adsertoris:

On the dish, Camus, Ionesco and the eyes of Roberto. And on the mirror, your gaze.

ADSERT. Earth, July, 2011 (taken from the automatic series “Anthill Songs”)

reblololo:

- MoMA ( Часть II )

René Magritte
The Portrait

Brussels, 1935
(via Не словом единым)

The Portrait(1935) is a painting by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte.

This painting is a classic example of the technique that often set Magritte apart from other surrealists. Artists like Dalí and Ernst usually depicted distorted and dream-like representations of real forms mixed with abstract shapes. Magritte is best known for his realistic depictions of ordinary things made surreal by context or their relationship to each other.

This painting depicts an almost photo-realistic table setting with a slice of ham in the center. The scene is made surreal by the presence of an eye staring back at the viewer from the center of the ham.

This painting was once part of the private collection of the surrealist painter Kay Sage. In 1956 she donated it as a gift to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

———

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT: RENÉ MAGRITTE’S THE
PORTRAIT

(excerpt from:  Distasteful: An Investigation of Food’s Subversive Function in René Magritte’s The Portrait and Meret Oppenheim’s Ma Gouvernante—My Nurse—Mein Kindermädchen by Janine Catalano) (click link to download full annotated pdf)

[The eye is] the object of such anxiety that we will never bite into it.12

Eye: cannibal delicacy… . [A] young man who by chance holding in
his hand a coffee spoon, suddenly wanted to take an eye in that
spoon.13

Both of the above quotes are from Bataille’s “Dictionnaire Critique” entry on “Eye,” published in the surrealist journal Documents in 1930. Though seemingly  contradictory, the tension between these two ideas is in keeping with the typical Bataillian veneration of all things uncomfortable, and the consumption of eyes is a recurrent allusion in his 1928 novella Story of the Eye. Here, however, I wish to examine how this interplay between the repulsion and attraction to ocular consumption is manifested in René Magritte’s 1935 painting The Portrait, and how this piece embodies Magritte’s own belief in surrealism as “the indomitable foe of all the bourgeois ideological values that are keeping the world in its present appalling condition.”

At first glance, The Portrait certainly evokes more traditional food-related artworks, particularly the still life. This is partially due to the piece’s austerity and anonymity of style, deriving from the simplicity of the pared-down presentation.16 The sparseness of the composition makes it a far cry from the cautionary tales of excess sometimes seen in artworks, such as in Hieronymous Bosch’s 1490 Allegory of Gluttony and Lust. Far from being abstracted entities, the relative verisimilitude of the glass, the ham, the cutlery, and the wine make them seem as though, in a different context, they could be found in a conventional painting of a dining table, or indeed on a dining room table in an average family’s home in 1930s France or Belgium. Yet in keeping with Magritte’s own rebellion against typicality—and consequently upholding a Bataillian veneration of heterogeneity—The Portrait is, very immediately, anything but a typical meal. The setting is completely removed from any context; these objects are not situated within a larger room, but are instead presented on a surface against a plain blue background. Consequently, the scene exists in a quasi-dreamlike, potentially fictitious environment that is simultaneous nowhere and anywhere. Moreover, there is virtually no sense of recession into space, and the objects almost appear to be stacked vertically on top of one another rather than being placed on a horizontal surface, removing it from the tradition of the locatable still life setting.

And then—or more accurately, first of all—there is the staring eye, agape in the center of the slice of ham. Eyes are commonly depicted throughout Magritte’s oeuvre, perhaps most famously in his 1929 painting The False Mirror, which depicts an enlarged eye with a cloudy blue sky replacing the monochromatic iris. Some have argued that Magritte’s painted eyes, removed from their facial setting and divorced from their partners, act as omnipotent entities, which recalls the Judeo-Christian tradition of the eye that wards off evil, or the all-seeing eye of Christ. I am here more interested in The Portrait’s transformation of the eye into an object for potential but thwarted consumption, in a complex rendering of suggested cannibalism in an inherently impenetrable and irreconcilable medium of paint on canvas.

