The Treachery of Images
Recently, a friend who helped me platform-test some pages made a droll comment that went something like: "So this is what Art Studies majors can do!" Actually, this has nothing to do with anything I learned in school. Like most everything else, I learned to make websites at home, by myself, with a few good books and a lot of reverse engineering. The medium fascinated me the way others didn't because I saw it as almost magical: With just Notepad and code, it was possible to make something out of nothing.
[Also, unlike most things that involve staring at a screen, I didn't have to be a passive consumer. Reasons 1 to 100 why I don't watch tv.]
But, yes, I suppose there's a great deal that's Art Studies-ish about this site. It can't be helped because it's my site, after all. (N.B.: My being an Art Studies major also has very little to do with school but that's another story.) Probably the most telling signs are the site name and the blague title. Both refer to the Surrealists: the first is from Comte de Lautréamont's "Songs of Maldoror" (beautiful as a chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella) and the second is from the painting up there, "The Treachery of Images" by René Magritte. It's a favorite of mine, like a book I keep going back to.
Michel Foucault once wrote about the paradox contained in that painting (excerpt here). To those of us who are used to "hip" layouts and po-mo attitudes, the paradox requires no long elaboration. What hits us, of course, is the contradiction/tension between the image and the text. For the art historically-minded, there's also the awareness that this tension is only possible in a mode that valorizes verisimilitude. (For example, there is no such tension in the early Cubist paintings/collages that incorporate text, simply because everything--ladies and lutes, chairseats and newspapers--is "isotopic" or mooshed together on a single plane, as was Picasso and Braque's intent.)
But as I reread the painting, I found that it can have a new meaning in the virtuality of the internet. In my previous post, I said that my header titles used to be regular arial text but that they're GIFs now. On the level of appearance, there is absolutely no difference between image and text but, in fact, they are two different animals altogether. Text is what we get when we type, whether we use Times New Roman, Trinculo, or ASCII. On the web, text is what spiders and bots "read" hence all the SEO schemes. On the other hand, a GIF file is an image file and not "read", only scanned in terms of width and height, number of colors, etc. It is bad form, search engine-wise, to make one's header a GIF file--like mine. To a human, this site's name is, obviously, umbrella+sewingmachine but, to a crawler, this site would be nameless if it weren't for the title tags. (If you know your HTML, you can also make all sorts of metas to get the crawlers' attention.) But, as I said earlier, it makes no difference to humans whether it's a text or a graphic, as long as the appearance is the same. On the internet, because everything--all the combinations of texts and images everywhere--is virtual, everything is mooshed by nature.
It is the interwebs's blague that everything is, to all intents and purposes, equal. That painting of a pipe that says it is not a pipe isn't even a painting (in the sense of a certain arrangement of pigments on a surface) or a tangible simulacrum of itself, already a simulacrum; it's a 15-KB JPG file of width 400 and height 285 (as resized by Blogger). And we ourselves might as well be fish in a sea of irony, having our bit of fun by putting acronym tags to things we already "know".
