Unearthing Mona Hatoum

Unearthing Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum, ‘Cellules’ [Cells], 2012-2013

mild steel and blown glass in 8 parts
170 cm x variable depth and width[1]

Cells is an ideal work as a starting point to discuss the underlying themes and concerns of Mona Hatoum’s body of work. The first noticeable characteristic of this work is the title, Cells which has multiple meanings depending on the context. When used in relation to natural biology it refers to the smallest unit of life and the essence of life, whereas, when used in relation to something man-made it is the institutionalised structure of a confined space often symbolising oppression, entrapment, restriction to movement, and indifference to the individual – for example, a prison cell. The “blood cells” in Hatoum’s work are of different shapes and seem to slump and ooze against the indifferent metal, resembling unique, individual organic beings apparently held as prisoners. The blood cells are made of glass, a fragile material representing the vulnerability of the human body, especially in contrast to the sturdy metal of the cages, representing the inherent violence of oppressive structures. It is hence the juxtaposition of the organic and the man-made structure that characterises this work, which is essentially about the conflict in the interaction between the individual body and institutional forces.

This idea, of the individual versus the institution, the personal at odds with the political, forms the basis and the main motivation for most of Mona Hatoum’s work. Hatoum’s repertoire is a diverse, unusual and often inter-disciplinary practice ranging from performance, video, sculpture, photography, and drawings, intermingling corporeal and political concerns. In her sculptures and installations, the range of materials she chooses to use is wide: from industrial materials such as metal, electricity, glass, rubber and plastic, to more domestic items such as fabrics and soap, furniture and cutlery, and disposable items, even corporeal such as hair. Hatoum’s aesthetic vocabulary is one in which commonplace, familiar objects and settings are imbued with an unfamiliar and sometimes menacing attitude evoking a sense of alienation. This could be likened to the aesthetic language of the Surrealists, which as Hatoum herself stated[2], were an influence for her, along with elements of Minimalism and conceptual art.

This essay will touch on a brief introduction to the artist, followed by focusing on selected pieces of video, sculpture and installation by Hatoum, and explore how her work conveys the notion of the confrontation between the individual and the institution, with a strong focus on the body as reference point. It will also touch on the echoes of Minimalism in her installation work, and how she indeed extends the Minimalist style by imbuing it with psychological and political depth, drawing the viewer in by their bodily interaction and engagement with the piece. As art theorist Amelia Jones writes, “body art practices solicit rather than distance the spectator, drawing her or him into the work of art as an intersubjective exchange.”[3]

I would argue that this emphasis on intersubjective exchange through bodily engagement is precisely what makes Hatoum’s work succeed compellingly.

Hatoum was born in 1952 to Palestinian parents who had been exiled to Beirut. During what was meant to be a temporary visit to London in 1975, civil war in Beirut forced Hatoum to go into exile in the United Kingdom, separated from her family in Lebanon. This personal narrative of “double exile” naturally imbues Hatoum’s work with themes of alienation, displacement, and powerlessness in the face of larger political forces.

Her career began with visceral performance art in the 1980’s. Her crucial point of reference since the beginning was always the body, often her own:

“For me, the embodiment of an artwork is within the physical realm; the body is the axis of our perceptions, so how can art afford not to take that as a starting point? We relate to the world through our senses. You first experience an artwork physically. I like the work to operate on both sensual and intellectual levels.”[4]

It was in the 1990s when she began to create installations with emphasis on their spatial construction. Since the beginning of the 1990s, she was increasingly working on large-scale installations that clearly intend to involve the viewer as a participant in the work for her or him to experience the sense of alienation and disorientation. In a later interview Hatoum states, “I wanted the viewer’s body to replace mine by interacting directly with the work. My work always constructed with the viewer in mind. The viewer is somehow implicated or even visually or psychologically entrapped in some of the installations.”[5]

Sculpture

Mouli-Julienne (x21) (2000)

