Soft self-portrait with grilled bacon 1941 oil on canvas
From young turk and anarchist to self-obsessed surrealist, Salvador Dali’s long strange trip through the artistic arena was a frenetic one. Born in Figueres, Spain, in 1904, Dali’s one-man travelling carnival drifted through Madrid, Paris, New York and Hollywood, before returning to its natural surroundings in Spain in the late 1940s. Liquid Desires is the only Australian exhibition of his work.
Populated by an attraction to crutches, clocks, insects, telephones, skulls and perfectly sculptured breasts, Dali’s creations can occasionally be seen as sweet, dreamlike and a cool provider of the shit-giggles. On a flipside, Dali’s work can commonly be viewed as a thunderclap collision of different styles and influences, and in many ways an experiment in terror. His depiction of skulls – one sodomizing a grand piano, another involving milk, honey and vipers’ nests, are obvious examples.
Along with these recurring themes, Dali’s mind held a deep obsession with the moving image, and this fascination is shown through his work with Alfred Hitchcock. Dali’s set designs and jaw-blasting imagery for Hitchcock’s 1945 movie Spellbound is overdosingly appropriate – frames filled with rolling eyes, contorting creatures, twisted backgrounds and trademark monstrous surrealism.
A testament to his love affair with cinema can also be seen in an adjacent dark-room loaded with a bug’s eye stack of TV screens, each one containing a hallucinogenic combination of bullfights and matadors, propaganda, rantings and ravings. Dali, with his upwards ant-claw moustache, is clearly seen at the centre of almost every reel of the proceedings.
Easily the most edible attraction of the exhibition is Destino, Dali’s collaboration with Walt Disney – slumped gathering dust on the shelves for over half a century. Destino opens with a slender señorita sweeping towards us out of an ocean of sand; every inch a picturesque naked commodity. Over the course of the seven-minute motion picture we witness a sweet love and delicate romance teasingly open and playfully close through many contrasting manoeuvres, each scene more elusive than the last.
With his prolific portrait raid on the retinas containing sketches, paintings and photos warped and mutated, it’s pretty clear that Dali was a natural street freak devouring whatever came by. Whether involved with film, fashion, art, advertising or ballet, Dali slashed cunningly through each field, his Molotov cocktail of art and adventure fully flaming every soul that he passed.
The exhibition at the NGV creates a chaotic and well crafted candy store environment with Dali cast as the conjurer-candyman and the crowd as the kid-eyed candy fanatic.
Loaded with exotic and playful moments, Liquid Desires is a dreamy, milky-way temptation of the senses.
