The Persistence of Memory (La persistencia de la memoria) (1931) is a trifecta of superlatives: Surrealism’s most famous painting, created by its most famous artist, featuring its most famous motif. The painter, of course, is Salvador Dalí, and his iconic rendering of melted pocket watches is instantly recognizable to nearly everyone, even those with little or no interest in art.
Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory when he was 28. By that time, he was already a well-established member of the Surrealist circle, having moved to their base of operation in Paris five years earlier. His reputation preceded his arrival thanks to his fellow Catalan artist Joan Miró, a Surrealist OG whose work inspired Dalí’s own. Miró introduced Dalí to André Breton, Surrealism’s founder and ideological enforcer, who welcomed Dalí into the movement—though in time, the latter’s penchant for flamboyance and self-promotion, as well as his sympathy for fascism, would lead to a very public rupture with Breton.
Nevertheless, The Persistence of Memory, and Dalí’s work in general, represented the epitome of Breton’s call to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.” Moreover, Dalí’s thinking, like Breton’s, was deeply indebted to the writings of Sigmund Freud and his belief that the mind could be unlocked through psychoanalytical methods such as the interpretation of dreams.
Dalí added his own peculiar twists to Surrealist ideology as well. For example, when artists of varying stripe began to flock to Breton’s movement, he enlisted Dalí’s aid in coming up with a way of making art that could conceivably span the panoply of styles and aims sheltering under the Surrealist umbrella. As a response, Dalí offered the “Surrealist object,” a psychosexual spin, essentially, on Marcel Duchamp’s Readymade strategy of taking ordinary, functional items—a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack—out of their original mass-produced context and labeling them unique works of art. But instead of puckishly violating the boundaries between art and life or between high and low culture, as Duchamp did, Surrealist objects would dredge up repressed thoughts and feelings. Dalí based the idea on Freud’s theory of fetishism, which explored the erotic fixation on shoes and other items associated with particular body parts. (Dalí’s own contributions in this regard included 1938’s Lobster Telephone, a handset sheathed in a crustacean carapace.)
More relevantly for The Persistence of Memory, though, was another concept Dalí formulated the year before he painted it, which he called the “paranoiac critical” method. Based on the notion that paranoiacs perceive things that aren’t there, Dalí’s “method” secreted phantom pictures within his compositions as a kind of stream-of-consciousness Rorschach test for viewers. Dalí called this strategy a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.” In other words, Dalí was asserting that insanity provided him a model for pictorial organization—though, as he drily noted, “the only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.”
For his part, Breton embraced the paranoiac critical as an “instrument of primary importance”—until he didn’t: In 1939, after Dalí expressed his admiration for Hitler (saying, for example, that he often dreamed of the fürher as a woman whose “flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me”), Breton finally managed to engineer Dalí’s expulsion from the Surrealist group, something he’d tried and failed to do in 1934 after Dalí threw his support to the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. He accused Dalí of espousing race war and denounced the paranoiac critical method as reactionary.
The Persistence of Memory was first exhibited in 1932 in a group show of Surrealist art at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City. Levy had acquired the painting on a trip to Paris, and it immediately became a media sensation—the first for a work of art in New York, perhaps, since Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase rocked the Armory Show in 1913. It entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art two years later.
Dalí’s approach was notable for its almost hyperrealistic attention to detail, all with the aim of creating “hand-painted dream photographs,” as he put it. His otherworldly precisionism owed a lot to the polished biomorphic abstractions of fellow Surrealist Yves Tanguy, so much so that Dalí allegedly told Tanguy’s niece, “I pinched everything from your uncle.”
Dalí’s composition is, above all, a landscape that references geographic landmarks recalling his childhood in his native Catalonia, including Cap de Creus, a peninsula near Spain’s northeastern border with France, and Puig Pení, a mountain in the same region. Both take up the scene’s background, while its foreground is dominated by an ectoplasmic turkey-necked form that many take as a hidden self-portrait in profile. But it was also modeled after an anthropomorphic rock within Hieronymus Bosch’s dizzying medieval masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. (Much of Bosch’s works provided a template for Dalí.)
