Critique on Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory - Essay Example

Salvador Dali: Persistence of Memory In determining what makes one piece of artwork beautiful and another one nothing better than birdcage liner, it is important to understand the principles of aesthetics. Aesthetics include not only the subject matter of the artwork, but the efforts put in place by its maker based upon his or her background, experience and purpose in creating the work as well as the way these efforts and compositions interact with the viewer based on their own background, experience and knowledge base. This is known as the ‘visual aesthetic thought’ triangle in which each of these elements plays an equal yet different role in the interpretation of the piece and the perception of its beauty or importance within a given context. The concept of what makes something aesthetically pleasing is difficult to understand when discussing only the concepts involved. It is easier to illuminate the concepts by analyzing what makes a particular painting stand out from the crowd. When one thinks of eccentric modern painters, one of the first names that come to mind is that of Salvador Dali. Perhaps Dali’s most well-known artwork, and certainly the one that made him famous, is his painting “Persistence of Memory,” originally called “Melting Clocks.” By analyzing this surrealistic piece of art, one can begin to understand the concepts behind the “visual aesthetic thought” triangle in which the artist, the artwork and the viewer form an interlinked relationship in order to bring forward a thought or idea. “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). The Spanish painter became well-known in his lifetime for his unusual way of looking at things and his willingness to share these visions with the greater world population. “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. Dalis images - his bent watches, his figures, halfhuman, half chest of drawers – have made him the most famous of all Surrealist painters” (Harden, 2006). Typically painting images he saw in dreams or nightmares and consistently pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter, Dali had a wide range of interests that became reflected in his artwork, such as the work of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud or the mathematical genius of Albert Einstein, both of whose work have been associated with this painting. 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 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. 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. The light on these rocks also serves to soften them somewhat, yet the concept of hard is still present in the blue plank and foreground box that are depicted. The blue plank offers a hard contrast to the softness of the blue water just as the solidness of the foreground box is sharply different from the smooth amorphous shape of the suggested sand on the beach. 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. Another clock melting along the side of the solid foreground box shows a different time from either of the other two visible clock faces in the painting, perhaps indicating that time has no meaning in the world of dream or perhaps indicating the changing nature of thought as one moves from one to another with no concept of the space in between. A third clock melts over the soft shape of a vaguely human half-face as it sleeps on the sand. The long eyelashes covering the eye are perhaps a reinforcement of the somewhat shaded, indecipherable nature of some dreams. Between these three clocks, 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. Original audiences to this piece were confused by the symbolisms involved in the painting. The significance of the cliffs, not being visible in the static nature of the painting, was lost on the original viewers, as was the strange combination of planks and landscapes, real watches and their unreal melting over the shapes as well as the strange image in the center of the painting, that of the sleeping man. “Art critics were equally divided on the meaning of the painting, which some saw as a haunting metaphor for the ephemeral nature of mankind, our inevitable demise, and our subsequent obsession with the nature of time set against us, while others understood it as Dali’s own attempt to defeat time and achieve immortality through an enduring image of man’s triumph over the forces of decay” (Ades & Taylor 2004). The unmistakable dream images contained within the piece drew several psychological opinions as well. “The limpness of the clocks, one of them found, expressed impotence. Another felt that it was an excellent rendition of potence, because time, as symbolized in the clocks, meant power which could be transformed into anything, even saddles on which one might mount and ride off to victory in the distant hills” (Ades & Taylor 2004). Dali himself linked the piece, after it had been produced and exhibited, to the developments happening in modern science, calling it a precursor to the discovery of DeoxyriboNucleic Acid (DNA) saying “soft watches, biologically speaking, are the giant Dalian DNA molecules which constitute the factors of eternity. They are masochistic, because they are so eternal. Like filets of sole, they are destined to be swallowed by the sharks of mechanical time” (Ades & Taylor 2004). Modern interpretations of the piece have taken a decidedly more psychoanalytic approach than previously. In 2002, the Salvador Dali Museum’s curator of education, Peter Tush, offered his interpretations of the piece saying the artist “was influenced by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical interpretations of dreams. This ‘hand-painted dream photograph’ explores the distortion of time and memory. […] By making the watches limp, Dali attacks rational thought. The world of logic depends on orderly, measurable units of time. By ‘melting’ these solid objects, he deflates their meaning; the watches are no longer functional, so their logical purpose is mocked” (Williams 2002). Simply reading through the various interpretations provided in this short analysis demonstrates how widely varied the understanding of the piece can be. Certainly, Dali’s interpretation of the piece as he was creating it was different from the painting as it finally appeared and that was different from the way in which the audience of the 1930s, Dali himself and the audience of the modern day have interpreted the painting since. Although he had numerous ideas and thoughts in the process of creating the painting, Dali admitted that the inclusion of the foreground elements was the result of a sudden inspiration on an existing landscape rather than a thoughtfully planned and sketched composition. However, the types of images that Dali chose to execute on this landscape served to mimic the thoughts he had in his head at that time, translated into various forms and meanings based on the experiences, cultures, climates and aesthetic senses of his various audiences, both at the time and now. Thus, the meaning of the piece is dependent upon the interaction of the artist in his creation, the created image and the meanings the audiences ascribe to them. References Ades, Dawn & Taylor, Michael. (September 12 2004 – January 16 2005). Dali. Philadelphia: Advanta. Dali, Salvador. (1931). Persistence of Memory. [painting]. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Descharnes, Robert & Neret, Gilles. (1994). Salvador Dali: 1904-1989. Germany: Benedikt Taschen. Hardin, Mark. (2006). “Dada and Surrealism.” The Archive. Retrieved 6 March 2006 from < http://www.artchive.com/artchive/surrealism.html> Nik. (2006). “About Surrealism.” Surrealism [online]. Retrieved 6 March 2006 from < http://www.surrealism.co.uk/> Williams, Greg. (May 2 2002). “What Does the Melting Watches Painting Mean Exactly?” The Tampa Tribune [online]. Retrieved 7 March 2006 from Appendix – Persistence of Memory (Salvador Dali, 1931) Read More