 Dormiente (2008)

Mouli-Julienne (x21) (2000) and Dormiente (2008) are examples of some of Hatoum’s particularly intriguing sculptural work, that succeeds in confronting and instilling physical tension in the viewer with a surreal simulation of a terrifying and overarching structure of violence by subverting ordinary household items such as the vegetable slicer and the grater into larger-than-life instruments seemingly of torture. It also subverts the connotation of home or the domestic sphere as one of safety and comfort, instead instilling the idea of home with connotations of uncertainty and fear, alluding again to Hatoum’s experience of being displaced from her original home by the violence present therein. Another sociopolitical reading related to power structures could be that the sinister renderings of the domestic tools symbolise the oppressiveness of traditional roles of the woman which Margaret Thatcher encouraged (as Hatoum lived under her government in the 1980’s). Although these sculptural works can stand alone, it is necessary for the viewer’s body to be present in psychological engagement with the piece in order for the impact of the work to be fulfilled.

Homebound (2000)

A similar work is Homebound (2000), where Hatoum assembles an network of furniture that is connected wired up and connected to an electrical current, evoking once again a sense of paranoia linked to the idea of home rather than one of comfort.  

Video

Screencap from Measures of Distance (1998)

Perhaps Hatoum’s most significant and poignant video work is Measures of Distance (1998), one of the works that is informed directly by her personal narrative. It conveys themes of displacement and family ties strained by distance imposed by political forces beyond the power of individuals. It is a fifteen-minute-long piece consisting of photographs taken by Hatoum of her mother taking a bath. The photographs are superimposed with letters that her mother wrote to her, about the political turmoil ongoing in Lebanon, during their period of separation while Hatoum was exiled in London. The audio of the piece is Hatoum reading aloud the letters in Arabic and English so as to facilitate the accessibility of the work for most Western, English-speaking viewers. Instead of displaying journalistic or documentary depictions of the Lebanese civil war, Hatoum focuses the work on the poignant impact the political turmoil has on her relationships. This was in retaliation to what Hatoum perceived as an inaccurate depiction of Arabs by Western media and the work intended to counter the implicit stereotypes “of Arab woman as passive, mother as non-sexual being.”[6]

The significance of the body is hence important in this piece – specifically that of Hatoum’s mother in the personal space of the bath – lending the piece a sense of intimacy that is at odds with the description of the events in Lebanon.

Hatoum’s video work also explores a preoccupation with surveillance by an unknown and faceless authority figure. This is represented in Corps étranger: a cylinder lined with soft black fabric where videos and images are project depicting an endoscopy on Hatoum’s own body. She presents this endoscopy as the ultimate infringement of personal privacy by an external power figure. The videos were projected on the floor, through a black cylinder, which may be read as a sexual metaphor or symbolising the irrational fear of a woman’s body. Once again, the method of presenting the video work is intended to be confrontational to the viewer. By titling the pieces Corps étranger, Hatoum alludes to a body that cannot be seen or cannot be visible enough to assert itself during the violence imposed upon it by the other foreign body – of the camera. On the other hand, the anonymity of the filmed body could be an intentional gesture to imply a universality, to encourage the viewer to project their own body onto the video, to identify themselves with it and thereby to empathise with the plight of oppressed bodies.

Similar video works exploring, sometimes with a humorous and ironic tone, the body experiencing violation by surveillance, are Look No Body! and Don’t Smile, you’re on camera (1980) which both reveal an early interest in engaging the viewer almost confrontationally, almost violently, in the experience of being subjected to surveillance.

Installations

Hatoum began working on installation by 1989. Her installation work often coerces the participant to enter into a re-enactment of the dynamic between the individual and the violence of institution. These are best epitomised by the works The Light at the End (1989), and Quarters (1996).

