Look, Dali took surrealism seriously. He took irrationalism seriously. He took transgression seriously. (Like Genet and Sade did.) These nonaesthetic, rationalist, nontransgressive concerns like "murder is bad" were beneath him. If you decide to transgress for the sake of transgression, if you decide to go "anywhere out of this world," you don't mark off a point and say "beyond this I shall not transgress!" That was his point when he publicly destroyed the giant loaf of bread (like, 15 meters long) during a time of hunger in France. It's how you obtain total personal freedom, or as total as is physically possible. I can't make myself immune to fire or able to breathe underwater, but I can make myself not give a fuck about moral codes.
--- On Fri, 6/12/09, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
> From: Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Dali's trial
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Friday, June 12, 2009, 7:51 PM
> ``Beside all this the European war
> appeared to me like an episodic
> children's fight on a street corner. One day, nevertheless,
> this fight
> began to make too much of an uproar and became too real
> because of
> those big, happy and taciturn children of the German
> troops, who were
> already very close, and who arrived in fairytale armoured
> carriages
> covered with childish drawings and camouflaged with
> branches. I said
> to myself, this it getting too historical for me; and in a
> rage I
> stopped painting the picture I was in the midst of, and we
> left.''
>
> 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
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