Born in 1904, Salvador Dali grew up in the Spanish province of Catalonia during one of the most tumultuous periods in all of human history. Although Spain remained neutral in what was then called the Great War, but would turn out to be the lesser conflict in terms of horror in the twentieth century, the young Dali would still have been aware of the horrors of mustard gas, of the worldwide influenza epidemic that started in 1918, as well as the worldwide economic depression of the 1920’s and 1930’s. As with many artists in all media during the early twentieth century, Dali found existence to be too meaningless to portray realistically; instead, he used artistic representation as a way to instill his own philosophical ideas on the items on his canvas. As he grew older, his prodigious imagination was joined by a tendency to act out in odd, grandiose ways. Indeed, his public behavior often was more the discussion topic than his most recent works of art (Saladyga). Amusingly, he would often fabricate details about his early life – or even about his present existence, which made later attempts by biographers to catalogue Dali’s life frustrating (Gibson). However, Dali was forthcoming about his artistic antecedents and sources of inspiration, and according to his “Anti-Matter Manifesto,” “[i]n the Surrealist period, [he] wanted to create the iconography of the interior world and the world of the marvelous, of [his] father Freud” (Dali). Although there are many individuals throughout history who have left a lasting legacy on modern art, though, Salvador Dali’s bold artistic and bizarre actions to paint the unconscious that is recalled during our dreams and following other theories of the psychologist Dr. Sigmund Freud led to his legacy as one of the first modern surrealist artists of his time.
Dali began his foray into the creation of art around the same time that Freud’s groundbreaking work The Interpretation of Dreams was translated into Spanish – and Spanish thinkers were beginning to contemplate the various notions of infantile sexuality, spread by the Spanish intelligentsia. Even in the time before he began creating art, though, he had the habit of telling lies (or really garnishing the truth) to make himself appear better. The scenes in his paintings, although twisted and warped by his Surrealist mind, come from the grandiose plots that took place in his own mind and then would be presented later as reality (Gibson). They mirror the notions that the other Surrealists, including Andre Breton, were insisting: namely, that the imagination should be separated from the solely conscious, and that artists of all media should mine the unconscious for imagery in poem and stories, scenes for paintings, and subjects for sculpture. When Dali started out, Freud’s ideas about the significance of dreams and infantile sexuality informed a great deal of his thought – and his work.
On March 22, 1930, Dali gave a lecture in Barcelona relating Freud’s work, Surrealist art, and paranoia – which, in his words, meant “a form of illness which consists in organizing reality in such a way as to make it serve for the control of an imaginative construct” (Gibson). In other words, when imagination takes control of the visualization process, the end result is a form of paranoia. For a very simple example, imagine a mannequin in a dark room, wearing a suit. Anyone who enters the room for the first time and turns on the light will, at first, think that another person is in the room and perhaps jump with fright. Even on later visits to the same room, that same person may jump again – even though he remembers that there is a mannequin in that room. The process of imagination takes the individual back in time to childhood, when there were monsters lurking in the shadows around every corner. It may take dozens of visits into that room for the person to stop jumping at the sight of the mannequin, and if enough time goes by between visits, the jumping may begin again.
In his lecture, Dali gave the example of a visual image that he had recently viewed, that could take the form of a horse or a woman, depending on how the individual’s paranoid process – or a myriad of other forms. Because of the multiple possibilities, he says that it “would be interesting to know what it is that the image really represents, whichis the truth” (Gibson). He concludes by wondering whether what we as a society agree on as reality is not instead “a product of our paranoiac faculty” (Gibson).1
This engagement of paranoia represents Dali’s processing of Freud’s notions of the unconscious and applying them to the way that we “see” and interpret the visual stimuli placed before us. Later in 1930, he developed the phrase “paranoiac-critical thought” and turned it into a method of systematizing “confusion and [contributing] to the total discrediting of the world of reality” (Gibson). Just one example of this is found in his painting “The Rotting Donkey.” Just about every visual element of this painting is untrustworthy, beginning with the ground that the two animals are standing on. Is the sandy dirt the shore, or the ground beneath the water? According to traditional perspective, the sand would be on the shore. However, both animals are darker below the water line, and the primary figure actually has dotted lines across its legs, continuing the water line. It would seem, then, that they are underwater. However, the two trees just to the left of the primary figure are not darkened; instead, it looks like they are trees on the shore, next to the water line. The argument for the sand being on the shore is strengthened by the boat on the water and the shoreline off to the left, which, if the waterline is really the top of the water, should be sitting right on top of the sand.
