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ISIS Press Release 08/10/08
Salvador Dalí, Paranoia and Dissolution of Time
Martin Ries dissects The Persistence of Memory
Dalí the young trouble-maker
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) showed precocious gifts
in the local Catholic schools in Figueras Spain
where he was born, as well as at the National School of Fine Arts in Madrid where he studied
art. He exhibited decided megalomania, and impressed everyone as a troublemaker.
He was expelled from school more than once and served jail terms for anti-government
activities. While a student he met poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who was later
murdered during the Civil War. He wrote the script for the film, Un Chien
andalou with Spanish-born film maker Luis Buňuel before joining or
even meeting the Surrealists.
Despite bizarre activities and outlandish
statements, the sum total of Dalí’s work, including his writings, represents
much more than eccentricity, narcissism and slick posturing. Thus the tendency
to dismiss Dalí is not completely fair, considering his early articles in
Catalonian and Spanish vanguard magazines during the 1920s, that are serious
and without his familiar later pretension.
In 1927, Dalí discovered Surrealism
in the art magazines. It was a revelation, and he painted Blood Is Sweeter
than Honey, which featured images that continued to obsess him.
The “paranoiac-critical” artist
In the 1920s-30s, the Austrian psychologist Sigmund
Freud’s theories on the unconscious mind
became so pervasive as to be taken for granted by the Surrealists. Freud
used the psychoanalytic device of free association to trace the symbolic meaning
of dream imagery to its source in the unconscious; Dalí applied the same method
to his pictorial imagery.
Based on psychoanalytic studies of
paranoiac dementia, Dalí consciously charged his paintings with psychological
meaning which he called his “paranoiac-critical method”, using countless symbols
of persecution mania, sharp instruments (castration), sexual fetishes, and
phallic images, many taken directly from case histories of paranoia in Dr.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, as well as from Freud’s
works.
Paranoia is a mental disease characterized
by delusions and projections of personal conflicts ascribed to the supposed
hostility of others. Dalí’s work imitates paranoiac conditions, because while
the paranoiac is able to find proof of persecution, Dali only simulated the
illness. He used paranoia less in the psychiatric sense than the etymological
sense: para, meaning alternate, noia meaning mind. Thus, his
"paranoiac-critical method" became a forced inspiration as Dalí
submitted his paintings at once to the caprice of dream and wide-awake calculation.
His images, based on readings in psychiatry, eventually began displacing experiences
drawn from his own psyche.
Dissolution of mechanical time
In The Persistence of Memory (1931, oil
on canvas, Museum of Modern Art), the long-venerated Newtonian cosmos, shattered
by Einstein’s special theory of relativity in the early part of the 20th century,
had to be discarded and replaced. “At rest” was no longer a reality as the
philosophical perception of time shifted from absolute to an eternal becoming.
There was much discussion on questions of when time began, will it exist forever,
and had it always existed. French philosopher Henri Bergson is supposed to
have quipped: “Time is nature’s way of preventing everything from happening
at once.” The Church thought of time as eternity, citing medieval theologian
Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae where he compares completeness, perfection,
and infinity, to God.
The deep perspective in Persistence
suggests time past, with the viewer deserted and lost in infinity. Interestingly,
Salvador (“Saviour”) Dalí’s anti-clerical sentiment is reflected in
his use of Christian and Freudian images in the painting; and as if to emphasize
the reality of his hallucinations, his surreal iconography is placed in the
landscape of the bay at Port Lligat on the Costa Brava, his home and
studio. Although he describes the origin of the soft watches as derived from
dreaming of Camembert cheese, Marcel Jean, in his History of Surrealist
Painting, says they symbolize impotence: montre not only means
“watch” in French, but is also the imperative form of the verb montrer,
“to show”. A sick child must show his tongue to the doctor, montrer la
molle, which sounds the same as la montre molle “soft watch”.