 The Light at the End (1989)

For example, in her 1989 work The Light at the End, a darkened area in a gallery in London contained a cage-like structure of six bright, hot electrical rods. The participant is drawn to the light, but is prevented from going further by the strong heat of the structure. The title of the work is obviously ironic, its usual optimistic connotation subverted by the evocation of “imprisonment, torture and pain,” as Hatoum herself commented.[7] In terms of visual form the style is clearly of Minimalist influence, bringing to mind the gentler lights of Dan Flavin. However, Hatoum extends the formal aesthetics to speak of the conditions under which the body of the socially oppressed endures.[8] Hal Foster describes the installation as one where “spatial positions become phantasmatic positions of power as well. … here the threat

often projected onto Minimalist objects became actual.” Hatoum thus imbues the Minimalist aesthetic with the philosophy of Michel Foucault, and was especially drawn to his analysis of architectural surveillance in Discipline and Punish. Of course, this work is a precursor to the aforementioned Homebound (2000) with the use of electricity as a threatening and violent element of the work.

She further explored this situation with Light Sentence (1992), a large structure of lockers made of wire mesh with a strong lightbulb, similar to bright lights used in prisons, at the centre moving up and down, casting sinister moving shadows on the wall. Hatoum herself points out this is intended to create an unsettling feeling in the viewer.[9] The title alludes to legal terminology and the structures appear cage-like. There is a sense of “instability and restlessness” which she admits is informed by her past experiences – the unpredictable and threatening figure of an unseeable authority force of power, casting looming shadows all around.

 Quarters (1996)

In Quarters (1996), as with previous work where objects associated with domestic comfort are subverted, a series of stacked-up beds stripped of mattresses and fabric stands bare. Despite the presence of several beds the work does not offer the viewer any sense of comfort that beds usually do, and as Hatoum no doubt intends, the viewer moves from visceral discomfort, to an intellectual understanding and empathy for bodies that have experienced oppression under indifferent power structures – such as those prevalent in wars, in medical or psychiatric institutions, where despite the provision of beds there is no rest to be found.

In all of the work explored in this essay, Hatoum invites the participant to a visceral experience of her pieces and the underlying idea of conflict between the individual and larger sociopolitical structures or menacing power systems. The participant is forced to feel these ideas through their immediate senses, and only then to process it intellectually. She calls for the participant’s bodily involvement first. Even when Hatoum expresses herself via her own body, such as in Corps étranger, it is intended to be a kind of analogy for a generic body that is subjected to the power and violence of another (person or institution). The artist intends for the participant to identify their body with this generic body, allowing the participant to empathise with the fact that any body can be a subject to a larger oppressive structure, and every body is.

Bibliography

Archer, Michael, Guy Brett, M. Catherine De. Zegher, and Mona Hatoum. Mona Hatoum. London: Phaidon, 1997. Print.

Grosenick, Uta, and Ilka Becker. Women Artists in the 20th and 21st Century. Köln: Taschen, 2001. Print.

Jones, Amelia. Body Art/performing the Subject. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1998. Print.

Mona Hatoum, exhibition catalogue, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Castello di Rivoli, Milan 1999, pp.11-12

"Mona Hatoum by Janine Antoni." Interview by Janine Antoni. BOMB - Artists in Conversation. BOMB Magazine, Spring 1998. Web.

Wagstaff, Sheena. “Uncharted Territories: New Perspectives in the Art Mona

Hatoum.” Mona Hatoum: The Entire World as Foreign Land. London:

Tate Gallery, 2000.

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[1] Photographer: Lydia Garnett

[2] "Mona Hatoum by Janine Antoni." Interview by Janine Antoni. BOMB - Artists in Conversation. BOMB Magazine, Spring 1998. Web.

[3] Jones, Amelia. Body Art/performing the Subject. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1998. Print.

[4] Archer, Michael, Guy Brett, M. Catherine De. Zegher, and Mona Hatoum. Mona Hatoum. London: Phaidon, 1997. Print.

