Dali, Surrealism and the Problem of Postmodern Camp

Abstract

Behind the eminently recognisable farrago of Dalian hallmarks which includes melting watches, flimsy crutches and lobster telephones there lurks a mercurial wit at once capricious and apocryphal, having frequently resisted appropriation or annexation to any artistic style or creed. It is the elusive wit of Salvador Dali which has made him a master of display and disguise and frequently confounded critics by perpetuating extravagant yet highly implausible claims and wilfully provocative viewpoints. Detractors of the artist, who have read Dali literally, and have thereby attempted to extract coherent meaning from his statements or his works, have frequently concluded that his oeuvre is either intellectually vapid or expressive of a hidebound conservatism (adducing his public endorsements of Renaissance painting, Catholicism and Franco as evidence for this). Such readings do, however, frequently incur the risk of ascribing a uni-linear intentionality to his works and eliding their many contradictions; for, as many of his works also attest, Dali delighted in assuming differing and indeed contradictory viewpoints and personae throughout his career. For this reason, recent scholarship has begun to challenge essentializing views of the artist for their reductiveness and their-general indisposition to consider the Dalian personality as a wilful perpetration and play of multiple identities and belief systems. David Vilaseca's 'The Apocryphal Subject' (1995) reconsiders Dali's biographical works through the interpretative lens of post-structuralism, showing how they resist any definitive, essentializing interpretation of his life and-personality' and that the various personae that he displays to the world all have their own truth.