To See As Dali Sees

November 19, 2017

Salvador Dali arguably epitomises the Surrealist movement. Drawing upon Freudian ideas of the repressed unconscious mind, what Dali does is poses questions about what reality really is, and how we view it. His work and concepts are confrontational, setting up intense encounters with one’s dreams, phobias and inner disturbances in the most macabre way.

The paranoiac critical method is something that Dali developed in order to achieve this illusionistic style in his paintings. Dali stated that the paranoiac critical method is a "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena." He was interested in ‘paranoia’ in the context of the mind; the mind can forge links between unrelated objects, invoking questions about the identity of form and matter. This evolves into what we see in most of Dali’s pieces, the Freudian dimension of identity and reality. The dream-like landscapes and sexually charged symbolism illustrate the process of the unconscious mind revealing itself. It depicts the opening of a mental window.

‘The Great Masturbator’ perhaps illustrates this most clearly. As a vision of Dali’s own unconscious, the images have a fluidity and whimsicality despite the almost irreverent nature of the sexual scene. The luminosity of the work is described through the series of seemingly disparate images poised on the edge of the Spanish landscape. A grasshopper points to Dali’s phobia of locusts, the lion’s head and tongue have phallic connotations with the sharp teeth indicative of a discomfort with sex, and the overtly positioned sexual act perhaps figuratively depicts the ‘opening of Dali’s mental window’ exposing sexual frustration.

Yet what is intriguing about this piece is its multiplicity of viewpoint. Turn the picture from landscape to portrait and the sexual act undergoes a metamorphosis and becomes a female face. This is something Dali often inscribes into his painting; the piece ‘Paranoiac Village’ transforms a domesticated scene from his birthplace Cadaques into a human face. Dali is questioning how we view our reality, and how we do not have to see things as one dimensional or as they are intended to be.

This idea of ‘unclothing’ an object so that it manifests a new identity was inspired by the rocky, sculptural formations found off the Spanish coast of Cadaques, a landscape which features as the backdrop of most of Dali’s significant works. Iconic subjects of Dali’s surrealist pieces such as rhinoceroses, camels and even the female face from ‘The Great Masturbator’ were not randomly imagined but actually exist as solid, naturally eroded rock structures along this influential coastline. However, it was Dali who transferred his own subjectivity onto such formations to give them the identities they have in his artwork.

The altering of perceptions of reality using one’s subjective consciousness can be seen in the familiar activity of cloud spotting; taking a cloud and imagining it as something else like an animal or household object which maybe only you can see or others can as well. As I sit here writing this now looking out my window, the clouds are pink, drenched in the light from the sun’s setting. Yet what I can see are human faces screaming, figures in torture almost like chthonic forms. My physical environment is becoming a reflection of the visceral and experiential, an image drawn from my subjectivity. And this is what surrealism does. It takes things like two disparate objects and throws them together in a violent juxtaposition to form an impression of one’s subjective reality, such as a cloud and a tortured face. This stretches beyond Dali and even influences today’s fashion world. Take Alexander McQueen and Lady Gaga to name a few that fuse the surreal with the fashionable. My metafictional musing only aims to highlight what Dali exposes through his work; that how we view reality is subjective, self-conscious and most importantly highly revealing about who we are as individuals.

On a philosophical level this could link to the ‘qualia’: instances of subjective, first person experience. Qualia is what some argue is missing from the accounts of those who say that everything can be known through facts and knowledge of physical properties. Physically, yes, something may technically be a rock, and its molecular configuration may point to its existence as sedimentary matter. And this is unquestionable. But what does looking at said rock for the first time actually ‘feel’ like. When Dali looked along the coast of Cataques for the first time he didn’t see rocky formations but a female face and a sexual act, for example. That was what his qualia conjured, the ‘feel’ he got when observing the rocks characterised them using his own subjective thought. Even Fitzgerald alludes to the idea of subjectivity forming the world we see around us as narrator Nick describes his ‘feelings’ about the post-war irrationality of the 1920s and the actions of Daisy Buchanan by relating them to “a night scene by El Greco”. Reality can be constructed by the experiential.