In addition to the perspective issues, it is unclear whether the smaller figure, at right, is an earlier representation of the primary figure or a different donkey. With the smaller figure, the rotting is more conventional: the parts “under” the water have blackened, and the tail, protruding above the water, has been eaten away to a red stump. The primary figure is a combination of what looks like sand, fur, feathers, hides of various colors and conditions, and a black-and-white elongation of the ying/yang figure. The legs have blurred into whitish shadows. The shadow, which covers much of the upper body, has no apparent source – even the sun, the primary sort of light, appears to be weakened on this day. Everything, it seems, is subject to decay and rot.
Taking this back to Freud, it is apparent that all of the painter’s semiotic filter have taken this image of a rotting donkey and converted it into an amalgam of impulses and ideas. When it comes to the idea of rotting, the disintegration of harmony that the yin/yang diagram represents, and even the power of the sun, are weakened by the absurdity of modern life. In Dali’s most famous painting, The Persistence of Memory, the only object with apparent reality is the golden cliffs of Catalonia, in the right rear of the painting (New York Museum of Modern Art). While memory may be persistent, it appears to be unreliable, because of the entropy inherent in modern existence: ants are swarming to an odd, fleshy creature on the ground, which is a distorted image of Dali’s profile. The watches in the picture are either sagging under the weight of the time they measure, or are already under attack by the ants, suggesting that their time of effectiveness is past. The underlying message is that memory is only as reliable as the filters through which one views it. From Freud’s point of view, these filters are in constant flux, because of the unconscious forces at work, bubbling up from distant memories of childhood, recent memories of success or failure, dreams from last week or from five decades ago, and a myriad of other influences that get between the image as it actually appears and the way we remember it – or even initially perceive it. The perspective in The Persistence of Memory does not have the inherent ambiguity of The Rotting Donkey; here, instead, the ambiguity is in the measurement of time and the preservation of the events which have taken place during that time.
This notion would be taken even further by the structuralists in literature, led by such thinkers as Roland Barthes. Declaring the author to be a dead entity, Barthes replaced the term with the word “scriptor,” for the person who records text on paper. Because that text comes through that person’s semiotic filters and then must travel through the reader’s semiotic filters, no two readers will find the same text to mean the same thing; in fact, because our semiotic filters change over time, it is not likely that the same reader will find the same precise meanings in the same text on different readings, particularly if a period of years, or even months, goes by between the two encounters (Barthes). The experiences we go through inform our responses to stimuli – and those experiences include the unconscious. The desires we repress and send down deep into the id return and manifest themselves in surprising ways.
Dali’s contribution to the work of Freud was to take the notion of the vast, seething mass of impulses and emotions that roil inside our unconscious, affecting not only our dreams but our decisions while we are awake, and show us how that mass can influence the art that we make. Visual images can shift meaning from day to day; objects can look different at different times of day (as the Impressionists showed us); they can even differ depending on who is looking at them at the same time. What this means for a uniform sense of reality is that, while it is important to build consensus, it is not important to insist that all people share one ideology or worldview, because just as soon as you insist on everyone follow your ideas, your own filter will shift, the kaleidoscope will turn, and what you thought was a horse one day will be a supermodel the next.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Web. Retrieved 14 November 2011 from
http://www.scribd.com/doc/12733155/Barthes-Death-of-the-Author
Dali, Salvador. The Persistence of Memory. Oil painting. 1932. Retrieved 14 November
2011 from http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79018
Dali, Salvador. The Rotting Donkey. Oil painting. 1928. Retrieved 14 November 2011
from http://www.artsunlight.com/artist-PD/P-D0016-Salvador-Dali/P-D0016-0959-the-rotting-donkey.html
Gibson, Ian. The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
New York Museum of Modern Art. “The Persistence of Memory.” (Gallery Text). Web.
Retrieved 14 November 2011 from http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79018
Saladyga, Stephen Francis. “The Mindset of Salvador Dali.” Lamplighter Vol. 1(3),
Summer 2006.
