Art Review - February Issue - (Page 124)

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WHILE IT DOESN’T PROVE ITS CASE BEYOND A DEFT CHOREOGRAPHY OF DELIGHTFUL COINCIDENCE AND HOMAGE, IT ACCIDENTALLY HITS A TRUER MARK. obert Gober, Untitled, 1990, beeswax, cotton, wool, human hair, leather shoe, 27 x 52 x 14 cm. Photo: Lee Stalsworth, © Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution. © the artist In seeking to articulate Magritte’s fraternal relationship with surrealism and his siring of Pop art and postmodernism, the extensive evidence presented leads to another conclusion, revealing Magritte to be none of these things, but instead an early conceptual artist. He made art that wasn’t about art history, and was concerned with the physical world only in passing; he made art about language and the ideas rather than the objects it represents. Painting in Magritte’s programme was a means to an end, an element in a semiotic construction. His art was not about seeing familiar objects in new ways – that’s Pop’s business. Nor was it about how such objects prompt and manipulate the subconscious – that’s the terrain of surrealism. Magritte was suspicious of both agendas. Elegantly curated to highlight deliberate and specific stylistic and symbolic correspondences and citations between the practitioners of these movements, the installation demonstrates just how incomplete that interpretation is. In being shown alongside those artists anointed as his heirs, Magritte, in opposition, emerges as a voice clearly dedicated to goals that reach beyond stylistic influence and innovation to strike at more basic and problematic questions of information and modernity. Magritte’s strategy depended in large part on the legibility of his objects, what curator Stephanie Barron calls his ‘misleading literalness’; but this means that his was not a revolution in style on the order of Impressionism or Cubism. It was about language and communication and the e ects of modernity on the operations of each. His interest in language takes a more literal form in his popular uses of text, especially with the legendary painting The Treachery of Images This Is Not a Pipe 1929 , the centrepiece of the exhibition and a part of LACMA’s permanent collection. But it also appears in less widely known works, like The Interpretation of Dreams 1952 . An intimate chart-like arrangement of objects egg, shoe, hat, etc , each bearing a false caption ‘moon’, ‘snow’, ‘storm’ and so on , the painting confuses the viewer regarding the mechanics of his own seeing, invoking a ghost in the machine of perception that has nothing to do with either the painting or the objects and words therein. The Human Condition 1933 depicts a pastoral vista visible through an open window, partially blocked by a canvas on an easel depicting a painting of the identical view. The real subject of the image is not the artist’s skill in landscape, nor his employment as a painter, nor the peaceful tone of the view; it is desire. This image, as so many others here, is a comment on the twentieth century’s obsession with representations and possessions, and its perverse preference for mediated experience. Magritte’s technical acumen is beyond reproach; his texts, interiors, forms, figures and landscapes are instantly identifiable and traditionally rendered, his titles elaborate and well-considered. All that remains indeterminate is the ultimate meanings of the images; he allowed room for expansive significance only by close orchestration of everything else. The artists whose work physically resembles Magritte’s own work the least are nevertheless closest to it in spirit. The hyperrealism, sensuality and scale manipulations in Charles Ray’s oversize mannequin Fall ’91 1992 ; Robert Gober’s unsavoury waxen body-part sculptures; Ed Ruscha’s SPAM painting Actual R ARTREVIEW p123-138 Reviews AR Feb07.indd 124 3/1/07 03:13:06  Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - February Issue

Art Review - February Issue

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