Current mood:

jittery

Mais bien sûr c'est une pipe!
[But of course it's a pipe!]

La Trahison des Images
[The Treachery of Images]

I always kind of space out in the direction of this picture during class. (That and the creepy guy who says "children are tasty.") I guess I like it because it cleverly challenges your perception while still being completely logical. It still sort of confuses me, but it's easier to organize my brain when I figure things out writing about them. So bear with me while I try to make something coherent from bits and pieces of my thoughts.

When I first saw it I thought That is clearly a pipe. What else could it be?
Then I realized the caption was right! Surprise, surprise. I tilted my head to the left, and I saw a dancing old man!

No, not really. Not at all. Feel free to stare at it all day long... You wont see a dancing man, and you wont see a pipe. (Unless you happen to see your grandpa in the other room doing a crazy little jig and taking a smoke.)

What you see is not a pipe; it's a picture of a pipe.

Actually the reason I picked this was because it reminded me of something someone said to me a while ago. They said "the word 'dog' doesn't bite." I thought it was one of those sayings people use to try to sound smart, and that make sense, but at the same time don't really make much sense. But now I understand better. It shows the difference between words and actual things, just like the picture shows the difference between images and actual things. The witty little Belgian dude himself said you can't stuff tobacco in it.
Or maybe Magritte was just getting pissed off at all the people saying that his work wasn't realistic because he was a surrealist. Maybe he wanted to show that no matter how closely we can come to realistically portraying something in a painting, we can never catch the item itself.

Do you hear what I'm saying?
If you do, check your ears, because I haven't said anything...

   It's like... Currency. All there is behind it is the belief that it is worth something. Way back when we used bartering, like "I'll give you my chicken if you give me that burrito." Then we used coins made of precious metals and stuff. Those were real, tangible things that were actually worth something. But now you give the guy 5 little pieces of paper and he gives you a burrito. The only reason he accepts this as payment is because he believes that it's worth something too.
The only reason we think this is a pipe is the belief that it represents a pipe and the belief that there is some substance behind it. But the painting can never replace the object itself because you can't smoke a picture of a pipe. (Shut up you logicians. I know you can.)
(Okay, that was a terrible analogy. Like all my analogies.)

  You see that picture and think "pipe." But why? Our past experiences are the only things that make us assume that this is a pipe. A child who doesn't know any better might surmise that it is a toy. (And let's face it, nowadays who the hell smokes a pipe? Maybe if you gave them a picture of a TV and said "this is not a TV" you'd get a better reaction...)
We base all of our perceptions off of our previous knowledge of the world and prejudgment which we have accumulated over our lifetimes. [schema!] We know certain things are good and bad, and certain things are pipes and some are dancing old men, but we only learn these things through repetition. When we're kids, they show us a flashcard depicting an insect and say "this is a butterfly." We soon accept that it is almost as much a butterfly as the one on the flower outside, about which they say the same thing.

So what makes a pipe a pipe? The way it looks, or the fact that one could smoke with it? The fact that we say it is one? But we could say that a lamp was a pipe. Would that make it so? The word "pipe" is just a random composite of letters equated with an object. Even a pipe that you can hold in your hands is not a pipe; we just call it a pipe.
Conveniently enough, they use the same four arbitrary letters in French as well as in English so this didn't get more confusing than it already was with my poor analytical skills.

Or--another brilliant idea--Maybe it's a piece of chocolate wrapped in pipe-looking foil!

Dang that wasn't really very coherent. Oh well, I don't want to fix anything because I'm lazy.