Work > The Treason of Photoelectric Indexicality
0:45 color HD video loop with sound, 2010. Premiered at Noble and Superior Projects' Ron Artist: MVP (Malleability vs. Preservation), September 24 through October 23, 2010.
Magritte's famous painting plays on two contrasting semantic functions of the verb "to be." These two functions exist in English and in French, so it translates well. We use the verb "to be" both in an ontological sense as well as a predicate sense. Magritte takes the phrase "this is a pipe" to have an ontological meaning: that the thing there exists as something that fulfills the form or function of pipe-ness. And, in this light, yes, we must agree that this is not in fact a pipe. But there is another common usage of the verb "to be" which denotes a quality of its subject. The phrase "this is red" does not mean that this fulfills the form or function of red-ness. "This is a pipe" qualifies the image as having a particular referent, just as "this is red" qualifies an object as having a particular color. The painting is a double-entendre, or (by which I mean no insult) a joke. The simultaneous perception of these contradicting semantic interpretations of a single syntactic structure fuels its humor. Of course, like any joke, it's a lot funnier when you don't explain it.
"The Treason of Photoelectric Indexicality" bears a similar representational relationship to its referent as Magritte's painting. This is a videographic image of an LCD screen displaying an animated re-interpretation of a particular image. What the viewer perceives is separated from its referent by god-knows how many layers of mediation and re-mediation. The acute difference in the situation between this video and Magritte's painting stems from the fact that at any given step in that chain of mediation the thing continues to fulfill the form or function of image-ness (ignoring the observation that digital images are no longer images when they are not being displayed). The modified phrase "this is not an image" is, in both ontological and predicate senses, a contradiction.