Salvador Dali.
----------
(Long rift...)
I am posting this because it is the funniest description of the German occupation of France I ever read. I imagine the dower Camus, listening to Dali. Camus knots up his brows, pulls out his pistol and shoots this fucking chatterbox dead on the cafe table.
No wonder Breton through him out. Dali's use of phalic imagery was his way of reminding Breton, that Breton was taking the whole thing too seriously. In effect Breton was bourgeois.
``...he [Dali] explained that his obsession with Hitler was at heart apolitical, and that he could not be a Nazi `because if Hitler were ever to conquer Europe, he would do away with hysterics of my kind, as had already happened in Germany.' ''
This is hysterical. The problem was that the Nazis were interfering with Dali's social life. How annoying and droll.
A rarely noticed, but odd thing about Dali, was when he was painting and paying attention, he could be a really fine painter. Take a look at Metamorphosis of Hitler's Face... or the Portrait of Gala, where he writes:
``But in order to achieve this portrait of my Galarine, as I called her, I would perhaps have to die of fatigue like a real Catholic donkey.''
Yes, my dear, Salvador, you would have to work for a living for a change. Here is an article that gives a clearer idea of the split between Bunuel and Lorca, from Dali:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5944
In effect, what it says is that Dali floated into the haute bourgoisie like an amusing parasite to escape the banality of the bourgeois world. Bunuel and Lorca moved downward to the urban and rural prolitariat. It is an interesting study in what happens to the world of painters, writers, intellectuals in a class society like ours. You get to make plenty of money as an trivial amusement like Andy Warhol, or you can face the grit of hard times.
After a few really interesting pieces and looking at some of the better drawings and sculpture of the surrealists, I stopped taking them seriously. It was as if they didn't understand their own movement, that is its point as potentially a much more deadly game-revolt. I didn't like Dali's most famous work and dismissed him as a fraud. Later, when I came across other work, and then some of Dali's least known work, I had to reassess what I had thought before. Like any movement there are the good ones and the bad ones. Bunuel, Lorca, Paz, Miro, Siqueros, seem to me to all be on the good side in terms of art and politics. Others were more ambiquous like Tchelitchew and Duchamp.
In a theoretical and art history view, one of the more interesting themes to think about is the role of Catholicism. It's not a accident that most of the surrealist movement was latin, either from Spain, Mexico, and France, all very Catholic countries. Their emphasis on sexuality and or the body comes immediately to mind, and then can be easily contrasted to Catholicism horror of the body, endless worry over women's bodies and of course the grand prize, the squirting cock. The mysticism in Catholicism is another interesting door to open in relation to the surrealist. It seems something like a spiritual parent along with machismo and homosexuality, and the dual attraction, rejection of women. All these sorts of oppositions follow a kind of organic psychology or romanicism that flows against the grain of the rational protestant world of America; take a shower, brush your teeth, don't smoke or drink, and keep your hands out of you pants, young man...
In terms of gender, there were several women artists who come to mind who were all heavily influenced by or were surrealists: Barbara Hepworth, Louise Nevellson, and of course Georgia O'Keefe. I preferred the women to the men, in terms of their work. Nevelson for example managed to span several different movements from a kind of dadaistic assemblage to abstract expressionism, and then into minimalism.
For the art history crew, it sounds like a stretch to put Nevelson into the same sentence with surrealism, but that's because they are looking at her work as geometric assemblage. Her work methods, the process she went through, and finally the realm of evocation in her iconography all remind me very heavily of a surrealist approach. Also difficult to understand unless you've seen them, Nevelson's works were installed in exhibitions in very dark spaces so that the bounderies dialated out in a kind of dark fog. The effect was very stunning, something like coming across a mysterious alien machine that you have no idea what it is for, but its presence is not reassuring.
CG