Salvador Dalis Critical Paranoia - Essay Example

Salvador Dali’s Critical Paranoia One of the first s one thinks of when trying to eccentric modern painters is that of Salvador Dali. Usually classified as a Surrealist, Dali was born in 1904 in Catalan, Spain and would retain from his birthplace a passion for life and experience that fueled much of his art. His fame was built upon his willingness to reveal the unusual way in which he saw life. “Dalis importance for Surrealism was that he invented his own psycho technique, a method he called critical paranoia. He deliberately cultivated delusions similar to those of paranoiacs in the cause of wresting hallucinatory images from his conscious mind. Dali’s images - his bent watches, his figures, half-human, half chest of drawers – have made him the most famous of all Surrealist painters” (Harden, 2006). Like many Surrealists, Dali often painted the images he saw in dreams or in nightmares, but determining which was dream and which was simply his way of pushing social conventions remains difficult to determine. “Surrealism attempts to further our understanding of the human condition by seeking ways of fusing together our perceived conscious reality with our unconscious dream state” (Nik, 2006) and Dali was a master. His philosophy of art involved embracing the inner animal and exposing the hidden insanity that lurks at the core of every human. This philosophy can still best be examined by reflecting upon how it was reflected in his work. Created in 1937, “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” is one of Dali’s more representative paintings which falls without question into the Surrealist style. “The Surrealists tried to create a new art mythology by fusing conscious with unconscious levels of the mind” (Ocvirk et al, 2002: 289) and Dali attempts this by combining known myth with imagined landscape to provide a fully unique result. Obviously, the work of Sigmund Freud was tremendously important to the creation of Surrealist art and the form of expression Dali embraced. Dali paid particular attention to what Freud said about the distinctions and characteristics of the id, defined as the primitive and instinctual portion of our identity that remains free of societal constraints, and the ego, defined as the conscious portion of our minds and source of more considered, rational behavior. Freud considered “dreams, myths, odd patterns of behavior, slips of the tongue, accidents and art” (Bardjeste, 2006) to be the avenues through which the desires of the id become known, thus explaining the importance of these elements to the expressions of Surrealist art. Dali employs nearly all of these elements in this painting into a fascinating composition that has inspired conscious consideration since its first presentation. The dream state is evident in the comparative placement of the various elements within the composition while the concept of myth is emphasized within the title of the piece. Although this art form is audibly silent, Freud’s slips of the tongue and coincidental-seeming accidents can be found in the doubled form of Narcissus as well as the duplicated head shape in the rock behind him. However, when presented as intended by the artist, this painting is not as silent as many as it is accompanied by a poem on the same subject. “When this painting was first exhibited it was accompanied by a long poem by Dalí. Together, the words and image suggest a range of emotions triggered by the theme of metamorphosis, including anxiety, disgust and desire” (Tate Museum, 2005). While the poem helps illustrate the artist’s concept, an analysis of the image itself elicits the same emotional response. The initial impression upon walking up to this image, then, emerges at once of representing a cyclic pattern of life and decay, hope and depression, static immobility and explosive growth, balance and imbalance, light and dark. As the title of the piece indicates, the subject of the painting is the Greek myth regarding Narcissus, a beautiful youth who caught his reflection in a still pool and fell instantly in love with it. Not able to consummate a relationship with this shadowy image, Narcissus could do nothing other than to sit at the pool and pine away, slowly becoming a part of the scenery rather than a living, growing, thinking being. “The image of Narcissus mirrors man’s idle hopes and disappointments … [he] stands for mankind’s idle pursuit of the unreal” (Grant, 1995: 335). Dali represents this youth as an almost stone figure sitting despondently within the water of the pool, slowing blending in with the landscape behind him. To serve as a reminder of this foolish youth, the Greek gods created the Narcissus flower, commonly referred to in the United States as a daffodil, a flower that contains narcotic properties producing a numbing effect. For Dali, this affirmation of the importance of life is represented in the symbolism of the egg and the flower, each dreamlike signs of growth and rebirth within the story. While the figure begins to symbolize decay, a hint of growth is indicated through the stick-like hair that flows out behind him and the optical illusion of him becoming part of the environment, providing new material upon which other things can grow. In a similar switch, the image including the living egg and flower is also touched with death in the illustration of the skeletal hand as a base. Finally, this echo in the primary image as well as the suggestion of the deep, echoing canyons behind the figure are reminiscent of Echo, the girl pining away for Narcissus, as well as the repetitious aspect of the circle of existence and ever-present metamorphosis. One of Dali’s favorite modes of expression involved conceptual perception, in which he would often see shapes and images in objects that weren’t intended to convey such images, such as when one sees a dog or a horse in a cloud or identifies the face of an old man in a rock formation. He employs this device in another of his famous paintings, Persistence of Memory. For Dali, the cliffs of the background represented