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Leonardo

This Is Not a Pipe by Michel Foucault; James Harkness Review by: David Carrier Leonardo, Vol. 17, No. 3 (1984), p. 218 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1575197 . Accessed: 26/01/2012 07:07
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Reviews

Edited by the ConceptualDesign GraduateGroup, Art Department, San Francisco State University

Readers are invitedto send book reviews as well as suggestionsfor booksto reviewto the Book ReviewBoard at the Main Editorial Office. This is Not a Pipe. Michel Foucault. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1982. James Harkness, trans. and ed. 66 pp., illus. $4.95. ISBN 0-520-04232-8. It is easy to be put off by this little book, so elliptical and French is its description, for example, of the space between figure and text in one painting "as a crevasse-an uncertain, foggy region now dividing the pipe floating in its imagistic heaven from the mundane tramp of words marching in their successive line". This really is a pamphlet: 39 pages by Foucault; a slightly uneven 14 pages by the translator, who argues with other Foucault translators and tells why the book is infuriating; two fan letters from Magritte to Foucault; and some illustrations by Magritte. Foucault poses major questions about pictorial reference, and his original and novel account is worth arguing with. Magritte is commonly dismissed as merely a literary painter, and his painting seems an illustration, since it shows the contradiction between the depicted pipe and the words, 'This is not a pipe'. But as Foucault notes, only statements can contradict one another, and so maybe the painting is less selfcontradictory than it is an elegant statement about picture/text relations. Contrastingresemblance and similitude, he writes, "resemblance presupposes a primaryreferencethat prescribes and classes" and so conveys an "assertion of reality". By creating a calligram, a nonallegorical sign exemplifying the qualities of what it describes, Magritte, like Mallarme, Nietzsche and Foucault himself, focuses attention on language isolated from its use to refer to an external world. Since Foucault is now famous and his commentators, even Dreyfus and Rabinow, are often uncritical of his philosophical claims, I should note that his argument has problems. That reference requires conventions, that pointing can be complex, that infinite regresses are easy to find are all points so much discussed in analytic philosophy that it is annoying when Foucault passes over them lightly. One wants to ask, Is negation, 'This is not a pipe', essential here? How does Magritte's picture differ from those visually contradictory works Gombrich loves to analyze, or from the many earlierpictures with texts discussed in John Sparrow's Visible Words, which also describes Emanuele Tesauro (1592-1675), the Mallarme of Turin? This small book relates to the broader picture drawn in Foucault's The Order of Things. Velazquez's Las Meninas sums up the classical age of representation, showing the contradictions implicit in that system and thus stands to that age as does Magritteto our time. Each period has a definable style of thought, and it is plausible to link together botany, economics, literature and philosophy because they all use some common system of representation. The account of Las Meninas in The Order of Things is beautifully written and now very well known. Still, anyone who knows perspective and has a straightedge can easily see that it is false. The same sort of problems may occur here, since Foucault's exciting thesis depends on an argument whose details are certainly controversial. But since Foucault discusses important questions in ways relating to American-style philosophy, and since he has a highly original thesis about pictorial representation, even this slight book deserves more discussion than can be given in a brief review. Reviewed by David Carrier, Department of History and Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, U.S.A. Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde. John Milner. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1983. 252 pp., illus. ?22.00. ISBN: 0-300-02771-0. It is surprising to discover that one of the most important artists of the Russian avant-garde, Vladimir Tatlin, is one of the least documented and discussed in the literature on Russian art. Only a few scholarly articles and exhibition catalogues have been devoted to this designer of the famous 'Monument to the Third International'. John Milner's new book admirably supplies the need for a monograph on Tatlin's work. Milner is the author of Russian RevolutionaryArt (Oresko, 1979) and has organized several exhibitions of Russian art. His interest in Tatlin developed while doing doctoral research on Russian constructivism. Milner began work on the present book in 1979. Milner presents a chronological account and detailed analysis of Tatlin's art. Three fascinating themes run throughout the book: the development of the idea and technique of construction in Tatlin's work, from his earliest paintings of 1910 to the 1930s, when he designed the glider Letatlin; Tatlin's response to the changing cultural and political contexts and how this influenced construction in his work; and the role external sources played in Tatlin's development, the most interestingand important being his experiences as a sailor and his interest in alchemy. The first two chapters take us from Tatlin's early career as a member of the Russian avantgarde when he painted works such as Fishmonger (1911) and Sailor (1912), through his discovery of icon painting and the Western avant-garde, to a detailed analysis of his relief Bottle (1913). Milner investigates Tatlin's painterly reliefs of 1914-1915 (illustrations of which are here collated for the first time), comparing his approach with that of Khlebnikov towards the verbal material of his poetry. Another chapter describes the development of 'corner counter-reliefs', which move away from the picture surface into three dimensions but continue to possess painterly attributes. Here Milner makes a startling comparison with Kandinsky's Composition VII. The work of Rodchenko and others is compared with Tatlin's BoardNo. 1 (1917) and the famous Relief (1917) analysed, leading the reader up to the Revolution. At this point Milner provides a perceptive and informative account of this event's impact on the arts as well as Tatlin's role and his response to political and historical events. In perhaps the book's most fascinating chapter Milner tackles the problem of the Monument to the Third International (19191920). Here he offers a compelling interpretation of the symbolism of its infinitely extendable double conical spiral with reference to Hermes and Hegel. Milner suggests that this structure is symbolic of evolution through dialectical conflict, and thus corresponds to the processes of Communist government. He next turns to the astronomical implications of the Monument. The various halls of the Monument revolve at different speeds, functioning like a gigantic clock, and as the Monument is pointed towards the Pole Star it can be seen to relate the processes of human social development to the heavenly bodies, functioning like the 'zodiacal man' of alchemy. Finally Milner considers the monument as a consciously utopian project, contrasting it with Herschel's Reflecting Telescope, comparing it with the Eiffel Tower, and identifying two utopian literary sources in Campanella's City of the Sun (1623) and Tsiolkovsky's Beyond the Planet Earth (1918-1920). Milner concludes, "Tatlin's 'Tower' represents a social alembic for the resolution of opposites and the transmutation of base social material by a purifying and social philosopher's stone" (p. 169). Following this chapter Milner considers Tatlin's work of the 1920s and his importance in the development of constructivism. Tatlin's production of Khlebnikov's Zangezi (1922) relates back to the analysis of the 1914-15 reliefs and leads to the conclusion that Tatlin's ideas about construction owe a great deal to Khlebnikov's approach to the structure of language and verbal material. The final chapter is devoted to the creation of the glider Letatlin (1929-1932) and to the close of Tatlin's career, with his returnto easel painting and designs for the theatre. Well researched and entertainingly written, the book is illustrated with 4 colour plates and over 270 black-and-white illustrations, including some previously unpublished works, and numerous photographs of Tatlin himself. Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde deserves a place on the bookshelf of any
Pergamon Press Ltd. Printed in Great Britain. $3.00+0.00 0024-094X/84

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Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 218-224, 1984

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