Saint Dali: The Catalonian Pilgrimage
By Valery Oisteanu
A diary of surreal insignificance (part 2)
Salvador Dali was born on May 11, 1904 in Figueres, Spain and at an early age became a talented illustrator. At 25 he found himself at the center of the Surrealist movement in Madrid, Barcelona and Paris and having already collaborated with Buñuel on two surrealist, anticlerical films: Un Chien Andalou (1928) and L’Age d’or (1930), both banned in Europe for almost 50 years. Dali arrived in Paris and contacted the members of the movement in the fall of 1929. At that time Breton predicted that with Dali all the great "mental windows" were opening to surrealism in fashion, theater and cinema. In the early ’30s, Dali painted a series of extraordinary works, The Persistence of Memory, The Invisible Man, and Illuminated Pleasures–symbolic images that have since come to epitomize "layman surrealism." His miniaturist technique, almost photographic, was the rage of that time for the viewing public.
A Dali Pilgrim’s Notes
For nine days and nights I traveled in Dali’s stomping grounds, taking photos–writing notes and drawing bizarre cartoons. My scribblings were slightly discombobulated, reflecting the "on the go attitude" of my Dalinian adventure.
"The Diary of a Genius" from 1952 to 1963 is a good read. Some historians are crediting Gala for rewriting it from her husband’s "pigeon French." We marvel at his mad love for his wife Gala (Helene Dimitrovna Diakonov) and at their unusual sexual relationship both at home in Cadaqu�s and during their world travel.
Dali draws inspiration from "rotten fish," and Vermeer’s "Lacemaker," to enter his "rhinocerontic" period. In his diary, he describes his spiritual subversion as influenced by Nietzsche’s writings (1952). This was the period when Dali was put in jail in Gerona and one of his paintings was rejected for obscenity in an exhibition in Barcelona. This prompted a barrage of insulting letters written by Dali and co-signed by Bunuel to the most distinguished cultural personalities in Spain. Paul Eluard had named the infamous painting "The Lugubrious Game" but most of the viewers were scandalized by the scatological and anal elements. Although Gala was the first to warn him that among the surrealists he would suffer the same disdain as elsewhere, his Nietzschean stubbornness refused to listen to her. He took surrealistic symbols to heart, neglecting the blood nor excrements nor putrefaction on which surrealism’s advocates fed their diatribes.
Dali’s Transatlantic Overload:
In 10 days, I visited four Dali museums and was at the openings of five major shows on Dali in Barcelona, Figueres, Pubol, and the House-Museum in Cadaques. At the Municipal Theater El Jardi in Figueres a concert of Dali’s preferred music kicked off his centenary celebrations. Dali, after being slighted for decades as a major clown and pro-fascist and even derided by the Figueres locals as a madman, in 2004 rules supreme as a global cultural icon, from the USA to Australia, from Japan to Europe.
I landed in Barcelona where the face of Dali was waving from every light post. The first stops were city sites built by the famous architect Gaudi: the park Guell, Sagrada Familia, La Pedrera and Casa Calvet, all have biomorphic elements as part of his architecture. To my surprise I discovered that Dali gave talks, interviews and wrote articles to promote Gaudi when the latter was not so popular. I also learned that Dali restored the glory of Gaudi by performing in memory of the architect in the park Guell and asked Man Ray to photograph this genius’ structures for a magazine article. "Gaudi through the eyes of Dali," is an exhibit in progress at La Pedrera describing that period.
A major exhibit "Dali and Mass Culture" presently in Barcelona examines the unique relationship between Salvador Dali and mass media culture and his campy responses to the new visual universe generated by the technological and economic changes of the 20th century. "Dali and Mass Culture" well documented and curated by Felix Fanes opened in Barcelona at CaixaForum sponsored by the Fundacio "la Caixa," and travels to the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and then to the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, and concludes in Rotterdam at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum.
At Palau Moja, in the center of Barcelona, a well researched exhibit called Dali Elective Affinities curated by Pilar Parcerisas lays bare the cogs and gears of the symbolic nature of his narrative. It brings together his dreams, paranoia and metaphysics in revealing the "mental machine" of his erotic desire.
I magically managed to bypass the commercial Dali and enjoy strictly the artistic side of his boundless imagination which generated grandiose theatrical effects bordering on kitsch but nevertheless remain sarcastically funny. I was reminded of what local delicacies Dali really liked, scrambled eggs with sea urchins or a sweet pork sausage cooked in honey, when they were served to me from the "Dali 2004 menu" at Restaurant Duran (Cocina Daliniana) in Figueres. By the way, 30 top restaurants are participating in creating Dali-2004 menus.
Also, Dali was made noble; H. M. King Juan Carlos knighted him as the Marquees of Pubol in 1985, which coincided with Dali’s plans to restore a castle for Gala in Pubol. The Dali museums and foundations are now the major tourist attractions and cultural institutions of all Catalonia. Even the Emporda region is called Dali Land.
El Pays de Santo Dali
I was accompanied by Cinta Massip–a poet and artist-manager from KrTU of Generalidad of Catalunya, Departament de Cultura–on the bus pilgrimage from Barcelona to El Pays de Dali: Figueres triangle–Cadaques, Pubol castle, and Port Ligat with it’s Cape Creus and the Lighthouse at the end of the world. With Cinta’s help, I traveled to Dali’s tomb, I met Dali’s contemporaries such as his photographer-friend Tony Keeler and went to feast at Dali’s favorite restaurant/hotel Emporda in Figueres and even saw his childhood Teddy bear at the Toys Museum.
