Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde by John Milner (review)

Book Reviews Edited by the Conceptual Design Graduate Group, Art Department, San Francisco State University Readers are invited to send book reviews as well assuggestionsforbooksto reviewtothe Book Review Board 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 picturdtext relations. Contrasting resemblance and similitude, he writes, “resemblance presupposes a primary referencethat 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 Mallarmit, 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 earlier pictures with texts discussed in John Sparrow’s Visible Words, which also describes Emanuele Tesauro (1592-1675), the Mallarmit 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 Magritte to 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, anyonewho 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. 522.00. 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 ofthe 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 Revolutionary...