Saturday, June 22, 2013

Rene Magritte: The voice of space

I've always been fascinated by images that appear weirdly prescient or out of time.  If I encountered the following painting by Rene Magritte without context, I'd swear blind it was a prog rock album cover from the early 70s, or some obscure illustration from a UFO book from the same period.  Definitely early 70s - it has that very British pastoral psychedelic feel to it.  In reality, however, the image was completed in Paris in 1928.  This would add to the contention I was beginning to voice in a previous post that "surrealism, weird fiction, and the later psychedelic movement are the separate strands of a single cultural history which all emerged out of the same basic appetites, and which all converged, by their separate routes, on the same essential mental terrains and vistas."


Which is as good a time as any to post an excerpt from Mike Oldfield's 1973 performance of Tubular Bells for the BBC.  Not a huge Oldfield fan admittedly, but this footage rocks and just oozes the ambience of the period:


Magritte image from wikipaintings

full Mike Oldfield performance here

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