As for the liquefying timepieces, there are three in all, draped respectively across the aforementioned figure, the branch of a barren tree to its left, and an oblong box or bench jutting in sharply from the left border of the work to serve as a pedestal of sorts for the tree. A fourth pocket watch is also perched there, limned in orange, and though its shape is solid, it features ants converging in radiating lines toward a hole in the middle.
By Dalí’s own admission, ants represent his obsession with decay, but the melting watches have proved a bit more resistant to interpretation. Obviously they evoke time, though some have also suggested a connection to Einstein’s theory of relativity. For his part, Dalí described the watches as the “camembert of time and space,” as he’d gotten the idea for them by observing a plate of the cheese softening in the sun.
As with all things Dalí, including the maestro himself, The Persistence of Memory remains something of a mystery but is no less indelible for it. Indeed, one could almost say that Dalí’s title is a self-fulfilling prophecy as the painting tenaciously holds a place in our collective storehouse of imagery to this day.
As I enter the Shed, ready to be “immersed” in the “fun” that is Luna Luna, the ’80s art-amusement-park recently restored by Drake for $100 million, I hear a music blaring. I turn. I see a man on a motorcycle. And from his stereo, the infamous line: Tryna strike a chord, and it’s probably A minorrr.
I take it that the Man on a Motorcycle blasting song-of-the-summer “Not Like Us”, Kendrick Lamar’s now iconic Drake diss, will not pay $44 to go see Luna Luna tonight. We’re not like him. As with seemingly everyone in Brooklyn with a car or a stereo this summer, when the feud was at its peak, he’s sided with Kendrick—for free. The Man speeds away from me. Money burns before me. I go inside.
Luna Luna was once outside. Viennese pop star and artist André Heller staged his phantasmagoric carnival in the middle of a green field in Hamburg, West Germany, for one (rainy) summer, 1987. Here, with half a million dollars from the German magazine Neue Revue, Heller concocted a crazed idea: an amusement park (or “luna park,” as they’re called outside the US—hence, “Luna Luna”) with rides designed by the biggest visual artists of the day. Caricaturist Manfred Deix crated a Palace of the Winds, a theater with “live performances of amplified farting accompanied by classical violin.” Kenny Scharf customized a Victorian swing ride from the 1930s. A dying Salvador Dalí made a Dalídom, a geodesic dome with mirrors that create a lazy infinity effect. Jean-Michel Basquiat, the year before he died, designed a giant Ferris wheel, scored to Miles Davis’ “Tutu” (1986), festooned with his drawings (a roasted chicken on a spit, naked torsos, saxophonists) and texts (“JIM CROW©” and “THE END”). At Rebecca Horn’s Love Thermometer, couples wrap their hands around the glass bottom and watch the heated red liquid move up from “solitude,” “awareness,” “image,” to “truth,” “madness,” “damage.” Keith Haring built a carousel out of his funky, dancin’ lil’ guys, as well as a moon drawing with two lines of text that could serve as the official Luna Luna tagline: LUNA LUNA IN THE SKY./ WILL YOU MAKE ME LAUGH OR CRY?
I read Heller’s quote on the wall: “Art should come in unconventional guises and be brought to those who might not ordinary seek it out in more predictable settings.” A Haring quote in the press release is more to the point: “Art is nothing if you don’t reach every segment of the people.” Sounds lovely. And it was: we’re teased with photos of kids and adults having fun that Hamburg Summer of ’87. (It ominously foreshadows the neoliberal world order on the horizon ushered in by the falling Berlin Wall, but that’s another story.)
Alas, Luna Luna, in its current Shed iteration as “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy,” doesn’t make merry. In 1987, Luna Luna charged 20 Deutschemarks, or $22, and kids got in for free on weekdays. Now, at the lowest end of a tiered system, it’s $44 for admittance, $35 for kids. A single hitch: you can’t ride any of the damn rides.
“Forgotten Fantasy” is a queasy mix of “nots.” It’s not an immersive experience, except for the colorful if unexciting installations by Lichtenstein, Dalí, and David Hockney. It’s not a museum show, as carnies, elephants, and other deranged puppets stagger in and out of the biggest room like angry lost souls. And it’s definitely not a luna park anymore. It’s geared less for kids and more for bourgeois adults and their kids “in the know.”
