So, Lance Williamson C. HUMAART N02 July 12, 2017 When is a Drawing of a Pipe not a Pipe? Everyday objects and their names are what helps them be identified easily. For instance, if a child is given an apple he would automatically know that it is an apple in his hands, the same goes as seeing and identifying a chair, a bird or a door. The purpose of the human mind is to help the user characterize and classify his surroundings. It attaches color, sound, smell and imagination to a certain object hence generating its name through either combining all the traits or one of these in particular. Some surrealist artists are familiar with this attribute of the human psyche, yet very few are able to express and tamper with it. Some of these artists are no other than Rene Magritte and his painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe or “This is not a Pipe.” Born in 1898 in Brussels, England, Rene Magritte had already gained an inkling to the realm of arts as early as 12 years old. Growing up was not easy for him as his mother suffered from mental illness and his father had to lock her up constantly to prevent her from being a danger to her family, she died shortly by drowning herself in the river (Hackler and Gunderman 1). When her corpse was retrieved, her face was covered with a white sheet that, according to sources, were the bases of how Magritte would create his later artworks (Foucault and Magritte 1). During World War 2, Magritte got a job in being an advertising manager and in the 1960s his paintings gained traction, hence becoming popular to the world of art. Sadly on the same year, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died a few months later. Magritte’s paintings are famous for their idiosyncratic approach on Surrealism. While some French Surrealist painters focused on new and abstract ways in expressing their artwork, Magritte settled more on a deadpan illustrative technique that defined his picture ("Rene Magritte Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works”). His paintings have an occurring theme where a painting thrives within a painting, not an artwork referring to an outside “real-life” source from the canvas (Silvano 51). The artist seems to have converged both the textual and visual designs since some of his masterpieces contain the aforementioned two which altogether make it more mysterious. Sometimes his art also conjoins to exact resemblance to the point where they willfully multiply as if to assert themselves, where objects such as leaves on the tree will become the tree itself (L’Incendie) or a ship on the sea would resemble the sea, where all of its figure encapsulates the ocean (Le Séducteur). One known key strategy that Magritte applied was his use of repetition, since some of his works are being used repeatedly from one canvas to the next (e.g. Décalomaine (1996) and The Son of Man (1964) and Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1926) and Le Deux mystères (1966)). The men in bowler hats are a common theme in Magritte’s art and were said to interpret a self-portrait of the artist. Portrayals of his wife are also everywhere in his work as well as their apartment in Brussels. Although this might suggest that the painter uses his work to express his life, it more likely points to the places where he derives inspiration as if he believes that we need not to look far for the mysterious, since it exist everywhere in our conventional lives ("Rene Magritte Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works"). Rene Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe is a painting of a standard pipe on a canvas, below it is a short sentence written in an elementary handwriting fashion which states “This is not a pipe”. The artist paintings depict a play between words and images like his other work, Le Soir qui Tombe, which establishes the same message as the latter where in it, a shattered glass on the floor still has the reflection on the sun on it despite the shards being indoors. The broken glass represents the sun’s fall, but its reflection within the destroyed glass evoke its twin which is perfect and similar in every way. Ceci n’est pas une pipe rigs forth a moment of familiarity which soon becomes quickly evoked by absurdity wherein the picture of a pipe consists of what many are led to believe a standard form of a pipe, hence liberating it from many forms of intentionality to the utmost possible degree (Foucault and Magritte 38). In fact, to Von Morstein, the intentional object is not a pipe, but the way a pipe should look like to a common observer under standard conditions which in other words, the kind of experience is a stereotypical kind of experience (371). There are two concepts in understanding Magritte’s Pipe, first are the differences between similitude and resemblance. According to Silvano, both Foucault and Magritte agree that these two should be differentiated. Foucault’s interpretation of resemblance designates between an object and its original copy, while similarities is a process of equation, a recurrence of autonomous phenomena not linked to a hierarchical dependency. All that can be said in Magritte's work is that they present equivalence and interchangeability. The