OT - THE CURIOUS CASE OF SALVADOR DALI
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from the past year. I've had requests to repost it. In a way, it
responds to the surreal dimensions of the events of 2005.
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Dali was often involved with creating his own symbols. The critics
would have declared him a minor lunatic if he hadn't had such
formidable classical painting skills.
He placed those symbols (the notorious melting watch, the face and body
of his wife, the ornate and fierce skeletal structures of unknown
creatures) on the canvas as if they had as much right to be there as
any familiar object. This was quite troubling to many people. If an
immense jawbone that was also a rib or a forked femur could rival a
perfectly rendered lamp or couch or book, where were all the
accountrements and assurances of modern comfortable living? Where was
the pleasantly mesmerizing effect of a predictable existence? Where was
a class structure that depended on money and cultural slogans?
To make it worse, Dali invented vast comedies on canvas. But the
overall joke turned, as the viewer's eye moved, into a nightmare. In
fact, a bewildering mix of attitudes sprang out from the paintings.
What was the man doing? Was he making fun of the audience? Was he
simply showing off? Was he inventing waking dreams? Was he, God forbid,
actually imagining something entirely new that resisted classification?
Dali's greatest paintings were undeniable symphonies, and mere
acknowledgment of his talent would not explain how he composed the
movements.
Words failed viewers and critics and colleagues and enemies.
But they didn't fail Dali. He took every occasion to explain his work.
However, his explications were handed out in a way that made it plain
he was telling tall tales---interesting, hilarious, and preposterous
tall tales.
Every interview and press conference he gave gave birth to more attacks
on him. Was he inviting scorn? Was he really above it all? Was he
toying with the press like some god?
Media analysts flocked to make him persona non grata, but what was the
persona they were exiling? They had no idea then, and they have no idea
now.
It comes back to this: when you invent something truly novel, you know
that you are going to stir the forces trapped within others that aspire
to do the very same thing. You know that others are going to begin by
denying that anything truly NEW even exists. That DOES make it a
comedy, whether you want to admit it or not.
It is possible that every statement ever uttered in public by Dali was
a lie. A fabrication. An invention dedicated to constructing a massive
(and contradictory) persona.
Commentators who try to take on Dali's life usually center on the early
death of his young brother as the core explanation for Dali's "basic
confusion"---which resulted in his bizarre approach to his own fame.
However, these days, with good reason, we might say that Dali was
playing the media game on his own terms, after realizing that no
reporter wanted the real Dali (whatever that might mean)---some fiction
was being asked for, and the artist was merely being accommodating.
He was creating a persona that matched his paintings.
It is generally acknowledged that no artist of the 20th century was
superior to Dali in the ability to render realistic detail.
But of course Dali's work was not about realism.
The most complex paintings---see, for example, Christopher Columbus
Discovering America and The Hallucinogenic Toreador---portrayed the
interpenetration of various solidities of realities more or less
occupying the same space.
I'm sure that if Dali were living today, he would execute a
brain-bending UFO landing on the front lawn of the White House. Such a
painting would envelop the viewer with several simultaneous dimensions
colliding outside the president's mansion.
At some point in his career, Dali saw (decided) there was no limit to
what he could assemble in the same space---and there was no limit to
the number of spaces he could corral into the same canvas. A painting
could become a science-fiction novel reaching into several pasts and
futures. The protagonist (the viewer) could find himself in such a
simultaneity.
Critics have attacked the paintings relentlessly. They are offended at
Dali's skill, which matches the best work of the meticulous Dutch
Renaissance masters. They hate the dissonance. It's a sign that Dali
could give full play to his imagination---a sin of the first order.
They resent Dali's mordant wit and rankle at the idea that Dali could
carry out monstrous jokes---in such fierce extended detail---on any
given canvas.
But above all, the sheer imagination harpoons the critics. How dare a
painter turn reality upside down so blantantly, while rubbing their
faces in the detail.