[5] "Mona Hatoum by Janine Antoni." Interview by Janine Antoni. BOMB - Artists in Conversation. BOMB Magazine, Spring 1998. Web.

[6] Mona Hatoum, exhibition catalogue, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Castello di Rivoli, Milan 1999, pp.11-12

[7] As quoted in Foster, Hal. Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2007. Print.

[8] Wagstaff, Sheena. “Uncharted Territories: New Perspectives in the Art Mona

Hatoum.” Mona Hatoum: The Entire World as Foreign Land. London:

Tate Gallery, 2000.

[9] ("Mona Hatoum by Janine Antoni." Interview by Janine Antoni. BOMB - Artists in Conversation. BOMB Magazine, Spring 1998. Web.)

Concert by Curtis Roads: Review

Concert by Curtis Roads
Friday, 19 October 2012
8 pm
Flexible Performance Space, Lasalle College of the Arts

It is easy to know what to expect from a typical contemporary music concert: performers and their equipment on stage in full view of the audience, who can perceive where the music comes from and what effect the performers have on them. It is more difficult to predict just what kind of musical experience we are getting ourselves into as we take our seats in the flexible performance space, reconfigured such that instead of facing an open stage empty in anticipation of the performer, we are made to face nothing but a projector screen.

Electro-acoustic music composer and accomplished academic Curtis Roads’ sound and video equipment for this concert stand in the centre of the house near the latter rows of the audience. By displacing the musician from centre-stage, this clever arrangement effectively shifts the audience’s focus from the main performer and his techniques, to the performance itself, promising an immersive experience both visual (via the on-screen projections) and auditory (via the speakers placed at the four corners of the house).

As the house lights fade at approximately 8:10 pm, we hear the soft voice of Curtis Roads introducing himself and his collaborator and assistant Brian O’Reilly, who monitors the video projection. Roads maps out the show: 17 individual pieces, each about three minutes long. “i will let you know just before we play the last piece,” he explains, “and after the last piece you can react however you want.” He expects no applause until the end and nobody to keep count of the pieces; we are thus encouraged to sit back and take it all in, just the way we would an unusual dream.

His decided assertion that the sound system provided by the school is “the best [he has] ever performed on” soon becomes indubitable as we are plunged into a novel, sonic world of unstructured and irregular beats and tones, the result of Roads’ extensive practice of granular and pulsar synthesis. The sound is unusual and sharp, ricocheting off the walls and enveloping the theatre.

The overall 50-minute experience does feel dreamlike in its surrealism: a soundtrack that seems to have no discernible main theme is juxtaposed with a series of abstract, occasionally jarring visuals incorporating vaguely recognisable commonplace objects or patterns, to evoke various moods or sensations that can be felt but not defined: one piece brings to mind a sense of speed, another of desolation in what looks like a bleakly lit tunnel, yet another that sounds like a waterfall but looks like a furnace.
The use of different colour schemes for each piece accompanies the mood of the sound, shifting and morphing rapidly at each change of frequency or pitch. What particularly moved this reviewer was a distinctly upbeat score set to vibrant orange-themed visuals featuring what appears to be wild and uninhibited brandishing of bold strokes of paint on screen, very much strikingly reminiscent of the work of the artist Jackson Pollock, specifically Convergence (1952).

There appear to be momentary pauses between what seem to be different parts of the same piece, prompting one to wonder if these indicate breaks between songs or not. We are reminded that this is irrelevant: akin to a dream, there are no breaks or definitions in this remarkable multi-sensory experience.

