| Despite a surfeit of books and articles on Rene Magritte from a variety of critical perspectives, our understanding of the enigmatic works of this artist is circumscribed by the same few ideas. In the histories of Surrealism written since the 1960s, a basic view of Magritte prevails. He is seen as a painter of object lessons in which the familiar is made strange. The art of Magritte is always contextualized in terms of pre-existing categories, not only Surrealism, but also collage, and later, Pop art. In order to solve this problem of the immobility of Magritte's art, key concepts from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari are used to extricate Magritte from the history of modern art and to provide for a new context and interpretation.;This dissertation traces the history of Magritte's reception from the late 1920s to his death in 1967, and presents a new interpretation of his paintings guided by the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. If we reverse the order of things and allow Magritte to reterritorialize modern art in terms of simulation as opposed to representation, then a new view of Magritte and of modern art emerges. In this narrative, Magritte's challenge to representation is more radical than previously thought. His strategies of simulation engage the viewer on an affective level thereby affirming a new assemblage of asignifying sensations that go beyond the simple idea of surrealist shock or disorientation. |
