

Also part of the overall proceedings was an international symposium, “The Dalí Renaissance,” that aimed to consolidate renewed serious art-historical interest in this oft-maligned favorite of middlebrow illusionist taste. Not unlike the entrepreneurial self-promotion and esoteric self-reflection of the pandering and professorial painter’s split persona, Dalí was, to again quote, “a regionwide collection of promotions and events designed to celebrate Dalí and to maximize the positive economic impact the exhibition will have on our region,” as well as a landmark scholarly event memorialized by a monumental catalogue illustrating every artwork in the exhibition, and designed to serve present and future generations. My aim, as shared with Lacan and Dalí, and as articulated by the latter in a text entitled “The Rotting Donkey” (1930), is the total discrediting of any normative notion of objective perception unstained by the polymorphous emanations of embodied human desire.Įmblazoned with dozens of huge mustachioed banners up and down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and all across Philadelphia’s principal points of urban transit and trade, the City of Brotherly Love primped itself to the nines in order to welcome a national and international host of visitors to what its tourist website called “The Dalí Experience, a lively dreamscape complete with Dalí-related menus and lavishly decorated retail window displays-all inspired by the startling and outrageous artistic vision that made Salvador Dalí a household name.” Sponsored by Advanta, a small-business financial-services provider, the blockbuster exhibition was only the center of an orchestrated civic campaign to show off Philadelphia to its “surreal”-est advantage. It is in the spirit of these early and late meetings in their respective careers that I will delineate a quasi-Lacanian itinerary as I dally through the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s ( PMA) unlaconic Dalínian show. During a lecture tour forty years later, the now-celebrated psychoanalyst chanced to run into the still-infamous painter at the St. Back-to-back articles in the Surrealist journal Minotaure in 1933 expressed an exhilarating affinity between the doctoral research of the young Parisian psychiatrist on the systematic symbolic significance of the delusions and hallucinations of clinical paranoia and the self-styled paranoiac-critical method of the young Catalonian painter, whereby hallucinatory images were deliriously projected onto the sober perspectival coordinates of figurative art. In The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (New York: Dial Press, 1942 17–18), the painter reports that during their first meeting he and Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) were astonished at the congruence of their views on the primacy of paranoia as a form of active invention in contradistinction to the passive experience of the dream. The centennial exhibition of the works of Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art was a signal event for those interested in the past century of intimate relations between the visual arts and psychoanalysis. Performance Art/Performance Studies/Public Practice.Museum Practice/Museum Studies/Curatorial Studies/Arts Administration.Drawings/Prints/Work on Paper/Artistc Practice.



Subject, Genre, Media, Artistic Practice.
