In Which We Commence A Lifetime Of Threats And Insults

Water, The Dam

by ELLEN COPPERFIELD

When it came time to collaborate on their first film, Luis Buñuel and Dali had a script within a week. "Our only rule was simple," wrote Buñuel. "No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted."

So began "a lifetime of threats and insults." In the near term, however, Buñuel felt he could not ask his mother for any more money, so put his aspirations in the cinema on hold. To get the funding for his next project, Buñuel took a meeting with a potential backer, Charles de Noailles. At the de Noailles mansion, Buñuel heard Charles say, "Our proposal is that you make a twenty-minute film. You'll have complete freedom to do whatever you want. There is only one condition. We have an agreement with Stravinsky to write the music for it."

"Sorry," Buñuel replied, "but can you imagine me collaborating with someone who's always falling to his knees and beating his breast?"

swimming at the Chaplin home

Shortly thereafter Buñuel was hired by MGM. He loved America; the first thing he did in Los Angeles was buy a car, a gun and a camera. Every weekend he went to Charlie Chaplin's house to swim or play tennis. He did have a fantasy of going to the Polynesian islands, but thoughts of further travel in the world were far off. It made no difference where he was.

"One of the more unpleasant situations in life," writes Buñuel, several times but in this specific instance, saying, "is to be pursued by someone you don't like. It's happened to me more than once, and it's very uncomfortable; I've always preferred loving to being loved." Buñuel was expert at detecting when someone was falling for him, and according to his memoir My Last Sigh, written in his old age, this happened quite often.

Then there was also the sense that the love Buñuel was able to detect in his admirers wasn't quite as passionate as some others. He became captivated by all kinds of love, fixating on couples who committed suicide even when there was no familial obstacle to their union. It is like looking at a car accident and being envious you could not fly that fast.

Buñuel was a devout atheist. He felt that a hypothetical God wasn't very interested in a single human being: "Since I reject the idea of a divine watchmaker, then I must consent to live in a kind of shadowy confusion that leaves my moral freedom intact." For this reason and others, Picasso never appealed to Buñuel, who spoke of wanting to blow Guernica up.

When he was young he had been interested in intimacy with both boys and girls, but a chaste kind of knowing that pushed sex to the background as an impossibility. Once consummated, the object of Buñuel's affection no longer held the same sway. He learned this early.

In My Last Sigh he writes,

When we were young, love seemed powerful enough to transform our lives. Sexual desire went hand in hand with feelings of intimacy, of conquest, and of sharing, which raised us above mundane concerns and made us feel capable of great thing. Today, if I can believe what people say, love is like faith. It's acquired a certain tendency to disappear, at least in some circles. Many people seem to consider it a historical phenomenon, a kind of cultural illusion. It's studied and analyzed and, wherever possible, cured.

Buñuel was given the job of screening Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will in America. He was overwhelmed by the technical acumen he witnessed. When he showed it to Chaplin, Charlie fell off his chair laughing.

It seemed like everyone was in New York: his old friend Dali, Saint-Exupéry, Levi-Strauss, Leonora Carrington. Some he fell out with, others became closer in his new home. Dali was a phony and a fraud, yet Buñuel retained a certain sympathy for his lost friend. He did not write back to his old collaborator for the next 35 years. When Dali suggested a sequel to Un Chien Andalou, Bunuel cabled back a spanish proverb, Agua pasada no rueda molino, or, Once the water's gone over the dam, the mill won't run anymore.

This is the thing to say to someone who is lost to you.

Ellen Copperfield is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in San Francisco. She last wrote in these pages about Dorothea Lange. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

The Best of Ellen Copperfield on This Recording

Dorothea Lange's Failed Marriage

Sex Life Of Marlon Brando

The Onset Of The Western Canon

Entitled To Madonna's Opinion

Barbra Streisand Grows Up In Flatbush

A Sneaking Suspicion of Literature

Anjelica Huston Falls Off The Horse

Prefer To Be Simone de Beauvoir

The Marriage of Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra

Elongated Childhood of Jorge Luis Borges

Jokes At The Expense Of Tom Hanks

Which One Is The Gay?

"Once" - Tunng (mp3)

"The Village" - Tunng (mp3)

The fifth album from Tunng is entitled Turbines, and it was released on June 18th from Full Time Hobby.

In Which René Magritte Offers Aesthetic Illumination

Traces of the Divine

by KARA VANDERBIJL

The pleasure in surrealism does not lie in its ability to reassure that the world is not so, but rather in the knowledge that that it could be so. It is the idea that perhaps we will wake up in a world where water does not pour but slithers through the air, where a mere step will take us to the Moon. It might be a world in which a pipe is not a pipe, in which a rose by any other name wouldn’t smell as sweet; in which, by rule of non sequitur, we would be incapable of hurting those closest to us.

