This simple poetry broadside mimics the rhetorical form of a popular call-and-response, in which cheerleaders ask their respondents to spell out the name of the object-subject performing for the crowd. The ‘content’ of this new cheer exaggeratedly refers to René Magritte’s famous painting La trahison des images [The Treachery of Images] (1929) and the broader suspicion of realist referentiality that painting has become a classic symbol of.
Magritte painted numerous variations of the same painting, sometimes translating the text, sometimes swapping the pipe for another object. This is not another translation.
Launched at the inaugural ASP Fair at ICA (London) in September 2015.
