The Treachery of Images

If you haven't already been to LACMA to visit the Magritte show, we hope you'll join the IML Honors Program on Thursday, February 8, for a group trip to the museum. The show features an extensive survey of the surrealist's major works, in a show created by great LA-based artist John Baldessari, who has turned the museum upside down, or so it would appear. The show also features work by Robert Gober, whose work has been greatly infuenced by Magritte (as suggested in Gober's piece, above).

Also, I like Natalie's blog posting this week on "The Veldt," in which she notes that "instead of an imagination growing around the sensory world and subsequently departing from it through the mind, the nursery prvides such a comprehensive and potent alternate reality that the children feel no need to leave their surroundings." I'm intrigued by Natalie's suggestion that perhaps Plato's world of perfect "forms" might be a necessary component of imagination, and that creating a "perfect reality" obviates the need to imagine... Adam notes that Grant Morrison thinks "people with MPD are from the future," an idea that we'll come across again today in class, when the work of Jordan Belson attempts to illustrate an emerging form of consciousness...