As its name indicates, the movement emphasized more than reality, and not less. Convinced that reality was unattainable, its adherents conjured a brilliant simulacrum of reality — on one hand, something that looked and felt and tasted like it without being it; and on the other, something that strayed so far from the exact nature of things that it could only call attention to truth. In tampering with our perception — especially our visual perception — they took away from us what we put most of our faith in. They asked us to look, and in so doing taught us we were blind.

Quite literally, then, René Magritte's "Key to the Fields" painting not only represents a broken window, it is a broken window. Upon looking at the shards of glass the observer realizes two things: first, that they are the pieces of a painting, and second, that they also serve the function of a mirror. The painting ostentatiously refers to itself as art by being a window into reality; it shows us life as we think we see it. Yet the closer we get to what is beyond the window, to what is outside, the more we realize that art is much like walking towards Michelangelo’s La Pieta in St. Peter’s basilica: sooner or later we’ll run into plate glass, or oil on canvas, and realize that no matter how many leaves are on the trees, they are still nothing but brushstrokes. We’re looking at a painting of a painting of a painting, and the only real thing is our perception, which is the frailest thing in the world.

Frailty — or limitations both physical and mental — built boxes and frames around concepts we had taken for granted up until the war. Death, represented heretofore in human terms (a putrefying corpse, a robed figure, a dancing skeleton) became the great Finisher; except instead of finishing life, it merely finished art by framing canvases with wood, by hiding humans inside boxes or behind trees, and by creating absurd, albeit ingenious, metonymies. That we find Jacques-Louis David’s Madame Recamier in Magritte’s parody (1951) is solely due to the fact that only a certain kind of box can hold a human, just like our minds fit into certain boxes and hibernate there quite comfortably under six feet of soil.

Yet with the acknowledgement of human limitation came an incontrollable desire to present thought in its purest condition, unbridled by aphorisms, cold logic, or even language. No one explored this more than Dali, whose paintings captured the most fantastical wanderings of the unconscious mind. The Spanish master’s eccentric and occasionally frightening visions bled into his daily life: for example, in order to attract the attention of Gala, who was at the time married to surrealist poet Paul Eluard, he coated himself in goat excrements, dyed his armpit hair blue, and laughed uncontrollably in her presence. Inexplicably — again, non sequitur — Gala found this appealing.

Similar to Magritte’s obsession with bringing to light an apparent contradiction was Dali’s obsession with placing time and space outside of time and space. Thus his predilection for vast desert landscapes filled with degraded, almost unrecognizable objects begins to make sense; the pocket watches in 1931's "The Persistence of Memory" melt not because they are in a desert, but because they have ticked themselves out of existence. Millet’s famous couple, who had bent their heads so quaintly, so reverently over a patch of ground in Angelus, lost their humanity when they ceased to have land to pray over and church bells to pray to. The couple’s aesthetic function remains the same in both Millet and Dali, except that in Angelus they are sowing heaven in earth, and in "Atavism at Twilight" (1933) their bodies are symbolically harvesting hell: a pitchfork and a wheelbarrow.

Magritte took pleasure in hiding his subjects’ faces, whether it was with a piece of fruit or a piece of cloth. "The Lovers" (1928), engaging in an act as simple as an embrace, find themselves fumbling blindly for each other. Dali, on the other hand, concealed the subjects of his paintings behind Gala’s face. In her homely, middle-aged body he found traces of the divine, and at different times she masqueraded as both the pagan and Christian symbols of feminine zeal: Leda and the Virgin Mary.

Everything floats in "Leda Atomica" (1949), a not-so-subtle allusion to the disaster in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Leda — Gala — almost embraces the swan, whose wing almost touches her, as she’s almost seated, her feet almost resting on pedestals. Even the sea in the background recoils from land, all of it a picture of atoms hanging in suspension. Even in its eerie representation (the weirdest being that Leda has slightly crossed eyes and distinctively eastern European features), there is no mistaking the classic elements of Renaissance art, namely the divine proportion. Espousing the A-bomb to the golden ratio turned this piece, in Dali’s opinion, into the best kind of art: a picture of both mankind’s greatest achievements and its current wondering and wandering.

A man with wings, an overgrown apple in a tiny room, melting watches, and a woman enclosed in a coffin are surreal not because they could never be but because we forget to realize that they could be. Our simplemindedness, our laziness consists of this: that we are constantly and erroneously surprised by what is. Why should we ever be surprised that a rose smells like a rose, or that the sea comes back time and time again to the shore? This is the paradox, the greatest of non sequiturs: waking up and looking at the world as if you had never seen it before, and discovering that this might in fact be the secret formula of happiness.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about her letter to the editor. She tumbls here.

"Sonia" - Laetoli Steps (mp3)

"Hash of Cash" - Laetoli Steps (mp3)

"Bully Bully Bully" - Laetoli Steps (mp3)

with georgette berger

In Which Salvador Dali Experiences Something of a Beatdown

Dali

by HILTON KRAMER

Certain forms of art are less important for what they are than for what they signify. Though they traffic in aesthetic goods, the place they occupy in our culture has little to do with aesthetic illumination. To the language of art, they contribute nothing but a parody of established conventions. To the definition of feeling, which is the real glory of the artistic enterprise, they add only a corrupted simulacrum of familiar gestures.

