I first heard of this Belgian artist when i was doing my Masters in Applied Linguistics, six to seven years back. This picture and his illumination of the topic helped me to realise the 'what' of symbolic representation. What do you see in the picture? Is it a pipe? No, argued Rene Magritte. It is a picture of a pipe. The words on the picture says, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." ("This is not a pipe"). Try filling the picture with tabacco and immediately we will realise that it is not a pipe. In fact, to further the argument, i would say that what we see here is an electronic picture of a pipe.
Magritte thus named this provocative piece "The Treachery of Images. If you want to find out more about this intriguing artist, see: http://www.rene-magritte.org/
Henceforth this revelation, the penguins which I do have become "symbolic representation of a penguin." Surprisingly, when i went to a particular class of an
all-girls primary school, they seemed to respond with understanding. They started saying things like:"Oh, i am now making a symbolic representation of a penguin" or a "symbolic representation of this and that." They waxed this statement until it reached a tipping point of being cool. Haha.
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