Usually we think of these bent watches as referring to Einstein's theory in
which our world is becoming a spatio-temporal continuum; the world's concept
of time and space was certainly changing. The three open and vulnerable watches
(past, present, future?) are within orthogonals that point to the top center
of the painting (heaven?).
According to Freud, menstrual periodicity
transforms the concept of time into a feminine symbol, and the fourth watch,
closed, hard and impregnable, has been diagnosed as a feminine symbol. Certainly
this watch in the foreground is a vital red, while the middle-ground watch
is softened to orange, and the background timepiece is a lifeless gray. Could
the hands on the flaccid watches refer to the traditional medical-scientific
sign for male?
Of ants and flies and other Christian symbols
There are further symbolisms in the painting. Ants
usually suggest putrefaction and decay; the rigid watch is attacked by scavenger
ants, indicating the inorganic is becoming organic and vulnerable. However,
as the watch is closed and red with life, time is unattainable and the ants
attack without success, implying triumph over death and decay via procreation
or immortality. In Christian doctrine, ants signify provident man, the one
who chooses the true doctrine and rejects heresy. The fly, on the other hand,
has long been considered a bearer of pestilence and evil (Lord of the Flies,
or Beelzebub, is from Ba al-z' bub, lord + fly, a god of the ancient
Philistines, averter of insects). In Christian symbology, the fly symbolizes
evil.
The amoeba or fetal image suggests
the primordial beginnings of life, and like a lost soul in infinity, is stranded
on a barren beach with its life-giving water (holy water?) in the far distance.
This fetal image, usually interpreted as a self-portrait, appears in several
other paintings, including The Great Masturbator. The soft tongue,
similar to the limp watches, is a well known Freudian symbol for the penis;
Dali, in his Secret Life of Salvador Dali, overtly makes public his
anxieties about sexual dysfunction. Trees, tall and erect, are male symbols
according to Freud, but this tree is scrawny and lifeless. The extending
phallic branch, with its post-coital watch, points to rock formations which
in actuality are the granite outcroppings above the Bay of Cullero near Dali's home.
“Geology has an oppressive melancholy,” stated the artist, “this melancholy
has its course in the idea that time is working against it.” Again, the rock
is a symbol of Christian steadfastness, and suggests the antithesis of the
biological objects which are subject to the laws of change and disintegration.
According to medieval Christian legend,
the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil withered when Adam and Eve ate the
forbidden fruit. Thus the dead tree in the Italian Gothic painter and architect
Giotto’s Lamentation, and later, in the works of Italian Renaissance
artists Resurrection by della Francesca and Fall and Expulsion
by Michelangelo, all refer to original sin, otherwise known as Freud’s Oedipus
Complex. The cubes on the left may possibly have some reference to Cubism,
although again, they are symbols of stability in Christian iconology.
Ants, the fly, yielding watches, foetus,
open horizon, all suggest transitory, non-persisting time.
Realism dominates
Dalí's work because the visual logic of the picture makes itself
felt in the sense that the dreamlike emphasis can be conveyed only when the
objects are neither stylized nor abstract, but factually rendered. Only in
this way can the iconology be realized and the “irrationalism” of Dalí express
itself. It is interesting that the irrationalism and hyperbole of Surrealism,
and especially of Dalí, are not very highly regarded in the art world today
(this paper originally written in 1991), while abstraction continues to grow
and hold our attention. Even Freudian dream theory is now challenged; many
neuroscientists and psychiatrists argue that dreams do not stem from unacceptable
hidden desires and fears but actually are caused by spontaneous electrochemical
signals in the brain which we cannot help investing with meaning.
But Dalí
continues to fascinate.
An earlier version of this paper was commissioned and published by St.
James Press, for Contemporary Masterworks, Colin Naylor, ed., London
& Chicago, 1991. Professor Emeritus at Long Island University,
Martin Ries, artist and art historian, was Assistant Director of the Hudson
River Museum, and studied art history at Hunter
College. He has published widely, and exhibited his works in
the United States and elsewhere. For more see http://www.martinries.com/
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