A Look At The Treachery of Images

This basic-looking painting is created by René Magritte in 1929. It is called The Treachery of Images. It interests me with its contradicting nature. It deals with the settled, unthinking lifestyle of humanity. The work simply consists of two parts, the painting of a pipe and the text that can be translated as "This is not a pipe". The pipe and the text are different signifiers that signify different things. The pipe image signifies an ordinary pipe, while the text signifies that one should not be deceived by images that are not reality. In other words, the text is a reminder that the audience is not looking at a pipe but a representation or a drawing of a pipe. Therefore, the text completely contrasts with the image in the signifier-signified aspect.

Moreover, the medium in which the work is displayed is rather important when analyzing it. If we think of the work in the context of a visual art piece in a museum, especially a piece of postmodern conceptual art, the audience might either be inclined to stop and ponder the meaning of the work, as is the cultural expectation from a museum-goer, or dismiss the work entirely because of their preconceptions or distance of postmodern conceptual art. The second interpreter, for this reason, might not even reach the conclusion that the image of the pipe is in fact not a real pipe but merely a picture, and stop his/her interpretive process at labeling the seeming contradiction of the text denying the image as conceptual contrarianism for the sake of conceptual contrarianism, or boundary-breaking for the sake of boundary-breaking.

It is important to note that such a cynically dismissive attitude is the product of postmodern art becoming a cultural entity defined not only by examples of postmodern art but also parodies of it. Because of this, it matters a great deal how the work of art is categorized in the zeitgeist and the attitude of the zeitgeist to that category. Time is a crucial factor here since if the work is too novel, the public might simply refuse to engage with it as it lacks a category, and if it conforms too well to a preconceived category, then the audience’s reading might be too influenced by the connotations created by years of exposure, parodying and self-parodying surrounding that category. In this case, the judgment of the piece also depends a certain amount on whether or not the audience is aware of how influential the piece was, otherwise, because of its influence, it may be thought of as cliched or relatively basic compared to everything else to come out from the same cultural category.

An insight gained from this text might be that while one can be skeptical about the relationship between signifiers and signifieds, one can also be skeptical toward skepticism toward that relationship.

This is not an old man smoking a pipe. This is an image of an old man smoking a pipe.