Name: What Is The Treachery of Images?
Uploaded: 2025-06-16T01:08:50.000Z
Duration: 6 min 32 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Started analyzing paintings as a way to confront the problem of not engaging with certain forms and genres of art

I mean you stand at a museum look at a Kandinsky or a Monet or Seurat and wonder

Certain paintings seem particularly stubborn unwilling to move even an inch in your direction leaving you with a massive void to fill with unanchored interpretation

But what about paintings that do the opposite René Magritte's the treachery of images

Moves more than an inch in the direction of the viewer

It goes all the way the painting speaks in a language that we can understand which is to say language

This is not a pipe the painting actually says something it engages it talks

Let's talk for a moment about René Magritte one of the most famous and lasting of the surrealist artists a man

Who never really thought of himself as a painter more a thinker that used images to express himself

Once he landed on an aesthetic style it never really changed or evolved throughout his career well versed in

Philosophical writing from Plato to Foucault he used that style to investigate

Ideas his program was to confuse to evoke mystery to show us that what we want is always

Behind the thing we see and that the obstruction can never be removed completely because it's not in the object

The treachery of images approaches these themes directly the painting at first is obvious in its message

It shows an image of a pipe and then underneath the image it tells or reminds the viewer that

This is not a pipe and we can infer the rest obviously that's not a pipe

It's a representation of a pipe and Magritte means to show us that representations are not the real thing they only

Resemble the real thing but of course that's common sense who in the world would argue the opposite position

But a curious question comes out of this if someone showed you this image and asked you what it was

Probably you'd say it's an apple right or what about this image? It's a man or this this is a train

This is a house. This is a dog. This is a hand

This little accident of language is not really an accident at all for many hundreds of years human beings have supposed that language and reality

Had an organic relationship that the names of things in a way

Arose out of the things themselves that a tree was in fact a tree that Kanye West is in fact

Kanye West and that a pipe is really a pipe all of that was challenged by the famous linguist

Ferdinand de Saussure an extremely influential figure who saw that a thing and its name have a totally arbitrary

Relationship that we don't really know things but only access their shadow

Through language in which everything has a meaning in the context of the system after so many centuries of trusting the word

Implicitly these insights were hard won so hard won that Magritte saw that the old

Wrongheaded ways of thinking about language were still hiding in the way we thought and talked about images realistic painting plays on

Resemblance and resemblance suggests a hierarchy that the image of a pipe

Resembles that it points outside language to the thing in itself

The falseness of this claim is what inspired the abstract artists to move beyond

Resemblance into a field in which painting had no referent in reality as such Magritte on the other hand makes this point using the false premises of resemblance and

Shatters them from within the visual secret dependence on language is laid bare in the treachery of images

Indeed that dependence is the treachery of images here

We have an image and a sentence laid out like a page from a botanical textbook begging to be connected

But why should we connect them? Why should the sentence and the image refer to one another?

How do we know that the word this points upward?

Of course, we don't know but the pronoun the resemblance and the name all make that connection inevitable

And it's that inevitability that's made real in every aspect of our lives

We go about our days confident that everything we see could be said and that the images we say could be seen

But if you've ever used the phrase you had to be there

You know that these are two realities that do not overlap in the way we act like they do

But this is not a pipe either and if this is not a pipe then the sentence scrawled in its cute schoolboy cursive is

Actually a contradiction a contradiction that pulls the whole painting apart at the seams and makes it utter

Nonsense, I don't know if Magritte laughed about that but I hope he did because what's more forceful not moving an inch in the direction of the viewer or

Moving a question all the way into the center of the viewers mind that on the slightest prodding and examination implodes

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