THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT AN EYE

RENE MAGRITTE, THE EYE, ca.1932/35

(Art Institute of Chicago)

Thirteen ways of thinking about a Magritte:

I.

It is an eye in a box. A blue eye in a black box. An old, Victorian shadowbox about 10 inches square and 1½ deep, something you might find thrown under a table at a junk shop. A wooden square, in its center a painted circle. Part of a face: a rouged cheek, a section of nose, a glimpse of light brown hair, and an eye. The simple geometric forms of Magritte’s assemblage emphasize the repetitive geometry of the human face: the gentle curves of cheekbone, nose and eye socket, the more emphatic arcs of the eyebrow and the symmetrical contours of the eye, the concentric circles of blue iris and black pupil. We can count the lashes; we can almost count the hairs in the eyebrow. Have we ever examined a lover’s eye this closely, this coldly? There is something almost medical in our gaze, as if the eye’s detachment from its body licenses us to look upon it in a detached, scientific way. Although Magritte’s model was his wife Georgette, this piece has all the emotion and sentimentality of a geometric proof. If A equals B and B equals C, this must be love.

II.

There is something unnerving about staring at an eye. Look me in the eye. The gaze can be an involuntary confession. "Lazy idle little schemer," crows the punishing priest who haunts Stephen Dedalus through two of James Joyce’s novels, "I can see it in your eye."¹ An eye that never blinks is even more disturbing, an eye of the dead, a hypnotic eye, like Anthony Hopkins’s eyes in The Silence of the Lambs. And how much more unsettling it would be if Magritte’s Eye were suddenly to blink. The corpse comes back to life. It would be a moment from the pages of Magritte’s favorite writer, Edgar Allan Poe. We would instantly know ourselves as watchers watched and feel the (pleasurable?) guilt of voyeurism. But there’s not a chance of that here. We’re safe. The eye is detached, boxed, controlled, objectified. Has it been murdered? A shadowbox is a kind of coffin, just as all coffins are shadowboxes, boxes for shades. Boxes to keep the living safe from the dead.

III.

Look deep into the eye, past the white highlights and into the small, black pupil, the focus of the work. Here at the innermost part of the painting is a concentrated circle of black, the same color as the inside of the shadowbox, the space that surrounds the eye. This relationship pulls the pupil toward us and also forces us to consider the meaning of black: the color of an empty box, of nothingness, of blindness. The opening through which we see the world (and through which all others see us) is the color of blindness. There is a void, a black hole, at the center of our eyes like the blind spot at the center of our perceptions: we can see everything in sight, except our own eyes–or ourselves through another’s eyes. The hole in which Magritte’s eye appears is a peephole in the prison cell of the self. We are locked inside. The eye of the other might as well be inanimate, a doll’s eye, a painted thing, for we can never know exactly what it sees. We can cast a cold eye on others, even lovers, but we can never detach our selves from ourselves.

IV.

The Eye is a fetish, an inanimate object to which great, irrational power has been imputed. Like adherents to some iconophilic religion, we pause before the painting and grant it the power of what it represents: sight. Without even trying, we can deceive ourselves into believing the eye really sees us. Every artwork is, to some extent, a fetish, and the great art collections of the world are monuments to fetishization. They are places of ritual. We pass through elaborate entrances (often based on pagan temples), pay a steep price, show our ticket to the guardian and pass into ritual space. We place ourselves before a painting or a sculpture and wait to feel its power... But this is a fantasy, wishful thinking. Today the temples are overrun by tourists with digital cameras. The blink of the camera eye replaces the lingering gaze of contemplation. Visitors snap a picture and move on.

"Did you get this one?" a wife asks her camera-clicking husband in front of Cezanne’s Basket of Apples.

"Yeah, I got it," he says.

Hardly, I think.

V.

I have described this eye as ‘objectified.’ Magritte’s alternative title for L’Oeil (The Eye) is L’Objet (The Object). Together these two titles name a work that accomplishes a textbook Hegelian dialectical synthesis. Thesis: The Eye, a synecdoche for the perceiving subject. Antithesis: The Object, the thing seen, the focus of the subject’s gaze. Synthesis: Magritte’s Object-Eye, the object that stares back, that captures the sign of the subject (the eye) and turns the viewer into its own object. By a strange transformation, both viewer and viewed become both subject and object for each other. Actually, it only sounds strange when stated in such technical terms, for it is exactly what happens when two human beings look at each other, those rare moments or seconds when we really look and see one another. Each is both perceiving subject and perceived object of the other. It’s the dialectic of the intimate gaze. Philosophical love...

VI.

...or mutual surveillance. We pass quickly from Hegelian dialectics to the paranoid world of Michel Foucault. Magritte’s Eye, painted larger than life, seems to spy on us from an intimate distance. We are under close and continual observation. Intimate surveillance. This is how lovers, spouses and family members use their eyes. No warm and fuzzy ‘family values’ sentimentality for Magritte; in this work he is as unsentimental as all the great Modernists. Intimate relationships are a game of mutual espionage. All human beings spy on one another; we observe, analyze and draw conclusions. We are constantly watching, gathering information to be stored away for future use, evidence for the defense or the prosecution. Anything we say can and will be used against us...

VII.

