Salvador Dali - Freud's Moses and Monotheism

Salvador Dali is a kind of magician whose sleight of hand is all his own: it takes the form of fanciful obfuscation, it plays with the audience’s expectations and confirms the long-held opinion that Dali’s art is ultimately more about Dali than the world it represents. Frequently, unashamedly and unselfconsciously, Dali will insert ideas and images derived from his early childhood experiences, or his dreams, or his self-professed obsessions into his artworks. Take his 1975 work entitled “Moses and Monotheism”, a set of ten lithographs which are based on his interpretation of Sigmund Freud's essay of the same title. Here, in each of the ten lithographs, two layers of material are superimposed onto the painted surfaces: the primary material, whose themes are suggested by the titles of the lithographs, and the secondary material, the intensely personal images, found again and again in Dali’s art but which bear no relationship to the primary work.

Ants, crutches, elephants with spindly legs and snails, four of his favourite recurring images, appear in the depictions of Moses and his travails. None appear in Freud’s text, none help to advance Freud’s radical proposals but a little bit of research into Dali’s meeting with Freud may explain at least one of the odder images. In “Moses Saved from the Waters”, Dali starts with the story of the three-month-old Moses, who in the Bible is placed by his mother and sister Miriam in a papyrus basket set afloat on the banks of the Nile. Dali paints water, sky and reeds in keeping with the traditional telling of events but substitutes a giant snail for the basket and adds crutches and bones to the scene. Moses is depicted as a baby with rays emanating from his head, one leg and arm are extended and he is lying in the opening of the giant snail which is being held up by bones. Crutches are holding the entire bizarre edifice above the water.

The snail does not, of course appear in the biblical telling of the Moses story, neither does it appear in Freud’s version of the story. It is wholly a Dali invention, borne, he tells us, of several moments where real-life snails produce epiphanies which involve Freud, at least tangentially.

One occurs on July 19th, 1938 during the much anticipated meeting between Dali and Freud. Dalí writes that he was captivated by the sight of a snail on a bicycle outside Freud's house and connected the snail with the image of Freud’s head.

Dali also writes that while eating snails in a restaurant in France he notices a photo of Freud in a newspaper. "I uttered a loud cry. I had just that instant discovered the morphological secret of Freud! Freud's cranium is a snail! His brain is on the form of a spiral - to be extracted with a needle!"

The question of why a snail houses a baby in its shell still remains unanswered, of course. All we know is that Freud’s cranium is a snail, snails transport angels, they save babies from drowning and in Dali’s world, anything goes.

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On Translating God's Name - David Goldstein - 1987

Imagine coming across an essay called On Translating God's Name. Could you ignore it and move on to something more conventional and less esoteric or would the subject matter intrigue you? If you’re seeking a challenge, pick up the article written by David Goldstein and be prepared to be perplexed and frustrated but certainly philosophically stretched. And entertained.

The article starts with a description of the etymology of the word 'cabal' giving both the negative and positive uses of the word and its derivatives. It then moves to other examples of short phrases, images and two-word oxymorons that have multiple or convoluted meanings and these explanations are book-ended by snippets of facts that give the reader hope that information about translating God's name is possible. Not so fast.

The article is made up of two layers of explication that cannot be decoupled and discussed separately because the subject matter is non-linear and highly poetic: first, the Zohar is a series of commentaries on the foundational texts of an ancient religion, the words of which are multi-definitional and so can be made to refer to numerous ideas or situations or moral positions. Second, the author is suggesting that the translation of the original text and the subsequent commentaries (commentaries on the commentaries are still being written and are therefore in need of translation too) is subject to the near-impossible task of finding English words equivalent to the ancient Semitic ones.

I am not without bible fire-power myself. Matthew tells us that John the Baptist announces that while he is baptising people with water, someone is coming who 'shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire'. That would be Jesus Christ. And the fire could also be a premonition of the fires that martyrs will be facing once the pagan backlash begins in late empire Rome. And today the phrase means jumping into a new situation unprepared. So, non-Biblical experts who enjoy reading about the construction of religious ideas and those who like complex wordplay take heed but tackle the text — the universe described is worth trying to unpack but it will most assuredly be a baptism by fire.

