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Two lovely pictures were made for me (and my mom) by my daughter Syl for Mother's Day.
She's taking a painting class at Caltech, but she's been raised drawing- and certainly lived in museums.
She really likes Magritte. This painting, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" is a piece in my art, art history, painting and philosophy classes that took us into interesting discussions. But my daughter doesn't know that.

Of it Magritte said:

"The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe," I'd have been lying!"

And I found searching this realistic abstraction took me in interesting directions on a net I haven't decided is real or abstract, e-stract I believe.

Right now she's doing a Magritte image or homage in a painting she says will take "three months" and is "very, very small." I love hearing her talk to me about the things she's learning, translated through her lens. My daughter Sophia, to be able to take art or painting, had to take a kind of "What is art?" class at UCSB,and listening to her describe what she is studying is similarly fascinating. The class started with the performance art where the guy has his friend shoot him. Welcome to my world girls.

I decided to put the phrase from the painting into a google search and turned up this.
"To Paint is Not To Affirm" Foucault

I want to grab that page and put it here, it's very interesting, but I shouldn't.
It's just fascinating to think about image, thing, word, meaning, abstraction, real, nothing.....

From Wiki I found that others have thought awhile on this pipe, admittedly cracking me up (pun there if you look):

French literary critic and philosopher Michel Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox in his 1973 book, This Is Not a Pipe (English edition, 1991).

In Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, the painting is used as an introduction to the second chapter. McCloud points out that, not only is the version that appears in his book not a pipe, it is actually several printed copies of a drawing of a painting of a pipe.^[4]

Douglas Hofstadter also discusses this painting and other images like it in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, a work on cognition and consciousness.^[5]

Then I found a fascinating "review."

This could be a pipe:
Foucault, irrealism and Ceci n'est pas une pipe

by G.S. Evans

It had a quote most interesting that drew me in:

"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..." [p.9]. Thus, he argued, the drawing (and the series of paintings by Magritte that it inspired) strips us of the certainty that the pipe is a pipe, and "inaugurates a play of transferences that run, proliferate, propagate, and correspond within the layout of the painting, affirming and representing nothing."

Then I read this excerpt:

But to what end this strangeness? Foucault considers it to be Magritte's contribution to the anti-linguistic program of modernism, intended to show, in the words of James Harkness' introduction to Foucault's essay, that "a painting is nothing other than itself, autonomous from the language that lies buried in representational realism." But where painters such as Klee and Kandinsky used abstraction to make their point, Magritte "allows the old space of representation to rule, but only at the surface, no more than a polished stone, bearing words and shapes: beneath, nothing." [41] In spite of initial appearances, a work by Magritte is a "gravestone" of representational realism. "Magritte names his paintings in order to focus attention upon the very act of naming," Foucault writes. "And yet in this split and drifting space, strange bonds are knit, there occur intrusions, brusque and destructive invasions, avalanches of images into the milieu of words, and verbal lightning flashes that streak and shatter the drawings." [p.36] Magritte thus helps to overthrow two principles that, according to Foucault, long governed painting. The first is the principle of resemblance, which "presumes a primary reference that prescribes and classes" copies, where "either the text is ruled by the image (as in those paintings where a book, an inscription, or the name of a person are represented); or else the image is ruled by the text (as in books where a drawing completes, as if it were merely taking a short cut, the message that words are charged to represent)." Where "verbal signs and visual representations are never given at once. An order always hierarchizes them, running from the figure to discourse or from discourse to the figure." [32-33] The second, related principle is that there is "an equivalence between the fact of resemblance and the affirmation of a representative bond. Let a figure resemble an object (or some other figure), and that alone is enough for there to slip into the pure play of the painting a statement--obvious, banal, repeated a thousand times yet almost always silent...[that] 'what you see is that.'" [34]

Magritte's unraveled calligrams, according to Foucault, help to show that neither language nor painting "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 that was interesting.
Then the essayist argues their understandings, taking Foucault to task:

"...Foucault--in this essay, and for whatever reason--hasn't provided us with any rationale for his complete rejection of the image as an analogue of the object. We must look elsewhere in his writing to try and deduce this rationale, which very quickly brings us to Foucault's argument in The Order of Things that there is a mystical identification of words with the essences of things in Western culture, where languages "speak the heaven and the earth of which they are the image; [and] reproduce in their most material architecture the cross whose coming they announce--that coming which established its existence in turn through the Scriptures and the Word." This way of thinking (which Foucault considers to be a foundation of Western thought), then, goes back all the way to the Old Testament, where the Word is the Beginning. Thus the word "pipe" can't serve as a pointer for the simple reason that it has already become, in the mind of the viewer of the drawing, the thing itself in this mystical, Platonic fashion. And hence the quandary that Foucault suggests, and which forms the basis for the rest of his essay.

But we are not convinced that this saves Foucault's explanation: evoking this mystical bond still doesn't, in our view, explain why the viewer so readily accepts that the drawing of the pipe is an analogue of the pipe. Even in that moment when the viewer, in considering the basic paradox of the drawing, suspends the judgment, "this is a drawing of a pipe" (at which level the title of the drawing is very much true), and accepts the drawn pipe as being a "real" pipe (at which point the title becomes absurd), he or she doesn't, as we've already said, reach for the pipe to smoke it. In any case, this moment when the viewer becomes captivated by the drawing can be likened to the kind of reverie that we enter into when we read a book, watch a movie, etc.: where we go from seeing or experiencing the analogues as only being representations to actually being the thing itself. But, as with any reverie, a sudden contact with "reality" will snap the viewer out of it. The viewer of Magritte's drawing, once he enters this reverie, might well be thinking "this is a pipe"--indeed must be if he or she will take any interest in the drawing beyond its technical or material aspects--but a loud noise, another viewer in the gallery, a call coming into his or her cell phone, will all bring the viewer back to the realization that the drawn pipe is simply a representation of a "real" pipe. If this, then, is the mystical bond Foucault is speaking of, it is a short-lived one. "

My Mother's day pipe, not pipe, is so awesome. It reminds me of how hard it is to talk to the love I have for my kids. The joy in their thinking, lives. Their humor. And to get a pipe, not pipe, from your child for Mother's day, a treatise on meanings, analogies, the slippery slopes of art, image, meaning that defined my thinking life-this is really such a fascinating perception.
Now this searching took me kind of all over, you can imagine.

All titled like the painting.

It's funny but now I think of this image as a statement on iconographic images.
And it does have a "strangeness" that is hard to hold.
A wonderful gift for her Momma. Happy Mother's Day.


( Just found this funny link.)