the physical equivalent of his “principle of paranoiac metamorphosis.” Dali is quoted as saying “All the images capable of being suggested by the complexity of their innumerable irregularities appear successively and by turn as you change your position. This was so objectifiable that the fishermen of the region had since time immemorial baptized each of these imposing conglomerations – the camel, the eagle, the anvil, the monk, the dead woman, the lion’s head. […] I discovered in this perpetual disguise the profound meaning of that modesty of nature which Heraclitus referred to in his enigmatic phrase ‘Nature likes to conceal herself.’” (Descharnes & Neret 1994 p. 171). This transitory nature of the cliffs is not visible in the finished piece, yet the play of the light upon the craggy surface as well as its reflection upon the water draws the eye deep into the picture with the hint that there might be something there if the viewer could only view it from the proper angle. A small blue rock in the midground is easy to overlook, but helps reinforce the ability of a stray idea to interrupt the flow of thought. The stump of a tree that Dali identifies as an olive tree, offers a single branch as the resting place for one of the melting clocks. This olive branch is traditionally a sign of peace, perhaps offering peace in the stopping of time or peace in the ability to step into the world of dream. Between the three clocks in the image, one can interpret there is a time for peace, a time for hardness and a time for softness and dreams. There exists one last watch in the painting, but this one is turned with its face down, so that it cannot be determined the time that it would reflect. The back of this clock is covered with several black ants. This is reminiscent of the busyness of the ant hill as the workers constantly scurry around searching for food for the rest of the colony. Perhaps the reason the face of this final clock cannot be seen is because it is representing the effect that time can have on the workers, forcing them to turn away from their thoughts, dreams, aspirations and desires in the never-ending struggle for survival in a harsh, undefined world. To create this painting in 1931, Dali said his limp watches were inspired by the remains of a very strong Camembert cheese. “He had contemplated this cheese one evening after dinner, when he stayed at home with a headache while Gala [his wife] went to the cinema with some friends. Having meditated on the ‘super-soft’ qualities of the runny cheese, Dali went to his studio where he suddenly realized how he should finish a lonely landscape featuring the rugged cliffs of the Catalan coast, illuminated by a never-setting sun” (Ades & Taylor 2004). Regarding the rocks in his painting, Dali said “Watching the stirring of those motionless rocks, I meditated on my own rocks, those of my thought. I should have liked them to be like those outside – relativistic, changing at the slightest displacement in the space of the spirit, becoming constantly their own opposite, dissembling, ambivalent, hypocritical, disguised, vague and concrete, without dream, without ‘mist of wonder’, measurable, observable, physical, objective, material and hard as granite” (Descharnes & Neret 1994 p. 171). Linked to these ideas, Dali said he reflected on three philosophic antecedents in the Greek Sophists, the Jesuitical thought of Spain at the time as it was founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola and the dialectics of Hegel n Germany. He linked the softness of the watches to his own inner personality. “Instead of hardening me, as life had planned, Gala […] succeeded in building for me a shell to protect the tender nakedness of Bernard the Hermit that I was, so that while in relation to the outside world I assumed more and more the appearance of a fortress, within myself I could continue to grow old in the soft, and in the supersoft” (Descharnes & Neret 1994 p. 173). So, for Dali, this work represented a balance between his outer hard nature and the inner softness that he prized even while he portrayed the changing nature of thought and its ability to be something different from one moment to the next. Through Dali’s use of line, color, space, shape and other elements, Dali continuously presents unified dreamscape images that successfully combine concepts of the mind while presenting several sides of change from an emotional perspective. His final works often force viewers to consider them from both a distracted metaphysical perspective as in the dream-state as well as from the conscious state in which knowledge can be known and thus related to the overall presentation. His brilliant means of maintaining balance and harmony by repeating patterns through various elements serve to keep his paintings in a constant state of precarious stability that remains perfectly in tune with the message he is trying to convey. He ends up evoking a feeling much like one might feel if they were the spinning coin, standing on its edge and just waiting to find out which way it was going to drop. His presentation was so successful that even Sigmund Freud, who had long had misgivings about being the poster boy for the Surrealist movement, finally acknowledged the concepts of his work could be expressed through visual artistic means. Works Cited Ades, Dawn & Taylor, Michael. Dali. Philadelphia: Advanta, (September 12, 2004 – January 16, 2005). Bardjeste, Amin. Introduction to Surrealism. (2006). December 6, 2009 Descharnes, Robert & Neret, Gilles. Salvador Dali: 1904-1989. Germany: Benedikt Taschen, 1994. Grant, Michael. Myths of the Greeks and Romans. New York: Penguin Group, 1995. Hardin, Mark. “Dada and Surrealism.” The Archive. (2006). December 6, 2009 Nik. “About Surrealism.” Surrealism [online]. (2006). December 6, 2009 Ocvirk, Otto G; Stinson, Robert E; Wigg, Philip R; Bone, Robert O; & Cayton, David L. Art Fundamentals: Theory and Practice. (9th Ed.). Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002. Tate Museum. “Metamorphosis of Narcissus.” (December 2005). December 6, 2009 Read More