On Translating God's Name by David Goldstein appears in The Translator's Art, Essays in Honour of Betty Radice, edited by William Radice and Barbara Reynolds 

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Les Hysteriques - Francis Berezne (2002-2008)

Painting One

The painting is predominantly black and white, impressionistic in style, the background is pitch black and the subject is a young woman, lying on a bed covered in white sheets. She is wearing a white night dress, her face is turned towards us, her eyes are wide open, eyeballs an unnatural white, this in contrast to her otherwise calm, serene demeanor.

Painting Two

The same figure is now sitting up on her bed, her head raised, looking at someone who is standing to her right. One arm is folded across her chest and the other is raised, bent, elbow held high, suggesting defiance. Perhaps she is resisting someone’s effort to restrain her. Her lips are downturned.

Painting Three

The background is again black, the figure is in her bed, lying down, her arms are crossed atop her chest, suggesting a supplicatory attitude.The young woman’s eyes are closed, she is smiling. Her bed frame is metal, the bars along the back and sides are vertical. It looks like a hospital bed.

Painting Six

Now, the figure is sitting up, her legs are crossed unevenly, one knee is higher than the other, her arms are lifted up high suggesting prayer, her eyes are raised, she is smiling, ecstatic, unnatural. This is the giveaway image for me — I now know what I am looking at: these are modern impressionistic paintings based on a series of photographs taken by hospital photographer Albert Londe in the neurology ward of the Salpetriere hospital in Paris in the latter half of the 19th century. The figure depicted in the original photos and immortalised in subsequent paintings, in reconstructions of hospital scenes in films and art galleries and in reproductions in science textbooks is Louise Augustine Glezies, a patient of Jean Martin Charcot, a doctor of neurology and exponent of hypnotism.

Painting Sixteen

Suspicions confirmed. And this painting is the biggest piece of the puzzle, one which unlocks the origin of these odd and unsettling paintings. A huge work, it isolates and enlarges a segment of a famous painting by Andre Brouillet (1887) which features Charcot, a group of colleagues and another favourite patient called Blanche Marie Wittman, a woman who was hypnotised at the weekly hospital meetings and made to enact, for the edification of the doctors and certain interested members of the public, the common pathologies associated with hysteria and epilepsy. In this painting, the patient is bent over backwards, supported by a doctor and two nurses while Charcot stands nearby and explains the drama to his audience. Coincidentally, Sigmund Freud, himself a student of Charcot, hung a copy of this painting in his consulting room in Vienna.

This collection of twenty four paintings is executed between 2002 and 2008 by French artist, author, teacher and mental health patient Francis Berezne. And despite the devastation brought on by mental illness (Berezne spends some twenty years intermittently in hospitals and eventually hangs himself at the age of 64), he produces some poetic writings and haunting paintings that portray beauty in impossibly troubling situations. Two years before his death he writes of this series of works,

It appears that those who look after these people want to classify them, their symptoms, their crises, as one classifies plants in a herbarium. The photographer is looking at them as a botanist discovering a specimen, or as an entomologist pinning a butterfly in a box. But the result is of great beauty, showing women extraordinarily alive, who suffer, who enjoy, who know limit states, who sometimes take pleasure in posing in front of the lens. I have chosen these photographs, brush in hand, for their undeniable beauty, because they speak of the human condition, the fate of women and madness in general.

This moving collection of paintings is called “Les Hysteriques” and occasionally travels to small art galleries.

