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(piano music)
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Steven: At the Museum of Modern Art there
is this tiny painting by Salvador Dali,
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which is the painting that
everybody wants to see.
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That and Starry Night by
Van Gogh are the two stars.
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We thought it would be really
interesting to talk about why this
painting is so wildly popular.
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This is the Persistence of
Memory by Salvador Dali.
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Sal: And here I understand why
people kind of connect to it now.
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I mean anybody who has
ever tried to make an album
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for a rock band is
inspired by Salvador Dali.
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There is also this kind of fun
of, "What are you looking at?"
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is really playing with reality.
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It's kind of like a visual brain teaser.
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Steven: Is that it? Is it so popular?
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Is it on album cover art because
it's this attack on the rational
and that's such a seductive idea?
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Sal: Yeah, it's mind trippy.
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I like the way you put it.
It's an attack on the rational.
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I guess I don't ... There might
be more to it. That's my sense.
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Steven: You know, you were
talking about album cover art
and posters in maybe a dorm room.
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What's interesting is that these artists
took these ideas really seriously.
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This was Surrealism.
This was painted in 1931.
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Dali, the Spanish artist,
this Catalin Artist,
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had just come to Paris and had
joined the Surrealist group.
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Sal: I'm assuming he's
considered significant because
he was the first person
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to essentially do dreamscapes, and as
you mentioned, attack on the rational.
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Steven: When you walk into this painting
visually, you enter into this really deep
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open and lonely space, and
is this really quiet image.
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Sal: Yeah it's kind of this desert-scape,
ignoring the melting clocks for a moment,
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you feel that okay if you
were in this landscape, yes,
time really does not really
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carry a lot of weight. You
could just kind of wither there
and die and no one would care.
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Even that kind of water in the background.
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There's no waves in it.
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It's like they've had time to settle down.
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There's literally no activity.
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Steven: There's this
unbearable sense of quiet.
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There is almost no movement and I think
it does feel very desert-like, very hot.
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Literally time has melted, right?
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But we have this absurd environment.
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We do have this very
naturalistic rendering
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but the things that are being rendered
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are not naturalistic at all.
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You mentioned the dead tree on the left
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but it's growing out of
something that seems clearly
man-made or at least geometric,
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a table top perhaps.
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You have ants that seem
to be eating and attracted
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to a piece of metal as opposed
to a piece of rotted flesh.
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Sal: Oh that's what that is.
I couldn't fully make it out.
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Okay so they're eating away at a
time piece. That's fascinating.
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Steven: And of course you
have the drooping clocks.
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And that's such an interesting
and provocative idea
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because time is something
that is so regimented.
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Time is something that rules us,
that is so associated with the
industrial culture that we live in,
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and here it responds to the environment
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as we respond to the environment.
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Sal: Well one you have that tabletop.
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There's another one in the background.
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And even the way the light is
set up, especially on the cliff,
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it looks like it's sunset
so it's kind of like,
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"Hey another day has passed, who cares?"
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Steven: Now there are
some identifiable things.
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For all the absurdity and
for all of the impossibility
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of what we're seeing, there
are some things that our
historians have recognized.
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The cliffs in the back are,
we think, the cliffs of the
Catalonian coast in Northern Spain
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where Dali is from and so
this is his childhood perhaps.
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Some art historians have
concluded that that strange
figure, almost a profile face.
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Can you make out an eye with
extremely long lashes and
perhaps a tongue under the nose?
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Sal: This is the whole
optical illusion part of Dali.
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Yeah I thought it was a blanket but
now I completely see the eyelashes.
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I thought it was a duck for a second too.
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I see the eyelashes and the top of a nose.
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Steven: Yeah, Dali does that
fun thing where one object can
actually be several things at once,
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sometimes really convincingly.
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Some art historians think this is his face
but elusive and very much a kind of dream.
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Sal: That goes back in the category of is
this more that kind of dorm room optical
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illusion type art.
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Steven: Well that's right.
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Surrealism positive to that, the rational
world that we have so much faith in,
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was perhaps not worthy of all that faith.
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The irrational was just as important
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but was something that we had sublimated.
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Something that we had tried
to drive out of our life.
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And the way that these artists
and writers thought about it
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was if only they could retrieve
the world of the dream.
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Some of the artists have read Freud.
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Some of them had only heard sort
of secondhand accounts of Freud.
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But the idea that the dream was a place
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where the irrational mind
came to the fore unrestricted.
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Sal: This is something
that often confronts me.
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Even the notions that how
we perceive what we think
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is objective reality is really
based on how our brain is wired.
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We see these causes and effects.
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We see linear time. This
is how humans are wired.
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I think that's what's fun
about these type of things.
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Look, there are different forms of reality
and who are we as creatures that are wired
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one particular way to be all that
judgmental about what's real.
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Steven: When people have looked at
this painting they have sometimes,
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I think unconvincingly, tried to
link it to fine signs earlier,
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ideas of the ...
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Sal: Time dilation.
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Steven: Exactly and time in
fact was not a strict thing.
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I think there is more evidence
that Dali is thinking about,
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ideas of a philospher's
name who is Berkson,
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who thought about time as something that
was not simply what struck on a clock,
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but that there was something
that kind of unit of time
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that was more subjective and
that expanded and contracted
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according to our experience.
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Sal: Time is this thing
that sometime scares us.
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We completely don't understand it, even
though it's kind of the most fundamental
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component of our existence.
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We fundamentally don't understand it.
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We try to measure it out.
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We try to constrain it and define it
in some way that makes sense to us.
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Actually I think that's what
this piece is maybe trying to do.
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It's like, "Look these clocks are stupid."
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These are just our futile
attempts to try to label.
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It's kind of like if you label something
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or you measure something,
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you feel like you actually
understand it even though you don't.
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Steven: I think this is that moment when
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all of those safe ideas
of objectivity are being
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blown out of the water
and we're seeing an art
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that is in some really
interesting ways confronting that.
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(piano music)