It is yet another Modernist eye, a woman’s staring eye. Modernism begins in painting with the gaze of Victorine Meurent looking out at us from Manet’s Olympia and Luncheon on the Grass. These are public gazes in public paintings, eyes turned on the surveying crowd (originally, the Salon visitors; now the people who line up around the block to enter the Musée D’Orsay). In later Modernism, from Picasso to Hitchcock, the gaze becomes more private–and more disturbing. The eye is turned on a single object. It doesn’t see a hypothetical ‘viewer’; it sees us. Some of the canonical works of Modernism might be seen as grand monuments to masculine insecurity, attempts to fix and control the measuring female gaze. If so, the project has been an abysmal and glorious failure. To paint the gaze, frame it and hang it on the wall is to increase, not diminish, its power. The image immortalizes the gaze, turns it into a fetish, an icon, an object of reverence. How many real women cast a gaze as terrifying as Picasso’s Demoiselles? Were Georgette Magritte’s eyes as endlessly fascinating as her husband’s Eye?

VIII.

Like most of Magritte’s works, The Eye is blandly painted. It’s kitschy, like a circle cut out of a magazine advertisement for oatmeal or Ivory Soap. (Magritte worked in commercial art during the 1920's and carried its techniques into his more ‘serious’ works. Andy Warhol would do the same with less wit and intelligence a few decades later.) It is an ordinary thing represented in an ordinary way, and the magic of Magritte’s art lies in his power to make it unutterably strange. This estrangement of the ordinary is the principal effect of Magritte’s surrealism. Nowhere outside his paintings do bowler hats, white clouds and empty rooms look so mysterious. If Magritte showed us his wife’s entire face, we probably wouldn’t give it a second look. A kitsch portrait, we would rightly judge. But cut a circle out of the face and enclose it in a box, and suddenly the meaningless becomes meaningful. Transparency becomes mystery; kitsch becomes art. The ordinary object becomes the object of our investigation. Magritte makes private eyes of us all.

IX.

Is it an eye in a box or an eye in a peephole? Up close, we see the shadow cast by the round panel on the inside of the box, but at a distance the illusion prevails. We look through a peephole at an eye looking through a peephole. The circle reads as both painting and hole, solid and void, the empty space through which gazes travel and the imaged surface we cannot pass beyond. The other eye forever blocks our sight. This work is a holy icon of ultimate paranoia, a slice of life from a panopticon world where every peephole through which we spy on others only shows us another eye spying on us.

X.

We look at it and it looks back. Our gaze is returned to us as if by a mirror. Writing of Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in his eponymous poem, John Ashbery describes a similar sensation:

...you could be fooled for a moment

Before you realize the reflection

Isn’t yours. You feel then like one of those

Hoffmann characters who have been deprived

Of a reflection...²

In the uncanny first second we seem to see ourselves in the painting. And then the mind comes with its logic and closes the door to truth. For The Eye is indeed our mirror; the gaze we turn on the world turns back on us here. And it’s an unseeing gaze, uncomprehending, inanimate. An eye in a box. A reflection of all the superficial glances we cast not just at art but at everything in our lives. This is the object’s accusation: we pass through life as we pass through an art gallery, looking but not seeing.

XI.

"What are you looking at?"

Most of the works in the Art Institute’s Surrealism galleries are paintings of visions: Dali, Delvaux, Ernst, other Magrittes. In The Eye we have a painting of vision itself. It’s like a reverse-angle shot on every painting in the gallery. This is what the artwork sees. And what it is. All great art is vision–of the external world and the internal labyrinth in massively complicated combination. For maximum effect, The Eye should be displayed in the Old Master galleries along with Rembrandt and Rubens, not here in the middle of so much Surrealist weirdness. All art is vision, but it’s a vision we can only partly know, for even as it is revealed by the work, it is concealed by the limitations of convention and materials. All great paintings are mysteries of the eye. "He is only an eye," Cezanne reportedly said of Monet, "but what an eye!" Magritte’s assemblage is a collection of art’s essential things: a square, a circle, wood, paint, an eye.

XII.

An eye removed from a face, cut out as if with a cookie cutter. There is cruelty in this work, the cool, nonchalant sadism that underlies many of Surrealism’s most disturbing images: the razor-sliced eye in Un Chien Andalou, Hans Bellmer’s doll photographs, Balthus’s cruel masterpiece The Guitar Lesson (now, unfortunately, trapped in some multi-millionaire’s private collection). Magritte’s Eye is more literally iconoclastic. Violence is done to the image of a face. The human face–unaesthetically structured in reality, with the lumpy, absurd nose in the middle–is here reoriented around a single eye. This is the face corrected; the artist as plastic surgeon moves the eye to a central position befitting its importance. There’s no need when looking this face in the eye to choose between left eye and right eye. This face makes perfect sense. A similar painting centered on the nose would be merely comic, but it’s hard to laugh at The Eye. Its frozen gaze freezes us, and we stare at the stare.

XIII.

Ceci n’est pas un oeil. This is not an eye. And Magritte’s famous pipe is not a pipe; it’s a painting, a representation. We see the eye, we feel it looking at us, but it’s obviously a painted thing, skillfully constructed and placed in a box. It is not a subject, not a consciousness. It is a collection of carefully ordered inanimate material. Everything else is the viewer’s fantasy, a masochistic narrative in which the viewer is seen, spied upon, dominated by this small disk covered in paint. (If Luis Buñuel were still alive, this would make a wonderful Surrealist comedy.) Magritte’s object is an invitation to indulge in the fantasy of our own objectification. The artwork’s sadism activates the viewer’s masochism. That is the power of an image, the power of a single eye.

NOTES

1. Joyce, Ulysses, 458; Portrait, 44.

2. Ashbery, Self-Portrait, 74.

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