In the city of his birth, Figueres, Salvador Dali built, in the early 70s, a museum incorporating part of the old city ramparts, as well as the fa�ade of the former municipal theatre. He died in the city where he was born in 1989 and is buried in a crypt of the museum. Giant sentry-like white eggs (borrowed from Magritte’s Les affinit�s �lectives, 1933) placed on top of the tower and the parapets, as an architectural enhancement, and Catalonian weaved round breads dotting the outer walls visually dominate the exterior of the museum. In a central courtyard, a vintage Cadillac stands as a base for a huge-breasted woman sculpture guarding the baroque, surrealist sideshow. "Rain Cadillac" is a black car, its interior filled with jungle like greenery, watered by a steadily dripping rain. A trip through the Dali-temple, a reverential early morning pilgrimage before the tourist crowds, involved a walk up and down the steps through the labyrinth of Dali’s Theater-Museum laced with huge mega-murals, mannequins draped in white gauze, and the ambiance created by oversized "fun-house" toys, kinetic crucifixes, unfolding tapestry and gold jewelry. On his death in 1989, he bequeathed his estate to the Kingdom of Spain and the Independent Region of Catalonia.
Further north in the town of Cadaques, Dali used to spend his summers with friends: Lorca, Bunuel, Picasso, Man Ray, Duchamp and Ernst. In 1929 he bought nearby in Port Ligat first one and then several fishermen’s houses, and connected them with passages and courtyards, into a summer retreat/studio complex, all decorated with heads of rhinos, campy furniture, and exotic gardens with swimming pools. This was also where Dali and Gala first met, when she came here on vacation with her first husband the surrealist poet Eluard.
A goofy stuffed bear greets us at the entrance hall, holding a welcoming lamp. The bedroom has a quasi-theatrical look, with comically regal beds, bird and cricket cages, and a bunch of children’s chairs that were Gala’s contribution to the decorating.
Familiar Dali objects, porcelain sinks, flamingos and a Michelin man, adorn
their garden. A telephone booth without a phone, a statue of Diana on top of a
fountain, toreador liquor bottles around the pool, reveal a grand mania and
a taste for the exotic and kitsch. Photos of famous actors and kings and queens posing with Dali and Gala are collaged on their closet-doors.
In defense of Dali’s art, against the critics still hung-up on his commercial slyness, who proclaim him the King of Kitsch, I say that his illustrations of Lautr�mont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1934, 1973) are his valid contribution to surrealist illustration. On the other hand the centenary of Dali’s birth makes us re-examine his entire art and his writing and re-evaluate his influence on the avant-garde.
His films, paintings and writings are a complex treasure of Catalonian art history. They also are a popular illustration of surrealism for everybody. In these works he discredited rational philosophy and ingeniously introduced hallucinatory images and the symbolism of our nightly-dreams, where time goes backward and even bends space.
La Vida de "Avida Dollars"
What is "The Black Hole of Dali?" It is metaphor for a virtual space that absorbs individual minds and institution and proactively creates more institutions to oversee the ever-growing public need to own a part of the Dali myth.
Global marketing ideas have been put in motion and more products are on the way: digital Dali-DVDs , new titles of art books, essences of Dali perfume, hundreds of reproductions of jewelry designed by Dali such as red lips with pearl teeth, gold ants and silver elephants with elongated legs and of course the ubiquitous melting watches, some in gold and silver and some actually working as time pieces. On the Internet there are 1000 sites just for the current centennial Dali-2004! The lesson is that Dali had a sense of "slow/fast time" in art and forced us to look at the unexpected. He helped to define and expand the limits of bad taste and invented a new role for the visual-artist. Cheers to the soft watches, multiple crutches and erect-mustache of Dali at 100!
Where to find art and books by Salvador Dali
by Valery Oisteanu
*"Yellow Manifesto, Dali, Gasch, Montanya and Anti-Art" at the Miro Foundation Barcelona (June 17 – September 26, 2004)
*"Salvador Dali: A Life in Books"–Dali’s manuscripts, magazine and books he
wrote, readings, photographs and critical writing on Dali at Biblioteca de
Catalunya Barcelona (June-Nov 2004)
*"El Dali de Lacroix" –Intimate photographs by Marc Lacroix at Museum Emporda
in Figueres (through December 2004)
*"Dali and Lorca," traveling exhibition, presentations planned at the Museum of History of Catalonia (May 6 to July 4, 2004)
*"Dali and Optical Illusions," stereoscopic images, holograms, anamorphic drawings, etc, Museu del Cinema, Girona (June 14 to September 12, 2004)
*’Shocking!’ (Schiaparelli and Dali), Mus�e de la Mode et du Textile, 107 rue de Rivoli, Paris (until August 2004)
*An exhibition of 2400 prints by Dali can be viewed at Skot Foreman Gallery at 315 Peters St., Atlanta.
*In Australia Griffin production company commissioned a play on Dali called
"The secret death of Salvador Dali," a comedy by Stephen Sewell
Among new publications I will mention just a few:
"Dali The Salvador Dali Museum Collection," by Robert S. Lubar, 200 page color catalogue, Bulfinch Press, AOL Time Warner Book Group, New York, London, 2003
"Salvador Dali’s Dream of Venus," Ingrid Schaffner, photographs by Eric Schaal, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2002
"Don Quixote," a limited print run of 998 copies with 38 illustrations that Dali produced in 1945 for a pocket edition published in English, this deluxe edition is presented in a two volume box set, Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali, Grupo Planeta, 2003
"Dali-a computer typeface inspired by the Works of Dali," Manticore products, inc., Chicago, "art for your computer"
