I AM FEELING FAT AND SASSY!!!!
So you ask yourself- Why is it that my good friend Randy can't sleep?
BECASUE OF STUFF LIKE THIS.
For you that aren't french speaking that says - As stated in wikipedia-
This is not a pipe which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. ...
Note that Magritte pulled the same "stunt" in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an "internal" caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. It might be true that Magritte's point in these "Ceci n'est pas" works is that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself, per se, as a Kantian noumenon, but capture only an image on the canvas. But that interpretation trivializes Magritte's insight -- for it is true of any painting, and every artist and child would admit it, that what the painting does is only present an image of a thing, and the thing itself is not on or in the canvas. So when Magritte says "This is not a pipe," what he means is that it may be possible to think that it is only an image that stands for something else, that the phenomenal reality of the pipe obscures or hides the true reality lying underneath. The difficult question, if we go this far, is whether Magritte intended to provide support for or to illustrate sympathetically Freudian dream analysis -- the treachery of dreams -- or, instead, was mocking it: "You mean this image, which is obviously a pipe-image, is not really a pipe-image? Tell me another!"
René Magritte described his paintings saying,
My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?'. It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.
Sonnavabitch.
BECASUE OF STUFF LIKE THIS.
For you that aren't french speaking that says - As stated in wikipedia-
This is not a pipe which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. ...
Note that Magritte pulled the same "stunt" in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an "internal" caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. It might be true that Magritte's point in these "Ceci n'est pas" works is that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself, per se, as a Kantian noumenon, but capture only an image on the canvas. But that interpretation trivializes Magritte's insight -- for it is true of any painting, and every artist and child would admit it, that what the painting does is only present an image of a thing, and the thing itself is not on or in the canvas. So when Magritte says "This is not a pipe," what he means is that it may be possible to think that it is only an image that stands for something else, that the phenomenal reality of the pipe obscures or hides the true reality lying underneath. The difficult question, if we go this far, is whether Magritte intended to provide support for or to illustrate sympathetically Freudian dream analysis -- the treachery of dreams -- or, instead, was mocking it: "You mean this image, which is obviously a pipe-image, is not really a pipe-image? Tell me another!"
René Magritte described his paintings saying,
My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?'. It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.
Sonnavabitch.