Magritte A-Z
In 2011, Tate Liverpool mounted a major exhibition of Magritte’s work and, to accompany it, produced a book entitled Magritte A-Z, taking the form of a sort of dictionary of Magrittean connections and concepts.
I wrote five short essays for this book: ‘Detective Stories’, ‘Frame’, ‘Mirror’, ‘Photography’ and ‘Window’. As published in Magritte A-Z, these were somewhat different from my own first versions, since they needed to follow a certain house-style, dictionary-like and impersonal. I have therefore decided here to revisit my texts and restore some of the original elements.
The first one, ‘Detective Stories’, was very short; it has some cross-over with my film Nat Pinkerton and I have not therefore included it here.
With the longer essay on ‘Photography’, I have only changed a few small elements and restored the notes to the body of the text.
The major rewriting is in the three other texts ‘Frame’, ‘Mirror’ and ‘Window’, which I envisage as being interconnected. Parts of each are identical to the previously published version, but I have also included anecdotal elements which connect the objective and the subjective, as I cannot help but do in my response to Magritte’s work.
