It begins in a simple, compelling fashion: “Seeing comes before words. In remembering John Berger and making my way to the Pompidou’s gift and book shops, I had the chance to reread Ways of Seeing. Seeing and meaning in a post-factual world What’s real, what’s not real, what is imagined, dreamed, and where essentially does truth nest and sleep? It’s an enduring and complex set of questions. In their work, both Magritte (1898–1967) and Berger bang up again and again against the stubbornness of the object–the idea of objective reality. Years later the labor of these works bore fruit: Berger’s book heralded (along with thinkers like Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, and more contemporary philosophers and semioticians) thousands of careers in the area of “interpretation” to comment on what others were looking at, reading, and building–and to perhaps tip the bucket toward one subjectivity over another. The works illustrate how recognition and cognition work with and against one another, proving that the mind can maintain contradictory notions. The Magritte show was a parade of the Belgian Surrealist’s masterworks, paintings that shaped a growing awareness of our willing deception and conflation of words and images, and effectively the problem of truth. But language–the ultimate man-made tool–reigns supreme in the truth business. Words are plastic meaning and truth are subjective. It was only logical that the notion of the thing and its name would be viewed as an essentially arbitrary relationship (according to Ferdinand de Saussure). Word and image rapidly became bi-polar nodes of consciousness at the onset of the 20th century, accelerated by the widespread use of the camera, mid-century world wars, a concurrent rise of popular science and psychology, and the breakdown of belief in almost every sphere. Magritte’s focus and the Surrealist creed was a full-throated grab at meaning and language itself, shaking the sense out it. Notoriously pairing school book objects–a horse’s head, a clock, a pitcher and a suitcase–with texts that undermine the images depicted (the clock is labelled “the wind,” for example), Magritte’s “The Key to Dreams” signaled the widening rift art and language. The cover famously reproduced René Magritte’s seminal work about the problem of representation, “The Key to Dreams.”* The book and the series unpacked the hidden and not so hidden meanings of paintings and the act of looking. Berger was best known for Ways of Seeing, a radical book about how to look at art required reading for most liberal arts students in the past 40 years, it was based on his innovative 1972 BBC series of the same name. His death coincided with the final weeks of La Trahison des Images ( The Treachery of Images), the expansive Magritte exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. On 2 January, British art critic John Berger died at age 90 in Antony, a suburb of Paris.
0 kommentar(er)