essential point for Foucault is that an image should be considered to demonstrate similitude when it draws attention to a lateral relationship which oscillates within the painting alone (50). Magritte himself was also intrigued by Foucault’s definition and stated that “Things indeed do not have resemblances, they do or do not have similitudes” (Margolis 224). His interpretation of similitude resides on not only rely on visible relationships but extends to comparisons which are classified in various levels: flavor, gravity, color, form and dimension; it signifies a kind of play between what is within the canvas and what it is trying to communicate outwards like language, images and signs not processes or relationships that generate a semiotic system of any sort (Silvano 52; Margolis 225). Resemblance, however, to Magritte, is the intervention of deliberate ideation where the mind does not just respond to an extant relationship but operates as the captivating force which brings about the essence of relatedness. Magritte extends his definition by stating that: “Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of languages and objects generally ignored in everyday life… words are not bound directly to other pictorial elements, they are only inscriptions on blobs and shapes” (38 & 39). Another way of interpreting Ceci n’est pas une pipe are through the concept of the free mind and the notion of linguistic representation. Foucault stated in his book Les Mots et Les Choses that linguistic representation or which he called “Heterotopias” are disturbing because it secretly undermines language making it impossible to name this and that (Margolis 225). His point was that mental life should liberate itself form “ordinary ideas” which prevents it from going beyond a conventional cognizance. Somehow similar to Foucault’s idea, Magritte’s theory, however, states that the mind should free itself from their confining, misleading classification of names and from their social, moral and linguistic history. He presents an overall layout of the creative mind in a threefold manner: Begin with liberating the mind from its chains, from this imagination, inspiration and predisposition becomes operative and when these are in motion it enables the “essential mental act of resemblance to occur. The actual painted canvas is, therefore, a testimony to this ‘act’ (Silvano 54). Ceci n’est pas une pipe reminds the viewers that all images are images whether they may be a portrait, radiograph, abstract art or sculpture, they do not reproduce the reality they attempt to portray (Hackler and Gunderman 2). Magritte’s artworks often result to powerful paradoxes where images are often viewed in simplicity but also provoke unsettling thoughts when examined closely. The two concepts help the viewer unveil a large amount of the painting’s secret by concluding that one, even though the Pipe itself bears a resemblance to other pipes it annuls the resemblance it bears within itself and gradually sketch upon an open network of similitudes; and two, the pipe is considered to be an aesthetic experience as through the words of Immanuel Kant: Any object can be exhibited as an object of aesthetic experience, but to reach that state one must be liberated from any purpose vis-à-vis the object of experience including cognitive purposes (Foucault and Magritte 47; Von Morstein 373). It concludes that everything that revolves around the world of art does not reveal the entirety of what it represents. Even art styles such as cubism attempt to let viewers only see every angle of the object, can only address this challenge to a limited extent. Magritte is fond of saying, “Everything we see hides another thing. We always want to see what is hidden by what we see”. He is concerned with the distance that can exist between what one thinks one knows and what one does know. By showing us that what we think we know is not always the case, he reveals that interpreting images is not so straightforward as we might otherwise think. We operate in a milieu of uncertainty, where questioning assumptions can be one of the most fruitful exercises (Hackler and Gunderman 4). References: Foucault, Michel, and Magritte René. This is not a pipe. Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, 2004. Hackler, Patrick C., and Richard B. Gunderman. “The Treachery of Images.” Academic Radiology, vol. 22, no. 11, 17 Aug. 2015, pp. 1467–1468., doi:10.1016/j.acra.2015.06.014. Levy, Silvano. “Foucault on Magritte on Resemblance.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 85, no.1, 1990, pp. 50–56. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3732794. Margolis, Joseph. “The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 43, no. 2, 1984, pp. 224–225. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/430001. "Rene Magritte Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works." The Art Story. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 July 2017. <http://www.theartstory.org/artist-magritte-rene.htm>. Von Morstein, Petra. “Magritte: Artistic and Conceptual Representation.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 41, no. 4, 1983, pp. 369–374. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/429871.