Junk for Code

Dali's shitty pants

I've been caught up this last day or so with exploring the visual turn in our culture over at philosophical conversations.

I noticed that when Jacques Derrida was here in Australia for the Sydney Seminars in 1999 (called Deconstruction Engaged) the issue of the suspicion of vision was briefly raised as part of developing a critical relation to visual culture.

Junk for Code is part of, and reflects, the visual turn in its exploration of our visual culture.

In these explorations I noted the visionary model of artistic creation favoured by romanticism. With the surrealists this inner eye signified the expression of the imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason.

I came across this surrealist image by Salvador Dali:

Dali,The Lugubrious Game, 1929

Dali is everywhere in this image. Surrealism allowed Dali to portray his own life, his obsessions and sexual trauma in his works. So I presume the above image is all about Dali's unconscious or dream world.

Dali cultivated genuine delusion (as in clinical paranoia), whilst remaining residually aware at the back of his mind that the control of the reason and will has been deliberately suspended.

On another level, surrealsim was about the personally repressed being shouted aloud. For surrealists like Dali sexual explicitness was designed to shock the bourgeoisie. Apparently, the Lugubrious Game was found to be disturbing: a terror image; a "terror picture" about castration and enucleation.

It doesn't shock me. It actually bores me.

The shit-stained pants in the bottom right is a Bataillian gesture that would have upset Andre Breton, who loathed Bataille's embrace of filth, excrement and animality. It helped to create a fissure within surrealism between the Breton and Bataille groups. Breton, who identified the aesthetic with beauty, actually excommunicated a number of visual arts (eg., Andre Mason) who gravitated to Bataille's orbit.

I'm hard put to see the link between the romantic inner visionary eye, transgressive sexuality and the eye as a target of mutilation and scorn in Dali's image. I'm also hard put to see this Dali image as part of an anti-visual discourse.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at January 30, 2004 06:39 PM | TrackBack