The sheer absurdity of the eye in an otherwise recognizable and very familiar scene makes it quite humorous on first viewing. However, I would argue that it is at the same time, and more pervasively, deeply disquieting. To again invoke Bataille, ocular mutilation was considered by the surrealist thinker to be “the most horrifying form of sacrifice”—quite a superlative declaration for such an extremist, and a statement which says a great deal about the disturbing potency of this action. In spite of, or more likely because of, its squeamish potency, the theme was frequently revisited by the surrealists, perhaps most infamously in the scene of a woman’s eyeball being sliced in Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s 1929 film Un Chien Andalou. The Portrait, like its cinematic predecessor, is particularly disturbing in its portrayal of a human eye, here not only being presented for mutilation but for consumption. Indeed, the eye in this painting, despite its porcine surroundings, certainly appears human in its recognizable shape and light-colored iris. Magritte himself proclaimed that “a painter is mediocre if he doesn’t give special consideration to the importance of his spectator’s eyes,” and he wryly rises to his own challenge here.

It is this confrontation between the painted eye and the viewer’s eye that poses a particularly troubling blurring of boundaries. In addressing the eye’s unwavering stare with his own eye, the viewer simultaneously draws a connection with the painted image as his own eye—a quality only underscored by the painting’s titling as a portrait, but one without a specific nominal identification. If, as Norman Bryson claims, “still life negates the whole process of constructing and asserting human beings as the primary focus of depiction,” Magritte has successfully turned this academic tradition on its head, bringing about a disturbing revival of the medieval term “fleshmeat.” At the same time, the inverse of this supposition must be considered. If the painted eye can be equated with the viewer on some level, then the viewer can equally identify himself with the painted eye, substituting his own face for the piece of ham on the plate. In this way, Magritte further  complicates academic conventions, here undermining any idealization associated with portraiture. Instead, we have not merely flesh, but specifically a face made meat, turned bestial, perishable, and even potentially edible. This troublesome mutual identification adds not only cannibalism but self-mutilation to Bataille’s complex tension surrounding ocular consumption.

If Magritte is posing an ethical question of “to eat or not to eat?”, it is ultimately rendered purely hypothetical, for The Portrait is, fundamentally, paint on a canvas surface available for visual consumption but nothing further. Magritte frequently explored this distance between representation and object in his work. From early in his career, his famous painting The Treachery of Images (1929) presents a realistic painting of a pipe, but then declares that “This is not a pipe,” leaving viewers to determine how to classify what they see before them. In a more culinary context, his 1936 piece This is a Piece of Cheese makes an inverse declaration. It consists of a painting of gruyere placed under a glass cheese dome, which thus takes on qualities of cheese, yet no one would mistake it for an edible product. In these examples, Magritte highlights the disjunction between, rather than the merging of, signified and signifier; while the audience is free to partake visually, there is an inherent inability for them to literally consume or subsume these painted and sculptural objects. In The Portrait, the artifice and impossibility of consummating any suggested act is even further underscored by the idiosyncrasy of the few other objects: the upside-down fork sits on the wrong side of the plate; the butter knife is not the expected implement for cutting meat; the wine bottle, with no wine glass, sits next to an empty water glass.

While The Portrait conjures up all of the Bataillian anxiety of eating eyes, compounded by the viewer’s self-identification with the eye made edible on the plate, the piece’s integrity simultaneously implicates and incapacitates viewers who must reckon with its tensions. For though the picture deals with issues of consumption, Magritte has incapacitated the spectator’s mouth through his painted medium. Instead, we are forced to ingest the piece at a purely visual level, dealing with the staring eye’s challenge to consider what it is we are viewing and the uneasiness this evokes. We must address this eye; but however we interpret it—as threatening, as trapped, as parodic, as omnipotent, or any combination thereof—we are unable to dominate or alter this static, unwavering scene, reliant on little more than the work’s hints of humor to temper its uneasiness.