| Artist: | Dali, Salvador |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The Great Masturbator | |
| Date of Work: | 1929 | |
| Nationality: | Spanish | |
| Context: | Post-War Fantasy | |
| Movement: | Surrealism | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: "The Great Masturbator" is one of Dali's classic surreal images of sexual persecution and an obsession with castration, impotence, and masturbation. It is also an image that plays off of psychic automatism and Freudian dream logic: displacement, condensation, and fetish. Dali's own distorted profile with eye closed in sleep or dreaming becomes the featured element in this autobiographical work. Here the profile has been blown up to a monumental scale. Metamorphosis occurs at the neck region, giving rise to a woman engaged in her own sexual fantasy, though the man's genitals remain limp and impotent. Right under Dali's rather phallic nose, however, a grasshopper is once again perched over the mouth. The image is almost a textbook case study of Freudian ideas, as if Dali had ever so consciously set out to explore the unconscious. The grasshopper refers to a childhood trauma and symbolizes his fear of being devoured or castrated by another; he often cited how the female praying mantis climaxes sex by biting off the head of the male. Sex is clearly coupled here with fears of castration and death in a replay of the Freudian theme of Eros and Thanatos. The moral in this and other images from the same time period is that there is safety only in masturbation. Style: Dali, like Magritte, uses a realistic style to de-rail reality. He employs a lucid dream technique by using an almost Old Master precisionist style. Unlike Magritte, however, Dali does not seem innocent, even on the surface. The latent subtext of sexual fears and anxieties comes through even in the manifest content. Characteristic of psychic automatism (the undirected play of thought), one image metamorphosizes into another. Dali makes bold use of the strategies of Freudian dream logic: 1) he exploits irrational juxtapositions by stringing oddly displaced images together, such as the grasshopper and the profiled face; 2) he condenses dissimilar things, like his own giant profile that sprouts a female head, into one composite image; and 3) he turns most anything and everything into overcharged fetish symbols. Dali is not abstract in style, but his content is always disturbing and puzzling. Precision, rather than alleviating fear, ends up being the cause of added fear and apprehension. Trompe-l'oeil becomes Dali's weapon for upsetting the assured mindset that we bring to perceived, waking reality. And reality turns out to be much more hallucinatory, irrational, and subject to personal desire and paranoia than it is objective. Dali pits the rational, reasoning mind against the imaginative and fantastic, and it is the poetry of the unconscious and a "convulsive beauty" that win in the end. "My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialize the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision." Context: Dali's stated desire "to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality" made him an instant star among the Surrealists, until he proved to be too surreal even for their tastes. By 1934, he was officially censored and ex-communicted from the movement. In 1940, he goes Hollywood, working for Hitchcock on the movie, "Spellbound." Commercially successful, the art world turned on him, complaining that he had sold out and that his art had become too chic and self-consciously contrived. Some called his work illustrational, nothing more than "hand painted dream photographs." His overtly Freudian themes rendered in a precisionist style do contrast sharply from the abstract dream imagery of his fellow Spaniard, Miro, whose art is more an example of dream painting than painted dreams. But Dali's youthful works from around 1930 are still classic examples of the surreal aesthetic of "convulsive beauty" and the "marvelous," drawn from dream imagery and a Freudian-inspired exploration of the unconscious as a valid source for creativity. | ||
