decalcomanie

quotes from this is not a pipe by michel foucault

"what is essential is that verbal signs and visual representations are never given at once. an order always hierarchizes them, running from the figure to discourse or from discourse to the figure.

this is the principle whose sovereignty klee abolished, by showing the juxtaposition of shapes and the syntax of lines in an uncertain, reversible, floating space (simultaneously page and canvas, plane and volume, map and chronicle). boats, houses, persons are at the same time recognizable figures and elements of writing. they are placed and travel upon roads or canals that are also lines to be read. trees of the forest file over musical staves. the gaze encounters words indicating the way to go and naming the landscape being crossed. and at the nexus of these figures and signs, the arrow that crops up so often (the arrow, sign bearing a primal resemblance, like a graphic onomatopoeia, and shape that formulates an order) - the arrow indicates the direction in which the boat is traveling, shows that the sun is setting, prescribes the direction that the gaze must follow, or rather the line along which it must imaginatively shift the figure provisionally and a bit arbitrarily placed here. it is not, in fact, a question of those calligrams that by turns bring into play the subordination of sign to form (a cloud of words and letters taking the shape they designate), then of form to sign (the figure dissecting itself into alphabetical elements). nor is it any longer a question of those collages or reproductions that capture the cut out form of letters in fragments of objects; but rather a question of the intersection, within the same medium, of representation by resemblance and of representation by signs. which presupposes that they meet in quite another space than that of the painting.

paul klee, the wild man

the second principle that long ruled painting posits an equivalence between the fact of resemblance and the affirmation of a representative bond. let a figure resemble an object (or some other figure), and that alone is enough for there to slip into the pure play of the painting a statement - obvious, banal, repeated a thousand times yet almost always silent. (it is like an infinite murmur - haunting, enclosing the silence of figures, investing it, mastering it, extricating the silence from itself, and finally reversing it within the domain of things that can be named.) 'what you see is that.' no matter, again, in what sense the representative relation is posed - whether the painting is referred to the visible world around it, or whether it independently establishes an individual world that resembles itself. the essential point is that resemblance and affirmation cannot be dissociated."

"resemblance presupposes a primary reference that prescribes and classes. the similar develops in series that have neither beginning nor end, that can be followed in one direction as easily as in another, that obey no hierarchy, but propagate themselves from small differences among small differences. resemblance serves representation, which rules over it; similitude serves repetition, which ranges across it. resemblance predicates itself upon a model it must return to and reveal; similitude circulates the simulacrum as an indefinite and reversible relation of the similar to the similar."

rene magritte, decalcomanie

"in decalcomanie (1966): occupying two thirds of the painting, a red curtain with large pleats obscures a landscape of sky, sea, and sand. beside the curtain, turning his back as usual to the viewer, the man with the bowler hat looks out to sea.

now, we find that the curtain has been cut out in exactly the shape of the man: as if he himself (although of another color, texture, and width) were merely a section of curtain snipped away by scissors. within the large opening the beach is visible. what are we to make of this? is it that the man, in changing places, having departed the curtain, exposes what he was looking at when he was still enfolded within it? or is it that the painter, in moving the man a few centimeters, has set against the curtain that fragment of sky, water, and sand that the man's silhouette hid from the viewer - so that thanks to the cooperation of the artist, we can see what is contemplated by the silhouette that blocks our view? or must we admit that at the moment the man turns to look at it, the fragment of landscape immediately before him has leapt aside, avoiding his gaze so that before his eyes it became his shadow, the black smudge of his body? transference? doubtless. but from what to what? from where to where? the thick black silhouette of the man seems to have been shifted from right to left, from the curtain onto the landscape he now obscures; the fold he makes in the curtain displays his prior position. but in the shape of a man's silhouette, the landscape has also been cut loose and transferred from left to right. the scrap of red curtain that remains bizarrely attached to the shoulder of this human landscape, and that corresponds to the small part of curtain hidden by the black silhouette, in itself demonstrates the origin and the location from which the sky and water were cut. a displacement and exchange of similar elements, but by no means mimetic reproduction.

and thanks to decalcomanie the advantage of similitude over resemblance can be grasped. the latter reveals the clearly visible; similitude reveals what recognizable objects, familiar silhouettes hide, prevent from being seen, render invisible ('body' = 'curtain,' says mimetic representation. 'right is left, left is right; the hidden here is visible there; the sunken is in relief; flatness extends into depth,' says the similitudes of decalcomanie.) resemblance makes a unique assertion, always the same: this thing, that thing, yet another thing is something else. similitude multiplies different affirmations, which dance together, tilting and tumbling over one another."

[Footnote: 'decalcomania.' the title embodies a complex play of ideas. decalcomanie means transference, transferency, or decal; it is also a painterly technique (often mentioned by breton) in which pigment is transferred from one side of a painted surface to another by folding over the canvas. finally, decalcomanie refers to a species of madness bound up with the idea of shifting identities.]