If things feel a little droopy in New York, it ain’t just the heat -- it’s the Surrealists! The Guggenheim Museum is filled with symbolic phalluses, all castrated, deflated or stacked on skewers by Louise Bourgeois. Never has the spiral concrete womb so resembled a vast beehive, with queen Louise in its center.
Down at the Museum of Modern Art are Salvador Dali’s famous melting clocks and oystery self-portraits, well-known emblems of his own impotency, in "Dali: Painting and Film." It’s a great show, with the galleries converted into a series of spacious theater spaces for Dali’s movies: Un Chien andalou (1929), L’Âge d’or (1930), the dream-sequence clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1944), Andy Warhol’s 1966 screen test.
Especially bizarre is the cartoon Destino (1946), a seven-minute-long Disney-Dali mashup that Dali did some fabulous drawings for, but that was only finished by the cartoon giant in 2003. Imagine Snow White dancing around a Dali landscape to an atonal symphony, and you pretty much got it. (As for press stills, there are none; no doubt Disney, famous for suing kindergartens for painting Mickey Mouse on their walls without permission, has some corporate policy against it.)
Best of all is Dali’s Chaos and Creation (1960), a 17-minute-long black-and-white video made with Philippe Halsman as a televised greeting to an avant-garde conference. Like a demented Ed Sullivan, Dali presents an easel holding a Piet Mondrian painting, which dissolves into an actual pigsty, with real pigs in one square, a model in an evening gown in another and a motorcycle in a third. Paging Aaron Young!
At the press preview, the Dali scholar Frédérique Camille Joseph-Lowery, who is organizing a show of Dali’s theater works for the Godwin-Ternbach Museum at Queens College in Flushing, pointed out that Dali himself didn’t use the Catalonian acute accent over the "i" in his name -- and so neither will we. What a relief.
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CHAOS THEORY by Charlie Finch June 25, 2008 Buckminster Fuller, Paul McCarthy, and Salvador Dali’s "Painting and Film"
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