Windows to Reality: The Visual Language of René Magritte

“For me, Art evokes mystery without which the world would not exist.” – René Magritte

La condition humaine (The Human Condition)
René Magritte
1933
Oil on canvas, 100 x 81
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

“The problem of the window gave rise to ‘The Human Condition’. In front of a window seen from the inside of a room, I placed a picture representing exactly the section of the landscape hidden by the picture. The tree represented in the picture therefore concealed the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room in the picture and, at the same time, conceptually outside in the real landscape. This is how we see the world. We see it as being outside ourselves, and yet it is only a mental representation of it that we experience is inside us. Similarly, we sometimes place in the past something which is happening in the present. In this case, time and space lose that crude meaning which is the only one they have in everyday experience.”
(René Magritte, from a lecture in Antwerp, November 1938)

Arguably one of the most distinctive, insightful and yet relatively less celebrated painters of the Surrealist movement, René Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium, in 1898. Magritte is a Surrealist painter, although judging by the apparent simplicity, or straightforward facade of most of his pieces, this is not the impression the average person would derive from looking at his work. However, an analytical interpretative study of his work would reveal that there are profound insights lurking within the soft subdued intricacies of Magritte’s style.

Surrealists were generally very concerned with calling forth, drawing upon and taking apart a priori assumptions about the depiction of reality. Magritte might be said to be a Surrealist, but he himself did not choose to label himself so. It might be for good reason: Jacques Meuris says that for Surrealists, the key belief was that art was a form of escape, but for Magritte it was “a form of thought”, an expression of the curious nature of the world and what reality places on the table. Magritte chose to become a “realistic painter”, one for whom reality is the best medium for “turning convention on its head and transforming it into an enigma and, at the same time, revealing to the greatest degree possible the mystery that it contains with it.”[1]

Magritte’s brand of Surrealism is exceptionally steeped in subtlety, hidden meanings and an understated depiction of the element of enigma, compared to the wilder works of his more quixotic contemporaries such as Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró. The Surreal nature of Magritte’s work bases itself on the idea that nothing is as it appears to be, that what exposes can conceal, and vice versa, and that the most mundane objects and images can have profound significance. Viewing a Magritte work, a systematic thought process is kick-started in the viewer’s mind. Moving through the picture, absorbing what is displayed, we move from passive viewing to an active engagement with the picture and its inherent meaning as we start to question the incongruities presented in the artwork, and the reality of what we perceive. By presenting in calculated juxtapositions things which to the uncritical eye appear normal or unremarkable, Magritte’s paintings reveals the absurdity of what appears ‘normal’, and the ability that images have to mislead, conceal and reveal, sometimes all at the same time.

In most of his art, Magritte shows a keen preoccupation with the malleability of our perceptions of reality, as well as the fallibility of art as a representation of reality, and among all of his pieces that relate to these ideas, it could be said The Human Condition is the most definitive piece of his which effectively epitomises them. This essay will describe the history behind the painting and explore interpretations of The Human Condition, highlighting the ways in which it may be used to represent or typify the most outstanding characteristics and themes of Magritte’s body of work.

While the painting appears simplistic on first sight due to the ordinary, unremarkable outdoor images of the sky and the calm sea, it is the juxtaposition of these images with an easel depicting exactly the same image that catches the eye. It plays upon the viewer’s preconceived perceptions of reality and representations of reality in art, an effect that most of Magritte’s work achieves.

The idea for La condition humaine has its origins in a previous painting by Magritte entitled La belle captive (The fair captive, Fig 1). Apart from the similarity in medium – both are oil paintings on canvas – the similarity in motifs is evident: the idea of concealment of one image by another. In both cases, the object that conceals the landscape is a canvas, which, ironically, is conventionally acknowledged as a medium through which images and ideas and revealed. In these paintings the canvas reveals, or appears to reveal, with keen accuracy, the very backdrop which it conceals.

Fig 1
La belle Captive
René Magritte
1931
oil on canvas
Hogarth Galleries, Sydney

La Condition Humaine is a development of La belle captive. The latter forms the underlying design for the former. This was revealed by transmitted light and infra-red photographs taken by the National Gallery of Art, showing that Magritte started out by incorporating part of that image into La Condition Humaine. What makes it different is that the easel in the later painting is indoors, including the depiction of a window, and the philosophical implications of this are notable.

