BURNAWAY » First impressions of Salvador Dali: The Late Work?

First impressions of Salvador Dali: The Late Work?

Written By Kombo Chapfika on August 10, 2010 in Events, To Do List

Click below to view footage from Salvador Dali: The Late Work at the High Musuem of Art. The exhibition opened Saturday, August 8, and continues through January 9, 2011.

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Category: Events, To Do List |
Tags: Atlanta, High Museum of Art, preview, Salvador Dali, The Late Work, VIDEO

Jeremy Abernathy

The painting Santiago El Grande is over 13 feet tall. The scale of it is magnificent. A nude man rides on horseback against a vast landscape of ice blue. The painting hasn’t left its home in Canada since 1959, just two years after it was created in 1957. A surprising number of the other works in this show are also monumental in size and are equally rare to see exhibited together, if ever. This is one of the reasons why I find this exhibition fascinating.

The other reason is because I’m curious to see how the community will react. The museum’s motives are honestly well meaning, but they are transparent.

For example, what’s with all these mustaches? Dali’s mustachio-ed face has been plastered all over the city, on billboards, MARTA buses, and even on a passenger jet.
http://artkabinett.com/ak-file/collectors-fly-artsy-aircraft
They may seem innocuous now, but we will have to tolerate much of this until the show closes in January. The image is ripe for parody.

Of course the counterargument is that Dali’s late work is relevant because it prefigures the artist-as-celebrity tactics of Andy Warhol. These works foreshadow the likes of Damien Hurst and Jeff Koons (who will deliver a lecture at the High in October).

For that reason I appreciate the parallel Jerry Cullum drew between Dali and Lady Gaga.
http://www.artscriticatl.com/2010/08/salvador-dali-mixes-science-religion-and-showmanship-in-%E2%80%9Cdali-the-late-work%E2%80%9D-at-the-high-museum-by-jerry-cullum/
While celebrity status is certainly a powerful force in contemporary culture, there’s something to be said about an artist like Lady Gaga whose work is derivative and shallow and whose glittery stage presence outstrips her genuine creative worth.

And I was unable to attend the Surreal Soiree this weekend for family reasons. I wonder how it went?
http://www.pd.org/ Robert Cheatham

By this point in time ‘Salvador Dali’ has become a brand, even if you have barely heard of him. The flying cat/water and the melting watch alone were enough to guarantee that. Perhaps the ‘nuclear mysticism’ paintings aka religious paintings might come as a surprise…but no more so that Warhol’s late ‘catholic’ paintings perhaps. (Of course religion in general is still a hot button issue, and just as much so for parts of the ‘high art’ community. ‘Religion’ has always been a marker of the demotic, of the person on the street (and I don’t mean the ironic stance that art sometimes takes with it).

Our familiarity with surrealism in general is just part of the general culture now, in the dream life that it represents…and often in the banality which that represents. (The use of the word ‘banal’ should not be taken necessarily as a term of oprobrium, since the ‘everyday’ is where we all have to live.)

At any rate,in walking around the exhibit (or trudging more like it; the first saturday was uncomfortably packed) I was reminded by a short piece by Walter Benjamin which I looked up afterward and which, like always with Benjamin, a short quote is in order:
“The Surrealists….are less on the trail of the psyche than on the track of things. They seek the totemic tree of objects within the thicket of primal history. The very last, the topmost face on the totem pole is that of kitsch. It is the last mask of the banal, the one with which we adorn ourselves, in dream and conversation, so as to take in the energies of an outlived world of things.”

“What we used to call art begins at a distance of two meters from the body. But now, in kitsch, the world of things advance on the human being; it yields to his uncertain grasp and ultimately fashions in figures in his interior.”(Gloss On Surrealism)

Now we might take Philip K. Dick to heart and declare that the banla is now the world of kipple, of dream-stuff that is piling up around us everywhere, luminous piles of gimcracks, electronica, and plastic widgets left over from a visit to the hamburger joint to pick up plastic figurines from the latest sci-fi/horror flick. Dali’s ‘performativity’ is now at one with the culture we live in (or that lives us as Colin Bennett might have it), putting the move on stuff.

‘Thingness’ is the place we inhabit today and vice versa. It is entirely appropriate then that one is availed of numerous items to purchase a we leave the Dali exhibit (I did not notice a religious experience for sale though).

Surrealism’s dream (not excepting ‘molecular mysticism’) might be that at the heart of the human dream is not a subject at all but an object, a thing. There is where the frightening aspect of Dali/surrealism shows its inhuman face: the human as inhabited by piles of kipple.
http://www.kombochapfika.com Kombo

Two pieces stood out to me as very kitschy, so much so it was difficult to reconcile them with Dali’s epic surrealist work, of which there are a few examples in this show. Both of the brow-raising pieces paintings were commissioned portraits of wealthy patrons and both were done with a visible disdain for the subject. One of the few drawbacks of Dali’s art world fame is that even his bad did-it-for-the-money commissioned pieces eventually see the light of day. I see some strong parallels between Dali’s moustache and Flavor Flave’s big clock. Had Dali lived in our time, I wouldn’t put it past him to do a reality show.
http://www.pd.org/ Robert Cheatham

Actually Dali DID do a TV show in the fifties: What’s My Line?
It’s pretty funny, you can find it on youtube.
Jeremy Abernathy

You mean this one, Robert?
http://vimeo.com/11902036

I almost forgot that was online. Ha!

First impressions of Salvador Dali: The Late Work?

Lecture: Art Papers Live! / Matthew Coolidge

Meet the Collector: African Art Collector Michael Mack

Last Day to See: Seismic Reflection / Bethany Springer

Spit Bite Etching

Closing Celebration: Something In Particular’s Exhibition 1

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