About the tier system. It was in place in L.A.’s Boyle Heights last December, where, for $94 and a “Moon Pass,” you could enter the Dalí and the Hockney, with a slew of caveats. The Hockney is underwhelming: a cavernous empty space, like a fake Brothers Grimm forest imagined by Lars von Trier, a bunch of glitchy strobe lights, and (I don’t know if this was part of the immersion) some guy on the other end of the room, dressed in plain clothes, mirroring my every step. Ominous.
The Dalí isn’t worth much, not unless you get a kick out of taking your selfie in a room of mirrors, five of you at a time. Here in New York, a different segregating tier system is in place. A $94 “Moon Pass” will here get you expedited entry, instant access to the “immersive installations,” and discounts on the pricey merch. A $241 Super Moon Pass will get you all of that, plus instant access whenever you want—victory for the ruling, but still not riding, class. With the tiers, you won’t have to stand in the long line with the working-class waiters in order to walk into the Roy Lichtenstein house and its maze of glass—which, in a real two-for-one deal, kicked up my claustrophobia and agoraphobia in one fell swoop.
Maybe the biggest draw is the “Wedding Chapel,” designed by Luna Luna mastermind Helller. Here, you can marry anyone you want in a public ceremony—your crush, your best friend, your partner, a rando/future-spouse who bought the Super Moon Pass. In 1987 Hamburg, owners married their dogs. A photographer once married his camera. Writer William Poundstone observed, “Most of the marriages I witnessed were between fathers and their daughters.” A Polaroid of the happy couple is taken, and pasted onto a Luna Luna© wedding certificate; to divorce, the yellow paper instructs, you can simply rip up the picture. The “priest” and his “assistant” were aggressively pushing the divorce option on everyone.
In the most perverse but best gesture of the entire carnival, the Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys, who around this time wrote the hit song “Sun Instead of Reagan,” contributed a note. Not a ride, not a candied-apple stand, not even a urinal cake, but a grimly serious, barely legible, scribbly handwritten text near the entrance. Its title: “Text on Capital and Creativity.” I’m told by my German-speaking friend Léa that the text features such gems as “Money is not capital at all. However, ability is capital.” And “I am not a Marxist, but I probably love Marx more than many Marxists who just believe in him.” Imagine the shock of the kids coming out of the farting theater to this one.
As I leave Luna Luna and walk towards the subway, I look up. Will I laugh or will I cry? I notice twinkling in the sky. It’s neither the moon nor the stars; it’s the Christmas lights on the Vessel. It has just reopened after four years. New suicide safety barriers have been installed from bottom to top. People get to ride it again.
Many things get sliced in full view of the camera on The Bear, an FX TV series set at a Chicago restaurant, but the newly released third season features a rather unusual one: a human eyeball.
That split-open peeper appears in this season’s ninth episode, during a montage that also features footage from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948), Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and other famed movies. The eyeball shot is also appropriated from a storied film, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, a 1929 short that is considered a cornerstone of Surrealism.
Un Chien Andalou, like many other Surrealist works, deploys a dream-like logic, drifting freely between a range of memorable, grotesque images, with no obvious cause-and-effect structure to bind them. It has been celebrated in particular for one shot in which a man runs a razor blade across a woman’s eye. This action is, of course, simulated, although a quick cut to a shot of a blade slicing through an actual animal’s eye makes it appear real.
In fact, according to Surrealist lore, the image of a knife cutting through the moon, “like a razor blade slicing through an eye,” was one that Buñuel had dreamed and even told Dalí about. That conversation drove the two to make the short, which recently ranked at #169 on a Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time, as selected by critics. (Though there are still another six months before the film enters the common domain in the US, full versions of it proliferate online.)
In The Bear, the eyeball shots come during a sequence intended to communicate the value of magic and entertainment. Marcus, a chef played by Lionel Boyce, is shown watching on his laptop an edit of movie clips that feature card games and alien invasions, which he marvels over.
Voiceover from Martin Scorsese communicates how the everyday can be tweaked by filmmakers ever so slightly to offer an alternate perspective on life. “Something else is existing here, I don’t know what,” Scorsese says over images from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). “Something is happening that’s not part of our normal day, in terms of the nature of how we live, but we’re trying to create something different.”