Salvador Dali rolls into town

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This was published 14 years ago

Salvador Dali rolls into town

By Robert Nelson


Slave Market with Apparition of the Invisible Bust of Voltaire (1940, oil on canvas). The Salvador Dali Museum, St Petersburg.

Slave Market with Apparition of the Invisible Bust of Voltaire (1940, oil on canvas). The Salvador Dali Museum, St Petersburg.

All art lovers have preconceptions about Salvador Dali. The Catalonian artist (1904-89) polarises audiences: he is esteemed either as a genius innovator or a flamboyant pictorial prankster; a brave scrutineer of the unconscious or a superficial exhibitionist; a surrealist shaman or a self-infatuated showman. And for all his popularity, a large part of the critical community still can't decide. Are his obscurities simply vulgar attempts to score attention, or is his work sustaining beyond the impact of so many incongruous fantasies?

The exhibition at the NGV International is well designed to dispel any preconceptions. It methodically works its way through Dali's prolific output in a wide range of media, from the traditional ones, such as painting and drawing, through to film and television, ballet, animation, jewellery, fashion, photography, even holograms. To bring this array of material together is a curatorial feat.

As if candidly making it easier to judge, the exhibition brings out some material that safe taste might have suppressed. The show doesn't resile from the crasser applications of Dali's talents in the world of advertising. In one ad for television, Dali's face fills up the screen with rolling eyes: "I am mad," he says in French and then completes the sentence to indicate his ravenous appetite for a certain brand of chocolate.

How discrediting is that? Trading off the stereotypical image of the mad artist — which Dali injected with new theatricality — Dali also projects his own brand-name, even if it's at the expense of traditional artistic integrity. For Dali, an ad is about consolidating his position as household name, linking his image to other products and promotional forces. He perfectly understood what television is about and goes into it with the shameless marketing spirit that the medium indicates.

The man who fetishises his own moustache, who lets another artist turn his moustache into the hands of a clock, hardly strikes us as serious. The exhibition could easily have excluded such frivolities, but the curator Ted Gott has decided to embrace the loopy mo in all its contortions. The exhibition is full of embarrassing fun.

The material capable of profundity remains the paintings and drawings. The best of it is more than just puzzling overlay of inanimate objects and genitalia. For example, from 1940 is a "tour de force" of evocative spaces, beginning with the profile of Gala on the left, the double-meaning image of the Voltaire bust and the nuns — whose double eyes ingeniously fold into the philosopher's pupil — to the fruit in the bowl that becomes buttocks and the landscape on the right with nipples.

As with from the same year, Dali enjoys his forms. Confounding the images doesn't prevent him from finding something sumptuous and chromatically rich in the folds and flesh, the skies and masonry.

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Throughout his career, Dali was powerfully drawn to Renaissance and baroque masters; and the fondness for their influence is ultimately more memorable than any psychoanalytical dimension to which the combinations allude.

Sigmund Freud already observed this when asked about Dali. The idea that any given object might symbolise something in the unconscious, especially of a sexual nature, provides a frisson; but it doesn't endure, image after image, where the painter's prime objective appears to be to paint "all' antica", with lots of opportunities to do tight muscly bums and breasts in free fall. Sometimes his pictures seem like a modern pretext to enjoy the archaeology of picture-making.

Very early, Dali discovers his gifts as a burlesque tribute-maker, with pictures of almost sarcastic homage, such as the piss-take of Picasso in of 1926. An alarmingly spread-eagled lady is seen in painful spasm: but the drapery around her crotch exaggerates, with more mockery than reverence, the vulva that it's meant to conceal.

Dali could never be accused of being too sincere. By borrowing Renaissance conventions, his best works are contemplative as well as clever; but his many ruses often overtake the spirit of his pictures, compromising their resonance.

Once you've worked out the tricks, the picture doesn't always have much to say.

Because his works lay a claim to the unconscious, Dali sets you up for disappointment, because you never arrive. He engages a language for probing the depths of the psyche — where objects assume equivalences with your libidinal core — but he projects only artifice. His pictures are all about invention, where the world is a stage for pictorial concoctions rather than a vessel of lived experience.

Though well painted, Dali's pictures suffer from some of the defects that dogged his personality. He was by nature a shy man who had a colossal desire to stand out. So, too, his figures or anything placed on a table. They are often pushed away pictorially but have an

over-eager need to stand out. Small figures in the distance will be lit fiercely, or a thumb will inexplicably jut out.

For Dali, the horizon is the border of an arbitrary space filled with nothing but follies until it runs out. The exhibition makes an attempt to connect his imagery to his native landscape; but Dali sought to be too cerebral for this naivety. The desolation of his scenery is a function of exhaustion, because the ground cannot be filled infinitely with inventions, but only one or two or five or six. So Dali exploits the feeling of the wasteland, the idea of a platform without a context for anything, which is actually the reverse of the psychic landscape, in which everything is connected.

Dali's fondness for double meaning initially gives you a sense of embryonic thought, as if ideas in the front part of your mind are being formed by an inscrutable activity further down. Too often, however, the combinations suggest an arbitrary collapse of imagery, a manipulative collage of improbable overlap, all for effect.

The late works are a welcome surprise, painted already in the postmodern epoch. of 1981 looks amazingly contemporary. There are many surprises like this and you end up leaving all preconceptions at the door.

robert.nelson@artdes.monash.edu.au

is a sponsor of the exhibition.

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