Salvador Dali & The Persistence of Memory.
For the sake of simplicity, very little is said in the book about perhaps one of the world’s greatest creations ever made in the history of art. After Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa which first saw the light of day in 1505, the next piece of art that was about to become the most surrealist and debatable project in the following years was The Persistence of Memory, made by the most renowned surrealist artist, Salvador Dali.
By studying Dali’s painting, scientists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, philosophers and other artists have been able to pour deeply into the creative imagination of the human mind. It has proved to be a gateway into the many secrets that lie hidden among the folds of our perception and cognition.
Dali was a genius, no doubt, but he never really explained the meaning of his works to the public with seriousness. His artistic genius lies in his ability create ideas that lie on the edge between being disturbing and arousing curiosity. His art is often times found to be horrific and strange. But anyone who truly understands art would know that Dali didn’t go over the border to create visions based on disgust and shock value alone. The purpose of his creating such art as he did was not to bewilder or shock the viewers of his paintings, but to simply make the images speak for themselves. And in the complex case of Salvador Dali, it becomes difficult to realize what questions the viewer should be asking by looking at his paradoxical visual statements.
It should be noted that Salvador Dali was a philosopher and had significant interest in and science and psychology. He had, for example, studied works of Sigmund Freud and Nietzsche. The meaning of The Persistence of Memory strongly suggests psychoanalytical values, those related with the research of Sigmund Freud. Dali himself had shown much interest in science through his paintings until after World War II, when the Hiroshima atomic bomb made a long-lasting impression on him, hence giving rise to the nuclear or ‘atomic’ period of his work. During this period, the painter focused on adding elements to his paintings that suggested atomic composition of what is known as matter. This can be further acknowledged by another painting Dali painted later in his life called The Disintegration of The Persistence of Memory.
In this painting, completed in 1954, Dali literally took its contents apart suggesting the end of the importance of psychoanalysis, which is replaced by the knowledge of subatomic particles – a concept that supersedes psychology as a higher form of existence. Seemingly, the ants in the painting spreading on the orange clock could represent the anxiety associated with time. But what exactly are the origins of our anxieties with time? Is it being too late for work? Or is it not being able to complete or accomplish something before we die? The possibilities are infinite. Whether we realize this or not, we all understand, even on a subconscious level, that we will die one day. This psychology and understanding of the reality of death may configure our behavior.
According to Dali, he was a self-proclaimed genius. However, he sometimes gave ridiculous explanations for his paintings just to confuse others. The Camembert cheese that had supposedly been his inspiration for the melting pocket watches in the painting was just that. By doing this, Dali not only proposed new ways for discussing multiple interpretations of his art, but also made criticizing his work nearly impossible for people he thought possessed lesser intellect than that of himself. This is the same as was the case with Leonardo da Vinci, who wrote backwards in his journals so that the meaning of his work could only be interpreted when looked at in a mirror's reflection by those who were clever enough to understand it.
In the light of recent discoveries by scientists, forming memory is a four-step process. It is known that human memory actually consists of four types: sensory memory, working memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. According to one theory, the sensory memory is the persistence of sensations. Dali's paintings are psychologically deep, and perhaps the sensory memory is what influenced the famous "melted clock" painting since it is precisely this type of memory that makes it possible to attach our experiences to something we end up remembering at its deepest level.
A genius like Salvador Dali is one of the few gems that fall upon the earth once in a while. And in the words of Dali himself,
“Dali is immortal and will never die”.
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