• Ever find yourself looking at a painting and wonder: What exactly am I supposed to feel? 

  • Certain paintings seem unwilling to move even an inch in your direction, leaving you with a massive void to fill with unanchored interpretation

• Magritte moves more than an inch in the direction of the viewer, this painting comes in all the way 

• The painting speaks in a language we can understand: Language itself

  • Ceci n'est pas une pipe: This is not a pipe

    • The painting talks. It engages. 

• Magritte: 

  • Famous and most lasting of surrealistic artists

  • Considered himself not a painter but a thinker who used images to express himself 

  • Well-versed in philosophical style from Plato to Foucaut used this to investigate ideas

    • to confuse and invoke mystery

    • What we want is always behind the thing we see.

      • The obstruction can never be removed completely because it is not in the object but in vision and thought and perception (!)*

• The Treachery of Images 

  • obvious at first: Image of a pipe and then a reminder that it is not a pipe 

  • We can infer the rest : it's not a pipe, it's a representation of the pipe 

    • Representations are not the real thing, they only resemble the real thing 

      • Seems obvious, but if someone shows me a painting of an apple and asks me what it is, I am very likely to say, "it's an apple" 

        • This little accident of language is not an accident at all 

• Language

  • For many hundreds of years humans have supposed that language and reality had an organic relationship: that the names of things arose out of the things themselves 

    • A tree is in fact a tree ; a pipe is really a pipe 

    • The Gospel according to St. John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." 

  • Ferdinand deSaussure - famous linguist 

    • A thing and its name have a totally arbitrary relationship

      • We don't really know things but only access their shadow through language, in which everything has a meaning in the context of the system (!)*

      • Magritte saw that the old wrong-headed ways of thinking about language (trusting the Word implicitly) were still hiding in the way we thought and talked about images 

        • Realistic painting plays on resemblance and resemblance suggests a hierarchy 

        • The image of a pipe represents that it points outside of language, to the thing in itself.

          • The falseness of this claim is what inspired abstract artists to move beyond resemblance into a field in which painting had no referent in reality as such 

        • Magritte, on the other hand, makes this point using the false premises of resemblance, and shatters them from within 

• The visual secret dependence on language is laid bare in the Treachery of Images, indeed that dependance is The Treachery of Images 

  • The image and the sentence laid out like a page from a botanical textbook, begging to be connected 

    • Why should we connect them?

    • Why should the sentence and the image refer to one another?

      • How do we know the word "this" points upward?

        • The pronoun, resemblance and the name all make that connection inevitable 

          • That inevitability that's made real in every aspect of our lives 

            • We go about our days confident that everything we see can be said, and that the images we say can be seen. 

              • If you've ever used the phrase "You had to be there" you know that these are two realities that do no overlap in the way we act like they do 

• [image of a pipe] is not a pipe, yes; but [pipe] is not a pipe either 

  • The sentence scrawled in its cute schoolboy cursive is actually a contradiction, a contradiction that pulls the whole painting apart at its seams and makes it utter nonsense. 

• What's more forceful?:

  • Not moving an inch in the direction of the viewer?

  • Or moving a question all the way into the center of the viewer's mind, that on the slightest prodding and examination, implodes. 

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 *(emphasis added)