at the Museum of Modern Art there is
this tiny painting by Salvador Dali
which is the painting that everybody
wants to say that and starry night by
Van Gogh are the two stars and I thought
it would be really interesting to talk
about why this painting is so wildly
popular so this is the persistence of
memory by Salvador Dali and here I
understand why people kind of connect to
it now I mean any anybody who's ever
tried to make an album for a rock band
it is inspired by Salvador Dali there's
also this kind of fun of what are you
looking at is really playing with
reality you know it's kind of like a
visual brain teaser is that it is it so
popular is it on album cover art because
it's this attack on the rational and
that's such a seductive idea yeah it's
mind trippy I like the way you phrase
attack on the rational I am I mean I
guess like there might be more to it
that's my sense you know you were
talking about album cover art and
posters on you know maybe a dorm room
and what's interesting is that these
artists took these ideas really
seriously this was surrealism this was
painted in 1931 Dali the Spanish artist
this Catalan artist had just come to
Paris and had joined the surrealist
group that was zooming he's considered
significant because he was the first
person to essentially do dreamscapes and
these as you mentioned attack all the
rationale when you walk in to this
painting and visually you enter into
this really deep open and lonely space
and it's this really quiet image yeah
it's kind of this desert scape ignoring
the melted clocks for a moment you feel
that okay if you were in this landscape
yes time really does not really carry a
lot of weight you could just kind of
wither there and die and no one would
care even that kind of water in the
background there's no waves in it it's
like they've had time to settle down
there's literally no activity there's
this unbearable sense of quiet
there is almost no movement and I think
it does feel very desert like and very
hot literally time has melted right but
we have this absurd environment we do
have this very naturalistic rendering
but the things that are being rendered
are not naturalistic at all
you mentioned the dead tree on the left
but it's growing out of something that
seems clearly man-made or at least
geometric a tabletop perhaps you have
ants that seemed to be eating and
attracted to a piece of metal as opposed
to a piece of rotted flesh oh that's
what that is I couldn't I couldn't fully
make it out okay so they're eating away
at a tiny piece that's fascinating and
of course you have the drooping clocks
and that's such an interesting evocative
idea because time is something that is
so regiment it's time is something that
rules us that is so associated with the
industrial culture that we live in and
here it responds to the environment as
we respond to the environment well one
you have that tabletop and there's
another one in the background and even
the way that the light is set up
especially in that cliff it looks like
it's sunset so it's kind of like pages
another day is past who cares now there
are some identifiable things I mean for
all of the absurdity and for all of the
impossibility of what we're seeing there
are some things that our historians have
recognized the cliffs in the back are we
think the cliffs of the Catalonian coast
in northern Spain were dahlias from and
so this is his childhood perhaps some
art historians have concluded that that
strange figure almost a profile face can
you just make out an eye with extremely
long lashes and perhaps a tongue under
nose this is the whole optical illusion
part of Sababa yet I thought it was like
a blanket but now I completely see of
the eyelashes I thought it was a duck
for a second - I see the eyelashes and
the top of a nose yeah Dulli does that
funny thing where one object can
actually be several things at once
sometimes really convincingly some art
historians think this is his face but
elusive and very much a kind of dream
well I mean that goes back in the
category of is that this is more of that
kind of formal optical illusion type art
well that's right surrealism posited
that the rational world that we have so
much faith in was perhaps not worthy of
all of that faith that the irrational
was just as important but was something
that we had sublimated something that we
had
tried to drive out of our life and the
way that these artists and writers
thought about it was if only they could
retrieve the world of the dream some of
the artists have read Freud some of them
had only heard some secondhand accounts
of Freud but the idea that the dream was
a place where the irrational mind came
to the fore unrestricted this is
something I guess off often confronts me
is even the notions that how we perceive
what we think is objective reality is
really based on how our brain is wired
me we see these causes and effects we
see linear time this is how humans are
wired I mean I think that's what's fun
about these type of things that kind of
said well you know look there's
different forms of reality and who are
we as as creatures that are wired one
particular way to be to be all that
judgmental about what's real when people
have looked at this painting they have
sometimes and I think unconvincingly
tried to link it to Feinstein's earlier
ideas of the dilation exactly and the
time was not in fact a strict thing but
I think there's more evidence that Dali
is thinking about ideas of a philosopher
whose name is Bergson who thought about
time as something that was not simply
what struck on a clock but that there
was a kind of human time that was more
subjective and that expanded and
contracted according to our experience
times this thing that sometimes scares
us because we completely don't
understand it even though some kind of
the most fundamental component of our
existence we fundamentally don't
understand it if we try to measure it
out we try to constrain it define it
it's some way that makes sense to us
yeah actually I think that's what this
piece is may be trying to do is that's
like like these clocks are stupid these
are just our futile attempts to try to
label it's kind of like if you label
something or if you measure something
you feel like you actually understand it
even though you don't think this is that
moment when all those safe ideas of
objectivity are being blown out of the
water and we're seeing an art that is in
some really interesting ways confronting
that
you