Dali, the painter: Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marqués de Dalí de Pubol (11 May 1904 - 23 January 1989).
His self-appointed task: shake up reality.
Make the impossible intrude on the ordinary. Expose and confound the
critics and the press. Whenever the establishment tries to define who
he is, become something else.
The critics would have declared Dali a mental patient if he hadn't had such formidable classical painting skills.
He placed his repeating images (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 (on the same canvas), where were all the safe and easy
accoutrements and assurances of modern comfortable living?
Where was the pleasantly mesmerizing effect of a predictable existence?
Where was a protective class structure?
To make it worse, Dali invented vast comedies. But the overall joke
turned, as the viewer's eye moved, into a nightmare, into an entrancing
interlude of music, a memory of something that had never happened, a
gang of genies coming out of corked bottles.
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 perverse Olympian?
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 behavior."
However, these days, with good reason, we might more correctly 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 self 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---brilliantly orchestrated 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 on 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 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 blatantly, 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.
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 historians. They rushed at him. He
moved with his cape---and danced 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 forever, must be IDed, must have one basic
function. Must---as a civilization goes down the trail of decline---be
watched and recorded 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.
(Fake) reality declares: what you said yesterday must synchronize absolutely with what you say today.
This rule ("being the only 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. One. Only one. Forever.
That's the biggest joke of all. The big lie.
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,
improvised like odd-shaped and meticulous reveries.
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 realities 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.
But there the paintings are.
Imagination realized.
No comments:
Post a Comment