The cherry on the cake was: for every attack the critics launched at
Dali the man (they really had no idea who he was), Dali would come back
at them with yet another elaborate piece of fiction about himself. It
was unfair. The critics were "devoted to the truth." The painter was
free to invent himself over and over as many times as he fancied.
At best (and it was not very good), a critic might admit Dali was a
complete mystery. But the press does not like that outcome. Exposure of
the very entrails of a celebrity is necessary. The press adopts its own
pose: it is dedicated to taking things apart and laying them bare. (Of
course, that strategy is based on the conniving and secret concept that
journalistic probing is, at the end, supposed to leave the status quo
intact.)
Dali was holding up a mirror. He was saying, "You people are like me.
We're all doing fiction. I'm much better at it. In the process, I get
at a much deeper truth."
Dali was the hallucinogenic toreador. He was holding off and skirting
the charges of the critics and the reporters. They rushed by him. He
moved with his cape---and got out of the way.
The principles of organized society dictate that a person must be who
he is, even if that is a cartoon of a cartoon. A person must be one
recognizable caricature, must be IDed, must have one basic function.
Must---as a civilization goes down the trail of decline---be watched
and taped and profiled.
When a person shows up who is many different things, who can invent
himself at the drop of hat, who seems to stand in 14 different places
at the same time, the Order trembles.
This is not acceptable. Everything is based on One. Not seven, not 12,
not 457.
What you said yesterday must synchronize with what you say today.
This rule ("being the thing you are") guarantees that human beings will
resonate with the premise that we all live and think and work in one
continuum of space and time.
It would be ridiculous to have multi-dimensional humans inside one
space-time tin can.
Whatever he was, however despicable he may have been in certain
respects, Dali broke that egg. Broke the cardinal rule.
He reveled in doing it. He made people wait for an answer about
himself, and the answer never came. Instead, he gave them a hundred
answers, and they contradicted one another.
He threw people back on their own resources, and those resources proved
to be severely limited.
How harsh for conventional critics to discover that nothing in Dali's
education produced an explanation for his ability to render an object
so perfectly on the canvas. It was almost as if, deciding that he would
present competing and dissonant circumstances inside one painting, he
perversely ENABLED himself to do the job with such exacting skill,
"making subversive photographs come to life."
That was too much. No one can invent an ability like that out of thin
air. It goes against all the laws of human nature.
But there the paintings are.
Imagination realized.
Suck on that apple.
The only choice critics had was to label Dali the great oddity, the
bizarre and mad exception in the history of modern art.
A category all his own.
Like it or not, Dali paved the way for many others. He opened doors and
windows. And the pressure has been building. The growing failure of
major institutions (organized religion, psychology, education,
government) to keep the cork in the bottle signals the prison break in
progress.
More people understand that the veil is not really a veil of tears.
It's a curtain drawn across the creative force.
It's no accident, on a personal level, that my articles on the
continuum, the paranormal, and imagination have garnered a far greater
and more intense response than anything I've written on this site since
its beginning five years ago.
The pot is boiling. People want out. It remains to be seen whether
people will admit that the veil was and is ultimately of their own
making. This is the hard step. It's always easier to hold ourselves in
check with a variety of critiques pointed outward. I know, there are
certainly elites that deserve criticism and more. But somewhere along
the line we have to give the green light to our own creative power.
That is the first great day. That's the dawn of no boundaries.
Everything we've been taught tells us it's impossible. It's weird. It's
crazy. It's meaningless. We don't have it within us. We're small and
stupid and should maintain silence and propriety in the face of greater
power and wisdom. We must abide by the rule of One. We must, at best,
"surrender to the universe."
But what if, when we come around the far turn, we see that the universe
is us? Is one part of imagination? Is a twinkling rendition we
installed to keep us titillated with dreams that would forever drift
out of reach?
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com
http://www.nomorefakenews.com/archives/archiveview.php?key=2528
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As to the year we've had, it's been one long strange trip indeed!