but I’m inclined to point the finger at translator Michael Scuffil (the sort of blame game I discussed earlier). Here are a few choice morsels:

“The brush technique with its contrasts and glissandi calls forth immaterial, impalpable impressions.”

“It is moreover an example of his attempts on the moral plane to harmonize the meaning he gave to his work as a painter with that of his life.”

“Magritte was never a friend of symbols in painting, though in poetry perhaps.”

“The total rejection of the gratuitous was one of the constant features of Magritte’s attitude.”

“All that was left for this oeuvre was to topple over into its destiny in 1967.”