Pipes. Literally.

A ventriloquist’s performance relies on the misalignment of words, images, and objects. It is a self-reflective act in which both the dummy and the ventriloquist are fictive characters, constantly switching roles: owner-user, subject-object, original-copy. Not Treachery groups a wide array of disparate pipes from the museum’s many collections, starting with Une Pipe (A Pipe) by American artist Sherrie Levine, and evokes the treachery of images, literalizations, and taxonomies. Levine’s pipe talks back and contradicts the famous painting by René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe), which has been defined as a treatise on the impossibility of reconciling words, images, and objects. “Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged,” said Levine in an artist statement. “We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash. A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.”