1981

W

HY DO I HATE SALVADOR DALI? Let me count the ways. Dali never did anything for any purpose other than to talk about himself and his myriad social and sexual defects at length. His personal obsessions did not enlighten us but only served to entertain in the same way that gathering round a road traffic accident to see people (now) worse off than ourselves makes us feel good about our own lives. Whilst doubtlessly a talented and skilled draughtsman and possessing a great ability to realise his imagination into the solid objects he created by painting and sculpture, his mania for himself and his foibles is something that most reasonable people would find repulsive. It is not wrong to say that the repulsive ipso facto cannot be considered art, but when one makes the bridge beyond simply projecting creativity of oneself into the entire arena of synthesising the deliberately hideous for shock purposes then the artist's entire raison d'etre has to be called into question. Take for example his autobiography. In it he admits to many revolting practices, from (unfulfilled) homosexuality (which at the time of writing was considered to be a grievous sin), to deliberately killing other living creatures (not so unusual in a place like Spain) to launching an assault on his sister's head by kicking it as though it were a ball. It is not enough to simply doubt that any of these incidents ever happened - I doubt that many of them did - but the fact remains that Dali wanted these things to be true and hence included them in his personal mythology, something that was largely created by himself and kept alive by the legions of the stupid and vulnerable and gullible who not only believed his motivation for everything but who also refused to believe his base impulsion for making money from his ability to shock. He wanted us to be repelled, and repelled we were. His wish for admiration speak to me as the squalling of an errant child demanding attention and failing to get it until he does something so dreadful that attention is all he gets from that second onwards. Is his talent in his introspective wish-fulfillment, or does he dream up insane nonsense and make it look profound because he can draw? I see no reason on earth for elephants on stilts, lobsters, black telephones, melting watches, loaves of bread, drawers, burning giraffes, ants, wild-faced horses or endless christs on the cross forming any real part of the collective unconscious of our species. At a push it may be the case hat some of these things for some of the unconscious of a particular individual, but its solipsistic best that is only an inner view of one person, and the self-flagellation of one's ego by one's imagination is only a personal sort of masochism with a purposeful audience of one. So where do the rest of us fit into the world of Avida Dollars? The argument could be that others simply like the pictures and that they can appreciate the composition of likes of Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate One Second Before Waking without necessarily understanding the fish, the tigers or the rifle. Maybe they like the background. Maybe they like the flank of the reclining nude. Maybe they like the whole composition. Or maybe it's because it's a way of buying into the entire industry that has sprung up around his works. Not content with simply being able to look through an art gallery or even a bound book of his work, it is now possible to buy shirts, coasters, mugs, pens, playing cards, rugs, videos, placards, puzzles, carvings, magazines, calendars, prints, mouse mats, block writing pads, mirrors, fridge magnets, paper clips, inspired audio recordings, stickers, telephones, computer programs, wall mountings, table lamps, soap, pendants, crayons, cigarette cases, crockery, picture frames, glasses, clocks, boxes, lighters, cut-out displays and music stands that give you the opportunity not to just witness the inside of a fecund imagination, and not to just have the opportunity of visiting it whenever you wish but to actually live part of that life and to experience something that was never meant to be experienced beyond a gallery or display hall. To bring the imaginary and impossible to life means having to manufacture and that means selling something that that means having to find some place to put it in your house so that the next time the neighbours come round they can get the chance to see your melting clocks draped carefully over the coat stand, the lobster telephone on the small table by the front door and the purposefully arranged drapes, clock, images of Paris on the wall in front of the lips sofa to show that Mae West can be arranged to live within the space of your wooden framed brick-clad house near Luton. And all of this is in one name and for one purpose; to buy into an idea that exists that lets millions of people proclaim themselves to be individuals, in the same way that dressing up like all your mates does the same thing. All it does is lend to legions of the depressed, repressed and mortally bored the fleeting illusion that they are different people at the weekends than the sad and trampled people they are during the week and that behind the closed doors of their home their imaginations run riot. The more prosaic truth is, of course, that it's nothing of the sort and that all that is happening is that their lives are being directed on loan by the wit of someone who has been dead for decades and whose life was a mess from start to finish. Unfortunately for those in the housing estates, buying into a piece of Dali means buying into a whole lot more of him, so for all the transformed and revealed images, still lifes with bread, broken landscapes, fried eggs on a plate and glimpses of pop art, humour and endless enigmas there are also the spectres of mother complexes, corporophagia, diseased corpses, blasphemy, masturbation, rape, self-loathing, violence, torture, monomania, death, visceral fear, belligerence and virgins being auto-sodomised by their own chastity. Do they like to be reminded of this? Not one bit. But they can pick and choose the scope of this madman's lunatic vision to buy into and which they want to avoid. You can pick up playing cards featuring 'The Enigma of Desire' without a problem, but you'll never find table mats showing an image from 'The Lugubrious Game'. By wheeling into the light of his baleful art they reveal themselves to be the shallow, disinterested and uninteresting people they are attempting to show that they are not. Dali is a bore because all he can speak of is himself and his own neuroses, but by extension his own symptoms allow others to do just the same about themselves without realising that they are even doing so.