This Is Not A Blog
The Painting “The Treachery of Images” belongs to a series of word-image paintings by René Magritte. René Magritte was a surrealist artist who created his paintings depicting reactions and different perspectives, which was left for the viewer to perceive they way they wanted them to. One of his famous paintings, “La Trahison des images” (“This is Not A Pipe”) is an oil on canvas, with a carefully rendered tones of brown. The painting consists of a wooden pipe with a beige background with “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This Is Not A Pipe”) captioned for the painting. This painting may seem a bit odd to the viewers. Magritte would often misname the objects in the painting to show that even the most photorealistic painting may represent something else metaphorically or symbolically. What we perceive from art or objects around us are merely just a connection between what is said about it and what we see.
Considering Korzybski’s experiment, where he covered a pack of biscuits with white and offered some to his students and kept remarking that the biscuits are tasty, led to students also enjoying the biscuits and agreeing with the remarks Korzybski made about them. He then removed the white packaging of the biscuits revealing the original packaging of the biscuits, which were biscuits meant for dogs, made the students shocked and a few pukish. This experiment proves how the human mind tends to perceive anything with what a caption or a label depicts it to be. Korzybski said that people don’t just eat food but words too. What is said about an object can be more important about the object itself.
An objects representation is affected by our senses and interpretations given by our brain. Many people would relate differently with a ‘signifier’ as everyone has a different version of what a ‘signified’, with respect to the “signifier”, would be to them. Which is why when a message is sent verbally across many people the message gets many different versions each different when it flows from one person to the other, as people have different interpretations of anything in this world and no two brains are the same. We never perceive an object as what it really is and just what it visually looks like or what it resembles. This is what Magritte’s painting “This Is Not A Pipe” represents.
He would constantly question the predefined conventions of language and visual representation, by using methods that included the misnaming of objects, mirroring and concealment, etc. to cast doubt on the nature of appearances, both in the paintings and in reality itself. Magritte’s painting “This Is Not A Pipe” and its caption together prompted people to question what the object painted in his painting depicts. His deliberate attempt to make people question themselves about what their perspective should be about the painting or what should they imagine it to be proves the statement that art is something that should challenge or change people’s perspective about something and not merely depend on the predefined notion about something.
In conclusion, to be a designer in this world where people have innumerable perspectives about the same thing, it is important to keep our minds flexible and open to different viewpoints about a design to make something functional and universal.
References :
- https://www.learner.org/series/art-through-time-a-global-view/writing/la-trahison-des-images-ceci-nest-pas-une-pipe/
- renemagritte.org/the-treachery-of-images.jsp
- https://arthistoryunstuffed.com/michel-foucault-representation-pipe/
- https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fusionmagazine.org%2Fwhy-this-is-not-a-pipe%2F&psig=AOvVaw0rUZrjq6Ieb22inVVxSa2_&ust=1613165936978000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAIQjRxqFwoTCNin1cnl4u4CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAT
