Page 43 - Studio International - September 1966

Right tion with the rider 'if I can walk through the mirror hand
Magritte
From Gigantic Days in hand with Alice' of course the phrase 'holding up the
mirror to nature' already has a paradoxical content in
Patrick Hughes that, in showing nature to itself; nature might be con-
Below
Room 1964 sidered lacking in perception and so not able to appre-
Painted and wallpapered ciate its mirror image, or, if nature had perceptions,
hardboard and wood would already know what itself was like. A mirror is here
48 x 36 x 15 in.
a metaphor for representation, and we now all know that
Bottom there are many systems of representation, after Gombrich
Railway lines 1963 and McLuhan. What I am saying is that I must use a
Gloss paint on woo(
72 x 48 in. system which can be seen to be schematic and 'as if', as
all systems are. As a figurative artist I am for the illusory
rather than the real.
However, I place myself in an uneasy position if I
assert that I am attacking or investigating systems of
figuration. If I succeed in demonstrating the contradic-
tory nature of systems, it is not because I am asserting
that there is some pure way of perceiving reality, shorn
of formulae, and somehow realer than the tools we are
now using. Rather, it is a strong and deep feeling, that
reality itself, which includes methods of perception and
description, is paradoxical. In this respect, as a thinking
man, not only do I feel close to artists of great absurdity
like Kafka and Magritte and Ionesco and Steinberg; but
also to logicians and philosophers such as Heraclitus and
Nicholas of Cusa, and, in our own day, Lupasco and
Melhuish.
For instance, some people have asserted that the art of
Magritte is an examination of the semantics of repre-
sentation. But it is also an assertion about reality—'My
paintings have no reducible meaning: they are a mean-
ing'. For instance, in his painting The Human Condition, a
canvas appears to depict the landscape it obscures. And
to say that the canvas might be a transparent one is to
place the mystery on the level of sleight of hand : the point
is surely that this is a painting which appears to make a
revelation but in fact makes a mystery. We are confused
because Magritte uses his system of representation, for
which in itself he has no regard, as a metaphor for reality.
He accepts the system of the bourgeois realist at its face
value, says, 'Yes, this is reality', and immediately begins
to attack reality with it. Using this metaphor for reality—
and a metaphor for reality is a useful thing for an artist to
have about him—he is able to say, for example, of his feet-
boots, 'this is reality'. Obviously if he had a cobbler
make them they would be just another pair of shoes, of
greater or lesser novelty, but shoes nevertheless. Again, in
the case of the drawing, the Gigantic Days, a verbal
description of this wonderful work might go : The man
has been consumed by the object of his desire. Now that
is a statement about reality, of a paradoxical nature,
couched in pictorial terms. All that has happened is that
he has stopped drawing the man where he doesn't over-
lap with the woman, but the meaning is that of a mistress
becoming a master.
In my construction The Room I was following my sculp-
ture The Railway Line, where I made perspective tangible
(incidentally perspective is not a convention, it exists: see
J. J. Gibson, Perception of the Visual World). In the sculpture
I had made the world in its own image, which sounds a
simple thing to do but has a striking effect visually, for
one then sees the world processed through a process, one
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