In the earlier part of 1933 Magritte developed an interested in creating images by seeking out ‘solutions’ to ‘problems’ posed by a given type of object. In the case of La condition humaine he deals with the problem of the window: its ability to reveal and conceal, and we may go so far as to say that this painting blurring the notions of ‘indoor’ and ‘outdoor’ spaces, which meet and create a unusual perception of reality, unsettling in its inconsistency.

In a letter to Andre Breton in the summer of 1934 Magritte shares that “the scene behind the picture is different from what is visible, but the essential point was to abolish the difference between a view seen from outside a room from that seen from the inside. Although this was not my intention, the picture corresponds to a much older preoccupation: to find, in space, a phenomenon analogous to that of ‘false recognition’.”[2]

In AM Hammacher’s hefty analysis of Magritte’s work in Magritte, he postulates that the window, “which has played a role in painting since German Romantics such as Caspar David Friedrich up to Matisse, had the significance of the eye in the body – which is the house, and from which one observes and experiences the world.” [3]

Meuris picks up on Hammacher’s mention of German Romantics in René Magritte, shedding light on how that movement was related to Magritte. Meuris references Roland Recht, who explains that Friedrich Schlegel, one of the founders of the Romantic School in Germany, was concerned with “the problematic nature of windows as deriving from their situation between the landscape and the person regarding it.” [4] which is an issue that is reflected in The Human Condition, where Magritte sought to figure out the problem of the window in his own way. It is notable that slightly more than a hundred years prior to Magritte’s La Condition humaine, a very similar painting was created by the Dutch Romantic painter Bartholomew Johannes van Hove; namely Garden in the Hague (1828, oil on canvas, The Hague, Gremeentenmuseum)

Hammacher picks up on the significance of the curtains depicted in the painting, deducing that “... Magritte ... is the ‘curtain man’. Stripped of all support and logic that is usually provided by the windows and rooms which they serve, Magritte’s curtains are the final relics, like the balustrades, like the window and door frames, which provide a link with the interior.” The curtains effectively act as a transition point between levels of reality: that of what is perceived to be the outside world, and that of the inner world. Hammacher sees the red curtains as a representation of “the mental and emotional tension trigged by the dual image”; they appear to tremble with unease at the unfixed, layered nature of reality.

This unsettling effect is compounded by the colours used: complementary contrast of red and green is balanced by blue and yellow. The red shades appear stronger, somewhat more of an aggressive impact than the rest. It brings, according to Siegfried Gohr, an “unpleasant burning hotness into the colour chord, not only in the curtains but also in the reflections on the details of the easel.”[5]

Another notable feature is the way the landscape as presented on the canvas seems real, and yet Magritte imbues it with a sense of transparency, the resulting effect of which exists in the mind, because the landscape on the canvas actually obscures the “real” landscape in the background of the work. We may interpret this as reflecting the illusory nature of any form of expression: art, writing, performance or even everyday speech can only represent a portion of the authentic, vast landscape of our souls. Ultimately, any form of representation, whilst possessing the potential to reveal and convey authentic reality to a certain limited extent, also conceals a lot of the reality it appears to reveal. This is a theme that forms a vital undercurrent that runs through most of Magritte’s work.

The title of the work is noteworthy; by referring to such a broad, abstract concept as the “human condition” it hits directly upon the profundity of the philosophical nature of this piece, automatically inviting the viewer, being a member after all of the human race, to find a relatable, personable stance with which to view the piece and consider his or her existence. The use of such a title highlights the close relationship humans have with the paradoxes of representation and reality, which is a constant aspect of the “human condition”.

