Salvador Dali

 

Salvador Dali is among the most versatile and prolific artists of the twentieth century. Though chiefly remembered for his painterly output, in the course of his long career he successfully turned to sculpture, printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and, perhaps most famously, film making in his collaborations with Luis Bunuel and Alfred Hitchcock. Dali was renowned for his flamboyant personality as much as for his undeniable technical virtuosity

Key Ideas to take in consideration

Some of the key ideas i have included  which have  had a huge impact in his work are:

Freudian theory which  underpins Dali’s attempts at forging a formal and visual language capable of rendering his dreams and hallucinations. These account for some of the iconic and now ubiquitous images through which Dali achieved tremendous fame during his lifetime and beyond.

As well as this he used Obsessive themes of eroticism, death, and decay permeate to represent his work, reflecting his familiarity with and synthesis of the psychoanalytical theories of his time. Drawing on blatantly autobiographical material and childhood memories, Dali’s work is rife with often ready-interpreted symbolism, ranging from fetishes and animal imagery to religious symbols.

Dali was also influenced by the surrealist artist bretons  theory of automatism, but ultimately opted for a method of tapping the unconscious that he termed “critical paranoia,” a state in which one could cultivate delusion while maintaining one’s sanity.

Most Important Artwork description & Analysis

The Persistence of Memory

This iconic and much-reproduced painting depicts time as a series of melting watches surrounded by swarming ants that hint at decay, an organic process in which Dali held an unshakeable fascination. The important distinction between hard and soft objects, associated by Dali with order and putrefaction respectively, informs his work method in subverting inherent textual properties: the softening of hard objects and corresponding hardening of soft objects

It is likely that Dali was using the clocks to symbolize mortality (specifically his own) rather than literal time, as the melting flesh in the painting’s center is loosely based on Dali’s profile. The cliffs that provide the backdrop are taken from images of Catalonia, Dali’s home.

Hhowever Dali was intrigued with the images which occur at the boundary between sleeping and waking. They can occur when people are falling asleep, or when they are starting to wake up, and they tend to be extremely vivid, colorful and bizarre. He experimented with various ways of generating and capturing these fantastical images.

According to Dali, The extraordinary images seem to appear from nowhere, but there is a logic. The unconscious is a living, moving stream of energy from which thoughts gradually rise to the conscious level and take on a definite form.For a example:

One of His favorite technique i found out is  he would put a tin plate on the floor and then sit by a chair beside it, holding a spoon over the plate. He would then totally relax his body; sometimes he would begin to fall asleep. The moment that he began to doze the spoon would slip from his fingers and clang on the plate, immediately waking him to capture the surreal images.

Dalí & Film

Salvador Dalí as filmmaker?

 

Artwork description & Analysis:

As well as painting, he became involved in film ,Dali had a habit of doing eccentric things which polarised opinions. His eccentric manner was a reflection of his art and vice versa.

            Babaouo is a surrealist film, 1932. Collage for the film’s poster.

 

This audiovisual series looks at Salvador Dalí’s film, video and television production, as a culmination of the exhibitionDalí. All of the poetic suggestions and all of the plastic possibilities. Almost five hours in length, this collection of works, with repeat screenings over two days, argues that the relationship between Dalí and mass culture is key to understanding the artist’s work, but also to developing a different idea of modernity, one that conveys the spectacular and tumultuous nature of 1930s modernity.

The connection between mass media and modern art was understood, during most of that decade, through a complex body of theories. These modes of thinking, which ranged from formalist critique to the most orthodox surrealism, reveal the presence of an inevitable dialectical tension.

Dalí’s achievement was to formulate his own conception of the mass media, and his ideas took concrete form in the series of audiovisual productions presented in this series. In contrast with the mechanical and standardised work described by Kracauer, Dalí conceived of the film industry as a machine for the collective production of desire, in which the spectacle is the sequenced version of the paranoiac-critical method and its delirious associations.

Artwork description & Analysis:

Un Chien Andalou (film still) (1928)

Another  films  by Dali  which  recreates a dream-like setting in which images are presented in montaged clips as a means of tapping the unconscious.

Artist like Dali experimented with free association and interpretation of dreams. During this time the human psyche was being explored by Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries, presenting the human mind in a way that had not previously been considered. The theory that is being sampled in Un Chien Andalou is the Oedipus concept

when it comes to viewing a film like this, we must understand that this is a surrealist work.To me, they are great and interesting images, they are images of art, Art that works under its own purpose however I can accept and appreciate the film for what it is – an experience. A shocking and strange experience and a good use of imaginagition being presented to us in a weird and wonderful way.

what is this Oedipus concept? Basically it has to do with the way children mentally and emotionally desire their parents, but more specifically how they think about the parent of the opposite sex. In classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the child’s identification with its same-sex parent is the successful resolution of the Oedipus complex.

The Film Un Chien Andalou was created in a dreamlike state were time and space are not to be trusted, neither have any relevance in the story. This undependable usage of time and space is disorienting to the viewer and shattering any expectations they might have. Its premise came from an encounter of two dreams that occurred separately to its creators

Just as in the case of fetish, the present object connotes the absent trauma, and it is significant that the trauma of amputation or truncation which the body so often undergoes in surrealist imagery is always in some sense absent, for it has occurred in a body that is always already a representation

To gently guide you into understanding the antics of these artist, lets take a step back and look at Dali’s  The Great Masturbator, he is bringing desire into this painting, which was a major aspect of surrealistic art because they are obsessed with Freudian concepts and with Freud everything is driven from desire.

This painting contains various meanings of paranoia and delusion using a method that he calls paranoiac-critical method. This method means that he is assuming the mind of a mad man, however, he is not subject to paranoia, but he is trying to use delusion as an artistic mode of vision. The aspect of paranoia that Dali is interested in and which helped inspire his so called method was the ability of the brain to perceive links between things which rationally are not linked.

 

 

How has this helped me towards my own work

I will experiment with different moving images capturing not dreams but instead places and scenes that associate with me.This will be achieved by using video camera and arranging and editing images and videos in various ways to create my own illusion and what is going through my own mind and how i can use this to present my own surreal view of things using everyday atmospheres and environment surrounding me.This is why dali is a good example to use as a reference for inspiration which will eventually help me to built my own view of things and how i see them.