Their sole function is to perform a visual charade in which the public — a public terrified at experiencing any emotion it has never experienced before — will recognize its own most cherished yearnings.

Art of this kind does not appeal to our curiosity but to our prejudices. Its mission is not to question or to complicate our emotions but to confirm them. And such art can only succeed in its meretricious task if it effectively disguises its rehearsal of the familiar in the kind of technical display which, for minds of a certain disposition, is always a satisfactory substitute for real vision.

Two artists in our time have brought this charade to a kind of bogus perfection — the American Andrew Wyeth and the Spaniard Salvador Dali. Both have been duly rewarded with a surpassing popularity and success.

One offers us an image of American life — pastoral, innocent and homespun — which bears about as much relation to reality as a Neiman-Marcus boutique bears to the life of the old frontier. The other offers us a fantasy of the psyche in which the real fissures of modern life are cosmetized in the very process of being evoked, and which thus exploits the anxieties of modernism while effectively subverting their critical and spiritual function. Together these two artists, with their respective daydreams of innocence and apocalypse, define — if indeed they do not exhaust — the artistic horizons of that vast, silent, uncritical majority which knows nothing about art but knows what it likes.

Of the two, Dali is unquestionably the more interesting and accomplished. He understands very well the modern appetite for violence and scandal, and has made a career of catering to this appetite, spicing each successive dish with sufficient outrage and surprise to keep the public a little baffled, a little angry, a little appalled, but always delighted, impressed, and — above all else — interested. He is a master showman who lavishes his real genius on the instruments of public relations. Only his talent goes into his art, which is less the focus of his deftly organized publicity campaigns than one of his means of achieving them.

For Dali, painting is always an applied art — an art applied to advancing his own personality.

His latest exhibition — now on view at M. Knoedler & Co. — is devoted to paintings and drawings from the years 1965-1970, and contains a larger selection of new work than Dali has shown in many years. There are twenty-two items, several of them vast "machines" of the type that so delighted the knuckle-headed spectators in the official salons of the last century and that, to judge by the size and spirit of the crowds pouring into Knoedler's every day, have lost none of their power to impress a public content to live without intelligence or taste.

The famous technique has lost none of its luster. Only the power to shock has, perhaps, grown a little dimmer with the passage of time, but this is less a fault of Dali's than a reflection of the degree to which modern culture has now immunized itself against aesthetic shocks of any sort.

Nowadays the real shocks come from life rather than art, and Dali — even Dali, who has made such a specialty of shocking the public — is as helpless as anyone else in the face of this development. The time is past when his fantasies could disturb us. Now it is only his taste that disturbs, and even this is less a disturbance than a mild discomfort. For the first time, one almost feels a little sorry for Dali — all that effort invested in such a petty provocation.

As painting, of course, it is complete rubbish. The ostentatious display of "old master" ambition has degenerated into the purest kitsch. The puerile fantasy, with its aggressive self-importance and operatic rhetoric, is no longer even amusing. The feeble attempt at satire ends only in satirizing the satirist's own quite silly machinations. Everything about this work reminds us that we are dealing with a "case," a social phenomenon, an episode in the history of taste and reputations rather than an example of genuine artistic accomplishment.

"The two qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses," George Orwell once wrote, "are a gift for drawing and an atrocious egoism." Orwell defined Dali's sensibility as fundamentally that of an Edwardian illustrator. "Take away the skulls, ants, lobsters, telephones, and other paraphernalia, and every now and again you are back in the world of Barrie, Rackham, Dunsany, and Where the Rainbow Ends." The paraphernalia has changed since Orwell wrote his essay a quarter of a century ago, but everything in the current exhibition confirms this critical judgment.

As for the celebrated "aberrations" that were once so shocking, Orwell remarked: "Perhaps they are a way of assuring himself that he is not commonplace." Dali's desperation in this respect is now greater than ever, for the distance separating his facile, self-willed eccentricities and the commonplaces of our culture has been drastically reduced. The blatant "camp" that dominates the taste of his latest work is now the property of every two-bit filmmaker and commercial artist on the current scene.

None of this will dim Dali's popularity with the vast public that adores him — the public that still swoons over both his antics and his success — for Dali performs an essential service for this public. He provides a vision of the apocalypse that is at once exquisite and harmless — the apocalypse turned into a parfumerie. In performing that service, Dali brings the retrograde character of his art into perfect alignment with his decadent social ideology.

March 22, 1970

You can find more Hilton Kramer in his book The Age of the Avant-Garde, which you can purchase here.

"Shadows Fall (instrumental)" - The Coral (mp3)

"Monkey to the Moon" - The Coral (mp3)

"Return Her To Me" - The Coral (mp3)