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The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson McCullers, 1951

The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers is a masterpiece of American Gothic writing. Published in 1951, the novella is set in a small town in the American south and populated by the bizarre, freaky, rural, ill-educated, violent and often lonely and bored characters that populate many of the novels and films that represent this tradition. In the case of Ballad, essentially a story of failed couplings, an impossible love triangle drives the action: Miss Amelia is the fierce, disagreeable giantess who is opaque of heart and in love with Cousin Lymon. Lymon Willis is a self-indulgent hunchback of indeterminate age, in possession of an inconstant heart and mad not for Amelia, but for Marvin Macy. Marvin is Miss Amelia’s spurned husband, “evil” by all accounts, and determined to take revenge on his wife for her rejection of his love. Love triangles are not uncommon in art, even when the characters are as unlikely as these three: a giantess, a hunchback, and a killer. But the nature of the love that each of these three offers and the reaction of the beloved to that love are quite unique and complex. In the case of Amelia, she marries reformed lothario and thug Marvin for reasons she doesn’t understand, and she resists his advances for ten nights, after which Marvin disappears only to return a decade later, a hardened criminal, bent on destroying Amelia. Amelia in time falls in love with Cousin Lymon, “spoils him to a point beyond reason”, ignores his “mischief making”, his rumour mongering, his masochistic attraction to Amelia’s enemy Marvin, and worst of all, his inconstant heart. Amelia is a woman troubadour, loving her beloved from afar, with a love that is chaste and turned on its head: her beloved is not good or fine or deserving of her care. What is the nature of this love? Cousin Lymon’s ears begin to twitch when he sets eyes on Marvin for the first time (Lymon is like a bat or a living gargoyle, ugly but attuned to his physical reaction to Marvin). He suffers abuse at Marvin's hands and foils Miss Amelia’s attempts to rid the town of Marvin's disruptive presence. Cousin Lymon’s love may well be homosexual, a latent sort, perhaps, chaste, and certainly unrequited but he is dogged in his pursuit of Marvin. Marvin Macey, the third factor in this bizarre sexual triangulation is cruel, abusive and feared by young girls in the community. His desire for the conspicuously hard and masculine Miss Amelia, his unexpected gift (he transfers his property to Miss Amelia, an act of selflessness, perhaps even a sign of self-emasculation), are all strange and inexplicable: he is a heterosexual man who loves a woman who is like a man who cannot consummate her marriage. Carson McCullers is the ideal person to write of the complexities of human sexualty, herself having had a fraught relationship with both men and women. The southern gothic atmosphere, the narrator, herself invested in the history of the town and the peculiar personalities that played out the life and death of the Sad Café has made for an unforgettable novella.

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Federico Garcia Lorca Little Viennese Waltz (Poet in New York 1929-1930)

The best a casual reader of surrealist-inspired poetry can do is enjoy the surprises and the non sequiturs that give form and substance to the art form. But  if one is even passingly familiar with the artist’s background, it can be helpful to call to mind details of that poet's life while reading the poetry. Federico Garcia Lorca's poem Pequeno Vals Vienes, translated as Little Viennese Waltz and Leonard Cohen’s Lorca-inspired song-poem Take this Waltz are lovely examples of the image-rich, emotive poetry that can result when a bizarre, haunting moment is captured by a talented artist.
Does Little Viennese Waltz have anything to do with Lorca’s depression and subsequent year-long pilgrimage to New york following a break-up with his lover, sculptor Emilio Aladren? When Lorca offers us “...this close-mouthed watz”, “this broken-waisted waltz”, “this waltz that dies in my arms”, “this ‘I will always love you’ waltz” and ends the poem with “my love, my love I will have to leave violin and grave, the waltzing ribbons”, is he bidding goodbye to the unfaithful Aladren? Who knows?
Perhaps Leonard Cohen knew. He named his daughter Lorca. He tells us that he discovered the poetry of Lorca at the age of 15 when, rummaging through a used bookstore in Montreal, he came upon a book of Lorca's poetry and experienced an epiphany which lead him to declare that he would become a poet in the style of Lorca.
But perhaps it’s not necessary to mine the lives of artists to discover the sources or the motivations that lead to their masterpieces. Perhaps it’s enough to be moved by the feelings aroused by beautiful art. Leonard Cohen’s Take this Waltz ends with this offering, “O my love, O my love, Take this waltz, take this waltz, it’s yours now. It’s all that there is.” Just a song, just a series of images, just a feeling. And perhaps that is good enough.