In remarks regarding the painting Magritte has also given us the following note that might encourage us to draw further interpretive insights: “There exists a secret affinity between certain images; the affinity also exists between the objects represented by the images.” [6]

Picking up from this idea, we may observe that the canvas might be seen as a metaphor for a window. It is, in other words, a window to the world, that an artist may use to present a representation of reality. After all, similar to a work of art, a window serves as a reflection of life and reality only as far as its borders allow; it is only a representation of a part of reality, and we are limited in our ability to perceive anything beyond its perimeter. We may go so far as to extend this metaphor, by suggesting that the window is also a metaphor for the average human’s perception and understanding of reality. It represents the ultimately limited view we have in several aspects of life: the mind, fate, spirituality, science, among others, and effectively brings across the message that what we think we know to be true or real may be a very small fragment of a mere imitation of reality itself, which is thus revealed to be copiable, and beyond the grasp of human understanding. This insight could hence provide the link between the title and the heavily metaphorical and layered artwork.

Magritte extends the complexity of these relationships between the images (the “affinity between images”) further in The Key to The Fields (Fig 2), which depicts an apparently shattered window pane, but the incongruous feature of this painting is the fragments of landscape visible through the ‘glass’ of the broken shards.

Fig 2
The Key to the Fields. La Clef de champs
René Magritte
1936
oil on canvas
Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid, Spain.

                   Magritte depicts the impossible here, highlighting the paradoxes of representation and the deceptiveness of the apparent realism of the painting. He hence effectively conveys what each of his pieces intends: a sense of mystery, of the unknown and unknowable, delving beyond logic and sense into the broader reaches of the imagination. Magritte himself remarked on the painting, “if what is at least possible should truly happen one day, I would hope that a poet or a philosopher ... would explain to me what these shards of reality are supposed to mean.”

In conclusion, La condition humaine, as well as numerous other ‘window’ or ‘extended canvas’ paintings and art pieces by Magritte, such as Les promenades D'eulicid (Where Eulicid Walked) (1955), Profoundeurs de la Terre (The Depths of the Earth) (1930), La cascade (The Waterfall) (1961) and Le soir qui tombe (Evening falls) (1964), to name but a few of several, have the potential to provide endless philosophical and psychological insight, regarding the illusory nature of reality and perception as well as the deceptiveness of images and the inability to fully understand what truly can never be knowable; these ideas being the key underlying threads of Magritte’s entire work, they are effectively embodied by these series of exquisitely intriguing and enchanting pieces.

*      *     *

Bibliography

Gohr, Siegfried. Magritte: Attempting the Impossible. New York, NY: D.A.P./Distributed Art, 2009. Print.

Sylvester, David, and Sarah Whitfield. René Magritte Catalogue Raisonne Volume II; Oil Paintings and Objects 1931-1948. Vol. 2. Antwerp, Belgium: Mercatorfonds, 1993. Print.

Meuris, Jacques. René Magritte, 1898-1967. Köln, Germany: Benedikt Taschen, 1991. Print.

Hammacher, Abraham Marie. Magritte. New York: Abradale, 1995. Print.

Berger, John. "Magritte and the Impossible." Selected Essays. Ed. Geoff Dyer. New York: Vintage, 2003. Print.

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[1] Meuris, Jacques. René Magritte, 1898-1967. Köln, Germany: Benedikt Taschen, 1991. Print.

[2] Sylvester, David, and Sarah Whitfield. Rene Magritte Catalogue Raisonne Volume II; Oil Paintings and Objects 1931-1948. Vol. 2. Antwerp, Belgium: Mercatorfonds, 1993. Print.

[3] Hammacher, Abraham Marie. Magritte. New York: Abradale, 1995. Print.

[4] Meuris, Jacques. René Magritte, 1898-1967. Köln, Germany: Benedikt Taschen, 1991. Print.

[5] Gohr, Siegfried. Magritte: Attempting the Impossible. New York, NY: D.A.P./Distributed Art, 2009. Print.

[6] Gohr, Siegfried. Magritte: Attempting the Impossible. New York, NY: D.A.P./Distributed Art, 2009. Print.

(originally written 20 September 2011)