Chloe and I both presented on Michel Foucault’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe. The text was incredibly complicated to understand, but this may be partially due to the translation and also maybe because Foucault is slightly playful in his writing. She focused more on Magritte, while I focused more on the surrealists.
Chloe focused more on Magritte as an artist, while I focused more on the surrealists. I have been fascinating by the surrealists and their quirky style since I took an undergraduate course on surrealism.
Surrealist members created this drawing above by folding a portion of a piece of paper and drawing a body part, then hiding the content and passing it around to the next member.
The surrealist manifesto outlines some of the techniques the surrealists would use, such as automatism: the act of spontaneously writing or drawing without censoring their thoughts. The movement is most notably associated with the visual arts; among the most famous artists include Rene Magritte, Man Ray, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali. Although these works were not created through automatism, the art produced still represented the surrealist spirit through their styles by presenting counterintuitive illusions that create visual non-sequiturs.
In my presentation, I argued that the works of surrealists Andre Breton and Rene Magritte play with the image and text to such a point that the binary between them no longer exists or matters. The two complement each other rather than function incompatibly.
Modernity & The Visual: Image & Text 