In conjunction with the video in which I played with the transformation of subjectivity between Rene Magritte’s Golconda (1953), La Clairvoyance (1936), and Elective Affinity (1933), this essay hopes to investigate the apparatus of the sublime through drawing a relationship between the provocative work of Magritte and Deleuze’s interpretation of Foucault’s “dispositif” (1). Through a series of transformations, the video intensifies the disorientation already set-up by Magritte’s work and seeks for the “formations”(2) of the subjective observer, environment, and frame.

Beyond the exchange between Magritte and Foucault (most notably over the idea of resemblance and similitude in This Is Not A Pipe written by Foucault in 1983), there was an affinity between the two in their reluctance to “assign fixed identities.” While Foucault was fighting to prevent the notion of “line of subjectification” from being locked into a firm definition, Magritte was operating to devoid familiar objects of their definition and “resists rationalization, harmonization, and homogeneity, as well as being reduced to dualistic criteria.”(3) Magritte’s painting often presents itself in the most direct way possible (i.e., realistically rendered objects in unrealistic conditions) to question the idea of perception and definition through the uncanny in the combination. In Daniel Lopez’s Certain Elective Affinities, he quoted Deleuze saying “that which destroys sanity as the only sense and then what destroys common sense as the assignment of fixed identities.“ to understand Magritte’s position and motif of his artwork.

The relation between Foucault and Magritte’s wordplay is well documented and analyzed. Therefore, this essay will try to draw a reference to Foucault through Magritte’s Picture in Picture and Combination in Picture groups of paintings.(4)

Golconda (1953)

Without considering the logic of gravity, there are two subjects at play in the painting confusingly named Golconda, a once prosperous capitalist Indian city. The regularity of men arrayed in a grid and superimposed on a suburban town suggests a similarity in physicality and interiority between the two groups rather than the individual part. The parallel here isn’t between the men in the bowler hat, but between the men and the suburban environment’s rigidity and uniformity. With this synchronization between the subject and the environment, I share a similar interiority yet different physicality. When we look at the absence of spatial relationship presented through the multiple vanishing points in each group of men and the suburban scene, the painting disregards the spatial relationship between the subject and the environment.

Due to Magritte’s frequent commentary on the bourgeois, Golconda was interpreted by David Sylvester as a commentary on "capitalist alienation stripping people of their identity.”(5) Interestingly, Sylvester’s interpretation was made with knowledge of Magritte’s life experience as a Belgian in Paris, which is information not presented in the painting. While Magritte’s rejection of such a reading was expected, what I find intriguing is the subjectivity of Sylvester’s interpretation. In Foucault’s dispositif, there are lines of force that exists as consequential relations that are formed by knowledge. Sylvester, as a viewer of the Golconda, drew together his knowledge of Magritte’s life, the title of the painting, and most importantly, the visible imagery of Golconda to state that the artwork is a “critique on capitalism.”

It goes without saying that Sylvester’s subjective interpretation was not without ground and, to some extent, logical because of Magritte’s legacy of wordplay built upon painting the La Trashison des Images in 1929. In the form of a title, Magritte’s play on “the regime of enunciation” was in reality just as uncanny as the group of men and the suburban scenery,

La Clairvoyance (1936)

To use Sylvester’s fashion of interpretation, we can look at La Clairvoyance as imagery where a man who closely resembles Magritte himself is looking into the future of the egg, which will be hatched into a bird. Magritte’s usual wordplay in the title, which eludes to psychic power, is the main driver for the most popular narrative that cites the painting’s magical moment of production. However, if we objectively look at the peculiar imagery only from what is shown, the picture can be generalized as a moment of subjectification because the painter is drawing from his mind and not from sight. Unlike Golconda, La Clairvoyance depicts both the subject and the observer in the imagery, drawing attention to the relationship rather than either object itself. In other words, the relationship between the painter and the bird is far more relevant than the egg and the bird. (to my line of force, this relationship has turned out to be true during my research of Elective Affinities.)

On a few occasions, Magritte has staged with his painting in photographs. Magritte carefully photographed a mise-en-abyme of himself with La Clairvoyance as a gesture to emphatically draw attention to the painting’s objective quality. However, the painting in the photograph appears to be completed and led us to assume that the photograph is a way to return to the moment of painting the La Clairvoyance, which is no longer there.

Elective Affinity (1933)

Elective Affinity is a stark and straightforward painting with two distinctive objects placed in a picture frame with a title that leaves little to the imagination. However, the narrative of the artwork lies in the story that accompanies the painting. Magritte told an account of his night time illusion of seeing an egg instead of a bird in his cage. He was “provoked precisely by the affinity of two objects—the cage and the egg—to each other, whereas previously this shock had been caused by my bringing together two objects that were unrelated.”(6) The psychoanalytical sequence that resulted in this painting evokes Foucault’s line of subjectification in his dispositif, where Magritte “turns back on itself, works on itself or affects itself” (Deleuze). Interestingly, what Magritte found when attempting to capture a memory, he found the “affinity” in the uncanny similarities of two objects.

Clearly, the juxtaposition of Elective Affinity and La Clairvoyance is my attempt at pointing out the chronological and consequential relationship between two peculiar imagery. The strange coincidence of Magritte seeing an egg when looking at a bird and Magritte drawing a bird when looking at an egg led me to think that La Clairvoyance was another attempt in recovering the bird that Magritte didn’t see in Elective Affinity.

Animation

Albeit the creative license used in the video to manipulate Magritte’s paintings, my animation weaves through the idea of dispositif to different extents. While the notion of scale might not be of concern in Magritte’s imagery, the architectural, humans, and object scale of the three paintings provides a sequential foundation to the narrative of creating relations through transformation. When one motif transforms to another motif in another painting, the animation unsettles the established pictorial identity by continually shifting between a subject and an object to create tension between elements in each painting.

Apart from subjects and object, the three Magritte paintings also challenge logic and scientific modes of perception. In the same spirit of Foucault’s rejection to explain dispositif only in sequential and logical terms, Magritte’s paintings force the viewer to look beyond the familiarity of the imagery to experience the tension that he believed is the reality. Although not explicitly and visually provoked in the paintings discussed above, Magritte’s play on mystical concealment is, in my opinion, present under the veil of realism and stark statement. Anecdotally, Magritte wrote to Andre Bosman in regards to mysticism saying “It is miserably reduced to being the absolute and necessary principle so that the real can exist, so that "the most laughable and sublime things can be manifested.”