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Title
THE CURIOUS CASE OF SALVADOR DALI
Release Date
2009-06-27
Time
07:03:00
Comment
Article Text
JUNE 27, 2009. I offer one of my favorite pieces. I've had many requests to repost it.
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Dali was often involved with creating his own symbols. The critics would have declared him a minor lunatic if he hadn't had such formidable classical painting skills.
He placed those symbols (the notorious melting watch, the face and body of his wife, the ornate and fierce skeletal structures of unknown creatures) on the canvas as if they had as much right to be there as any familiar object. This was quite troubling to many people. If an immense jawbone that was also a rib or a forked femur could rival a perfectly rendered lamp or couch or book, where were all the accountrements and assurances of modern comfortable living? Where was the pleasantly mesmerizing effect of a predictable existence? Where was a class structure that depended on money and cultural slogans?
To make it worse, Dali invented vast comedies on canvas. But the overall joke turned, as the viewer's eye moved, into a nightmare. In fact, a bewildering mix of attitudes sprang out from the paintings.
What was the man doing? Was he making fun of the audience? Was he simply showing off? Was he inventing waking dreams? Was he, God forbid, actually imagining something entirely new that resisted classification?
Dali's greatest paintings were undeniable symphonies, and mere acknowledgment of his talent would not explain how he composed the movements.
Words failed viewers and critics and colleagues and enemies.
But they didn't fail Dali. He took every occasion to explain his work. However, his explications were handed out in a way that made it plain he was telling tall tales---interesting, hilarious, and preposterous tall tales.
Every interview and press conference he gave gave birth to more attacks on him. Was he inviting scorn? Was he really above it all? Was he toying with the press like some god?
Media analysts flocked to make him persona non grata, but what was the persona they were exiling? They had no idea then, and they have no idea now.
It comes back to this: when you invent something truly novel, you know that you are going to stir the forces trapped within others that aspire to do the very same thing. You know that others are going to begin by denying that anything truly NEW even exists. That DOES make it a comedy, whether you want to admit it or not.
It is possible that every statement ever uttered in public by Dali was a lie. A fabrication. An invention dedicated to constructing a massive (and contradictory) persona.
Commentators who try to take on Dali's life usually center on the early death of his young brother as the core explanation for Dali's "basic confusion"---which resulted in his bizarre approach to his own fame.
However, these days, with good reason, we might say that Dali was playing the media game on his own terms, after realizing that no reporter wanted the real Dali (whatever that might mean)---some fiction was being asked for, and the artist was merely being accommodating.
He was creating a persona that matched his paintings.
It is generally acknowledged that no artist of the 20th century was superior to Dali in the ability to render realistic detail.
But of course Dali's work was not about realism.
The most complex paintings---see, for example, Christopher Columbus Discovering America and The Hallucinogenic Toreador---portrayed the interpenetration of various solidities of realities more or less occupying the same space.
I'm sure that if Dali were living today, he would execute a brain-bending UFO landing on the front lawn of the White House. Such a painting would envelop the viewer with several simultaneous dimensions colliding outside the president's mansion.
At some point in his career, Dali saw (decided) there was no limit to what he could assemble in the same space---and there was no limit to the number of spaces he could corral into the same canvas. A painting could become a science-fiction novel reaching into several pasts and futures. The protagonist (the viewer) could find himself in such a simultaneity.
Critics have attacked the paintings relentlessly. They are offended at Dali's skill, which matches the best work of the meticulous Dutch Renaissance masters. They hate the dissonance. It's a sign that Dali could give full play to his imagination---a sin of the first order. They resent Dali's mordant wit and rankle at the idea that Dali could carry out monstrous jokes---in such fierce extended detail---on any given canvas.
But above all, the sheer imagination harpoons the critics. How dare a painter turn reality upside down so blantantly, while rubbing their faces in the detail.
The cherry on the cake was: for every attack the critics launched at Dali the man (they really had no idea who he was), Dali would come back at them with yet another elaborate piece of fiction about himself. It was unfair. The critics were "devoted to the truth." The painter was free to invent himself over and over as many times as he fancied.
At best (and it was not very good), a critic might admit Dali was a complete mystery. But the press does not like that outcome. Exposure of the very entrails of a celebrity is necessary. The press adopts its own pose: it is dedicated to taking things apart and laying them bare. (Of course, that strategy is based on the conniving and secret concept that journalistic probing is, at the end, supposed to leave the status quo intact.)
Dali was holding up a mirror. He was saying, "You people are like me. We're all doing fiction. I'm much better at it. In the process, I get at a much deeper truth."
Dali was the hallucinogenic toreador. He was holding off and skirting the charges of the critics and the reporters. They rushed by him. He moved with his cape---and got out of the way.
The principles of organized society dictate that a person must be who he is, even if that is a cartoon of a cartoon. A person must be one recognizable caricature, must be IDed, must have one basic function. Must---as a civilization goes down the trail of decline---be watched and taped and profiled.
When a person shows up who is many different things, who can invent himself at the drop of hat, who seems to stand in 14 different places at the same time, the Order trembles.
This is not acceptable. Everything is based on One. Not seven, not 12, not 457.
What you said yesterday must synchronize with what you say today.
This rule ("being the thing you are") guarantees that human beings will resonate with the premise that we all live and think and work in one continuum of space and time.
Whatever he was, however despicable he may have been in certain respects, Dali broke that egg. Broke the cardinal rule.
He reveled in doing it. He made people wait for an answer about himself, and the answer never came. Instead, he gave them a hundred answers, and they contradicted one another.
He threw people back on their own resources, and those resources proved to be severely limited.
How harsh for conventional critics to discover that nothing in Dali's education produced an explanation for his ability to render an object so perfectly on the canvas. It was almost as if, deciding that he would present competing and dissonant circumstances inside one painting, he perversely ENABLED himself to do the job with such exacting skill, "making subversive photographs come to life."
That was too much. No one can invent an ability like that out of thin air. It goes against all the laws of human nature.
But there the paintings are.
Imagination realized.
Suck on that apple.
The only choice critics had was to label Dali the great oddity, the bizarre and mad exception in the history of modern art.
A category all his own.
Like it or not, Dali paved the way for many others. He opened doors and windows. And the pressure has been building. The growing failure of major institutions (organized religion, psychology, education, government) to keep the cork in the bottle signals the prison break in progress.
More people understand that the veil is not really a veil of tears. It's a curtain drawn across the creative force.
It's no accident, on a personal level, that my articles on the continuum, the paranormal, and imagination have garnered a far greater and more intense response than anything I've written on this site since its beginning nine years ago.
The pot is boiling. People want out. It remains to be seen whether people will admit that the veil was and is ultimately of their own making. This is the hard step. It's always easier to hold ourselves in check with a variety of critiques pointed outward. I know, there are certainly elites that deserve criticism and more. But somewhere along the line we have to give the green light to our own creative power. That is the first great day. That's the dawn of no boundaries. Everything we've been taught tells us it's impossible. It's weird. It's crazy. It's meaningless. We don't have it within us. We're small and stupid and should maintain silence and propriety in the face of greater power and wisdom. We must abide by the rule of One. We must, at best, "surrender to the universe."
But what if, when we come around the far turn, we see that the universe is us? Is one part of imagination? Is a twinkling rendition we installed to keep us titillated with dreams that would forever drift out of reach?
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com