Ceci n'est pas une pipe

Abstract

First version, that of 1926, I believe: a pipe, carefully drawn; and underneath (in a regular, deliberate, artificial hand, the kind of schoolboy script you might find on the first line of an exercise book or remaining on the blackboard after the teacher's demonstration), this sentence: This is not a pipe. The other version-and the last, I should think-can be found in Dawn at the Antipodes. Same pipe, same statement, same script. But instead of being juxtaposed in an indifferent space with neither limit nor specification, text and figure are placed within a frame, itself resting on an easel which stands on very evident floorboards. Up above, a pipe just like the one drawn in the frame but much larger. In the first version, only the simplicity is disconcerting. The second visibly multiplies the deliberate uncertainties. The frame leaning against the easel and resting on wooden pegs suggests a painter's picture: a finished, exhibited work which bears, for a potential spectator, the statement commenting on or explaining it. And yet this naive script which is in fact neither the work's title nor one of its pictural elements, the absence of any other indication of the painter's presence, the simplicity of the grouping, the broad planks of the floor-all this suggests a blackboard in a classroom; perhaps a wipe of a rag will soon erase both drawing and text; or perhaps it will erase only one or the other in order to correct 'the mistake' (drawing something which will not really be a pipe, or writing a sentence affirming that this is indeed a pipe). A temporary mistake (a 'miswriting', as we might say a misunderstanding) which a gesture will scatter into so much white dust? But even this is only the least of the uncertainties. Here are some others: there are two pipes. Or rather two drawings of one pipe? Or else a pipe and its drawing, or else two drawings each representing a pipe, or else two drawings one of which represents a pipe but not the other, or else two drawings neither one of which is or represents a pipe? And now I catch myself confusing be and represent as if they were equivalent, as if a drawing were what it represents; and I also see that if I had (and I

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