Magritte, The Treachery of Images (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), 1929
The Cafe Irreal excerpt
What made the drawing so interesting for Foucault was the unusual effect (what he termed the "strangeness") created by the drawing's highly realistic depiction of a pipe on the one hand and the legend that Magritte wrote below it, which states, "This is not a pipe." Foucault argued that the incongruity between the pipe and its legend illustrated his position, stated elsewhere, that "[neither words nor the visible] can be reduced to the other's terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say. And it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying..."
This could be a pipe: Foucault, irrealism and Ceci n'est pas une pipe by G.S. Evans
This could be a pipe: Foucault, irrealism and Ceci n'est pas une pipe by G.S. Evans
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| René François Ghislain Magritte |
A Belgian surrealist painter, Rene Magritte’s witty and thought-provoking paintings sought to have viewers question their perceptions of reality, and become hypersensitive to the world around them. Rene Magritte