“Ah, the famous pipe. I’ve been criticized enough for it! And yet, can it be stuffed with tobacco, my pipe? No, it can’t be, it’s just a representation. So if I had written, ‘This is a pipe’ below the picture, I would have been lying.” - Rene Magritte, 1966
"We all search for authenticity, for the real thing, in every aspect of our life because we intuit that it exists, but it's very hard to find. The idea of originality has a lot of heat around it, and we hunger for the new as a way of denying how attached we are to the old. I tend to go back to things, though, and believe we all have a compulsion to repeat, and that repetition is essentially what our lives are.” – Sherrie Levine, 1996
Sherrie Levine first gained attention as part of a school of post-Conceptualist Appropriationists in the 1980’s. As a rule, she only appropriates art by deceased white male artists with a goal to, in her own words, “contaminate history.” (Kristin McKenna, Sherrie Levine and the Art of the Remake, Los Angeles Times, November 17, 1996.) Through her practice, Levine is able to reprise both images and objects and place them in front of a new audience, demonstrating how art can accumulate new meanings over time. In the present work Une Pipe, we see Levine referencing René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images ("Ceci n'est pas une pipe."). Even though Levine’s pipe is three-dimensional, it is no more real than Magritte’s drawing of a pipe. Both works serve as a materialization of a representation, undermining the assumptions behind what a realistic representation is and can be.