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April 11, 2007
Revolutionary pustules
I run into some of the damnedest things, and in a book which arrived in the mail today (Dali's The Tragic Myth of Millet's Angelus) I found this: THE BLACKHEADS OF SPACEWith words of encouragement like that, I began my search for appropriate artwork, and by some cosmic process I really can't explain, I soon found -- here -- a comedone which seemed to have burst forth from the hyper-paranoid imagination of Dali -- whether the authors knew it or not! Not only are the colors Dalinian, but if you look closely, you'll see that the "skin" is made from two very Dalinian crutches, pressing inward against the comedone. Normally, we think of crutches as aids, as devices used to support lame of injured people to keep them from falling. It would be just like Dali to use his famous crutches to hold in a comedone! No, seriously. In 1933, for example, ("The Enigma of William Tell") Dali even used one of his crutches to hold up Vladimir Lenin's elongated butt cheek: So why not a comedone? No, I am not making a moral comparison between Lenin and blackheads. The above painting got Dali in plenty of trouble as it offended Andre Breton and the Surrealists (who were mostly Marxists), and led to Dali being expelled from the group. He was accused of favoring Hitler, which was a preposterous charge, but a typical one for Marxists to make. (Anyone who attacks Lenin must love Hitler, right?) From Robert Descharnes' account of Dali's "trial": I saw Hitler as a masochist obsessed with the idee fixe of starting a war and losing it in heroic style. In a word, he was preparing for one of those actes gratuits which were then highly approved of by our group. My persistence in seeing the mystique of Hitler from a Surrealist point of view and my obstinacy in trying to endow the sadistic element in Surrealism with a religious meaning (both exacerbated by my method of paranoiac-critical analysis, which threatened to destroy automatism and its inherent narcissism) led to a number of wrangles and occasional rows with Breton and his friends. The latter, incidentally, began to waver between the boss and me in a way that alarmed him."Even today, Dali is criticized by leftists for disrespecting Lenin, and for insufficiently disrespecting Hitler. The irony is that Rockefeller crutches propped up the modernism which Dali was trying to undermine: After the war, Dali became the number one enemy of the North American art establishment thanks to his constant attacks on modernism. The irony is that Picasso, who belonged to the Communist Party, was loved by the American Art Establishment, while Dali, who had begun as a Communist sympathizer ended up expelled from the Surrealist Movement at the suspicion that he was a fascist sympathizer. The painter had painted "The Enigma of Hitler" in 1937 with a small print of Hitler's face on a dish with some beans. He explained that he wanted to understand the phenomena of fascism and besides, he had a dream that compel him to represent it.Here's an early example (from 1931) of a double image, Dali's "Le surrealisme au service de la revolution": (I didn't want to rotate it to the right, so you'll have to tilt your head to the left.) "Surrealism in the service of the revolution"? What if Dali meant it, and the Marxists didn't? What happens when modern is not modern, and revolution is not revolution? (The contents can be hard to express.) posted by Eric on 04.11.07 at 06:51 PM |
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Precious how supposed, free-thinking disregard for titles like communist and facist could get you thrown out of history's cliques. Seems like political correctness isn't such a new invention.
And Dali is facistically thrown out of his club for riffing on Hitler! Ironic.