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George Nakashima (1905-1990)

A recent visit to a small cafe near the St. Lazare train station in Paris brought me to mind of the American Crafts movement and the woodwork of Japanese-American architect and furniture maker George Nakashima. The round wooden spindles hanging from a flat piece of wood, itself hanging from the ceiling, the large communal table made with two solid pieces of wood joined in the middle, and the wooden slats used to create ledges on which bags of coffee beans offered for sale are displayed all suggest a fusion of tradition and innovation, comfort and surprise.
I think the interior designers responsible for the look of Braun Notes may have had in mind the aesthetic that influenced late 19th century American architects and designers who sought simplicity and strength and insisted on the use of natural materials in their productions. And in design terms, the restroom might be the most interesting space at the cafe as the brass wash basin, the exposed copper pipe bringing water to a basic faucet and especially the long wooden counter running the length of the room, most bring to mind the Nakashima aesthetic. Braun Notes is, of course, a commercial enterprise built to sell a quick meal to a young, trendy clientele and not an art space (and as a restaurant it is not particularly comfortable or well-built), but its “look” certainly channels the philosophy that brought master designers and conservationists like George Nakashima to world attention. Nakashima was a forestry major who eventually received an MA in architecture. He travelled the world, studied traditional carpentry techniques in Japan, worked with Frank Lloyd Wright in India and mastered what he came to call the “free-edge” aesthetic and built “live-edge furniture”. His signature designs are his “conoid” chair and his tables made of slabs of wood with knots and burls, connected with wooden butterfly joints, smoothed out on top but left unfinished on the sides.
In his 1981 book, The Soul of a Tree, George Nakashima encapsulates his eco-art philosophy in these two sentences: “When trees mature, it is fair and moral that they are cut for man’s use, as they would soon decay and return to earth. Trees have a yearning to live again, perhaps to provide the beauty, strength and utility to serve man, even to become an object of great artistic worth.” Nakashima tables are glorious and Braun Notes makes a good espresso.

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Jean Luc Johannet’s Tower of Babel (1980s)

Carved on cliff faces in Lebanon at Wadi Brisa are two reliefs dating to about 500 BCE depicting the Tower of Babel. In late medieval Germany, Meister der Weltenchronik paints a charming little, five-storey tower standing beside a thatched workspace and half a dozen artisans busily constructing the modest tower. Two hundred years later, Dutch artist and map-maker Cornelius Anthonisz produces a dramatic etching of a colosseum-inspired building spiraling into the sky, the top smashed by a violent wind, chunks tumbling to the ground hitting people, and a small army of sword-wielding, trumpeting angels flying towards the catastrophe. In 2011, Iranian artist Goran Hassanpour assembles TV screens into a tee-pee shaped conical tower whose screens display different views of the same dramatic waterfall.

The story of the Tower of Babel has provided and continues to provide material upon which artists, historians, linguists, theologians and archaeologists build explanations for any number of positions and viewpoints.

Jean Luc Johannet’s Tower of Babel does not often travel as it’s fragile but currently it’s showing in Paris at the Halles St Pierre to the end of February 2018. It’s worth a look. It’s a gigantic pencil and china ink drawing made in the 1980s by a gifted polymath who is able to incorporate his training in architecture, sculpture, poetry and painting to produce a version of the Tower that is altogether unique. His work references the “naive art” movement exemplified by Ferdinand Cheval and the Catalan modernism of Antoni Gaudi. He also takes inspiration from Swiss set designer and sculptor H R Giger whose aesthetic sets the mood for the Alien films. Johannet’s Tower is a pyramidal structure built on a river, straining to reach a baroque sky and populated by mechanical birds, winged ships and shifting nightmarish flying creatures. The Tower itself looks alive, its projections resemble horned masks, giant cilia, rows of sardine-like statues and at least one monkey and snake embedded in other figures.

Johannet’s tower is the Lovecraft version of Dr Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who.

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