Magritte's The Return(1940)

The Return, is a 480 X 610 art print, has a blue sky, a cut out of clouds in the shape of a bird, and on the bottom is a nest with three eggs. The name of the artwork, make us think what does the artist mean by The Return?. The very simple interpretation is the return of the mother bird to its nest, as a protector. Applying semiotics (study of signs and symbols) theory, blue sky and white clouds is symbol of spirituality, as soul, a return of life after death. The eggs at the bottom on the floor, shows the seed/ beginning of life. The bird, in the shape of a dove, as a protector symbolizes the presence of god or holy spirit watching over a new beginning. The surrealistic artwork puts together two realms of existence: life and after-life(soul), (life as signifier and soul as the significant) and there is a connection between them. There is no end to life; our body and soul are two different constituents existing together, like two sides of a coin, when we die, our life continues in the form of soul/spirit. 

"Rene Magritte's surrealness is real, found in everyday things transplanted to another world until they have lost their everyday thingness."- Paul Page

Magritte, “makes the invisible, visible”- concept of spirituality. Complex and structured environments, they provoke both strong somatic responses and wide-ranging metaphorical associations that, together, weave a nexus of layered, non discursive meanings. Dewey insists that an aesthetic act is not complete until the viewer/reader/listener is able to "emulate the operation" undertaken by the artist. When the painter and the poet succeed in incorporating "medium" in the outcome, that is, in creating a work of art, the work in turn provides the viewer and the reader with a potentially rich aesthetic experience that becomes all the richer when they are able to perceive the way the medium itself is being "used structurally" to create an aesthetic whole that precedes any "idea" the work putatively conveys.

Recognition and recollection --a kind of understanding based in memory and past experience that bypasses or even precedes intellection -- are the principal tools for apprehending spiritualistic experience, which helps in enhancing creation of art work. Everything is surrounded by the mists of significations which carry the mind in many directions, all according to knowledge, interest, and level of awareness brought to bear at any given moment when we happen to look around. Of course, all these perceptions involve signs and the mind in knowing may make comparisons among objects of which it is aware, and from these comparisons relations do indeed result. Our thought becomes a power of source/knowledge, providing possibilities of meaning and of truth that lie outside empirical seizure or proof- the root-impulse of the human spirit. There are values and energies in the human person -- and an inner voice which cannot be revealed with analytical and empirical tools. Magritte’s artwork provide access to such intimations, intimations which if inimical to reason are nonetheless instinctual to humanity- the sixth sense –spirituality, proving the simple analogy,

Art is experience,

Experience is knowledge,

Knowledge is spiritual

Art is spiritual.

Devorah Sperber's After the Mona Lisa 7, 2008

The exhibition, Second Lives, Remixing The Ordinary at The Museum of Arts and Design, features artwork and installation of many international artists. The ground-breaking fact is that their installations are made from ordinary manufactured articles, which are originally made for another purpose. Some of them where Bluffs by Tara Donovan (shirt buttons glued resembling a rare form of coral or seaweed), My Back Pages by Paul Villinski(flock of black and polychrome butterflies cut from vintage vinyl records).

At the second floor, was Devorah Sperber’s After Mona Lisa 7, 2008, which is made out of 5,084 spools of thread hung from an apparatus using stainless-steel ball chain. Of all the installations in the gallery, this seemed to be a puzzle, because at first glance, the artwork appeared to be a random arrangement of threads in different colors. If we take a closer look, Devorah created an inverted pixilated abstraction of a famous painting using hundreds of spool of thread. The installation is an image of Mona Lisa with a digital camera held up by the arm of a tourist, directly in front of her face. 

I was fascinated with the idea of bringing science and concepts of digital technology along with art, because the real image of the installation can only be resolved by using a viewing sphere or the surface of a convex mirror, involving science- principles of convex mirror¹. The image is scanned to get the color pixel patterns and are correlated with the standard color-codes of Coat and Clark brand thread, there by combining both computer and craft art. Devorah, through her installation bring out the principle of visual perception versus reality as a subject experience, “what we see is not what exactly it is”. Visual perception takes place due to fixation, the first time we see the installation, it’s barely recognizable, entirely depends how the eye and brain sense the data. The color of the thread and the way they are pixelated, we do believe, what we are seeing is a recognizable portrait, that’s why I had a jolt when the actual image was revealed when viewed with a sphere right in the middle of the room.

Devorah’s work reminded me of Satoshi Kon's Japanese animated film “PAPRIKA”, in a very similar way when I saw the very first time, I had no clue what was happening. The movie was about illusions and reality. It started off with a scene from the circus show and it seemed the part of an investigation, but was really a illusion of an investigator. The Chief of the lab, Dr. Chiba, the lead role of the movie, had her alter-self named as PAPRIKA and she existed as an ideal girlfriend who makes the investigator happy, and the one who is always ready to help the head of the scientist, she is flexible and she is capable of doing anything according to their whims and fancies, but in real  she was just an illusion in everybody’s mind. There was a scene which was repeatedly shown too many dolls walking in the street( a procession) and one of the character said they are people who are caught up between illusion and reality. I felt too many dummies walking on the street, but for real, it resembles the common human being, who live in this world, who have their lives the same way as the dolls in the scene. One person’s illusion can be perceived by the other, which first seems to be as is but put a little more thought, is reality.

¹The reflective surface of the convex mirror bulges toward the light source. Convex mirrors reflect light outwards, therefore they are not used to focus light and forms a virtual image