Alfred Russell : Dali: The Golden Ass of Modern Art,1972.

Dali's The Last Supper, 1955, in Washington's National Gallery. Robert Desscharnes was Dali's executive secretary and house photographer who took the photos that Dali worked from. According to members of the family the face of Christ is based on photos of Alfred from the early fifties. Alfred was Robert's brother-in-law. However apocryphal this may be there is a resemblance, albeit idealized. It was Robert who commissioned this essay for a volume on Dali in 1972. Russell's complexly ironic and contrarian views made it unpublishable. The quote at the end of his essay is from Lautréamont's Maldoror—David Carbone.

Dali: The Golden Ass of Modern Art

by Alfred Russell, 1972

Dali’s paranoid creative method is a nuclear strike, his own “bomblette” dropped on the great coalition disguised as “Modern Art” that enslaves the inner imagination of modern man, that blasphemes his memories, his nostalgias, his beliefs, his legends, his dreams and his heroes. By first liberating his own imagination Dali showed the way to freedom to others, furious in their imprisonment, exploited, reduced to the state of Hilotes by the cuckolds of the old modern art, by the bean counters of the counter-revolution, led by Freud, Lenin and Cézanne, this triumvirate of vicious human viscosity that has suffocated the renaissance of the romantic spirit heralded by Hölderlin, Novalis, Nerval, Lautréamont and Leopardi. Dali’s paranoid creative method is a catalyst that produces sudden mutations of the imagination; it’s an acupuncture of the mind that allows the intelligence of the artist to ascend dizzily to the spaces of “another art,” the spaces of atavistic memory, those outside the most advanced scientific speculations of recent years. The improvisation of the liberated imagination has created a meta-science, a meta-logic, a meta-image based upon that which cannot be thought, and has plunged it into a universe where Riemannian geometry, trans-finite space, antimatter and all other notions of the modern cosmos are but poor and weak reflections of a psychic cosmos resembling the one imagined by Dali in the totality of his oeuvre.

Dali’s inventions, his images and his metaphors, both directly and insidiously, have invaded our collective consciousness and transformed it forever. Thus the scholar, the mathematician and the physicist, just like the whore, the banker, the soldier and the astronaut, live in an environment where floppy timepieces, melting telephones, encephalic skulls and flaming giraffes all have a positive influence on their Weltanschauung.

Nature imitates art. Dirac, when he posed an impossible and absurd equation to discover the unknown universe, where artists like Dali have long been comfortably at home, dared to imitate the poet. Mallarmé’s “throw of the dice” that will “never abolish chance” was already far ahead of Pauli, Heisenberg and their ilk, with their “zoological garden of particles” and their “statistical states of matter.”

What our imaginations construct never fades into uselessness.

We already know that for thinkers the universe endlessly follows the universe. Within a year or even a month the laws of physics -- its Pi-Mesons, its waves, its quanta – change, contradict themselves, melt away like the snows of yesterday, except when Dali saves from oblivion the broken down principles of advanced science, and puts them back to work in the creative spaces of his imagination. Far from being a displayer of pseudo-scientific knowledge, Dali couldn’t care less about science. While understanding nothing of it, he nonetheless finds it useful to “furnish” his paintings with it, much like in the past artists would use drapery, Corinthian columns, horns-of-plenty, River-Gods, or cherubs. Thus “Leda Atomica,” “Saint Surrounded by Three Pi-Masons,” “Head à la Raphael Exploding into Discontinuous Corpuscles,” “Crucifixion,” and “Corpus Hypercubus” are all permanent transformations of the transitory ideas of science. Each phase in the development of today’s science finds a place in the mythology of the modern world. Here, Dali’s sense of time condemns progress, a priori, to a state of uselessness. “A rock, false mansion, immediately vanished into mist,” says Mallarmé.

Telephones, automobiles, bombs, file cabinets, Coca-Cola, sock suspenders, cigars, bras, all the detritus of the modern metropolis, are transformed into fossils older than the ashes of stars, more ancient than Jurassic dust. Dali’s fossils are not dead, they are “The Bones’ Prayer to Death” in T.S. Eliot’s “Time Without Ocean.” The fossilization of present time is bathed in an erotic radiation, a sublime and pious atmosphere. “Imperial Monument to the Woman-Child” is a ruined modern megalopolis reduced to dust amid the remnants of St. Augustine’s “City of God.” In “Two Pieces of Bread Expressing Feelings of Love,” using a formula all his own composed of geometric tensions isolated in a lunar chiaroscuro suggesting solitude, imminent tragedy and love rituals — those secret and cruel of the Great Pan as well as the mystical religious rites of Eleusis and Ephesus and those of the Great Cybele — Dali infuses the pulse of life into two fragments of inanimate matter.

Bread, bones, flesh, the desert, the rocks of Port Lligat. Fossils and fossilized ideas, memories, and dreams. In particular, the fossilization of modern scientific concepts. Everything that Dali touches is charged with a distant eroticism, silent, abstract and universal.

The erotic creates a bridge, filling the gap between the Dionysian world of the demiurge and the Apollonian world of chiseled marble Alexandrines. Dali has rediscovered and revitalized the magnetic field that created the mystery and the sad anxiety that has always been present in the great metaphysical painters of the past: Cosimo Tura, Nicolò Dell’Abbate, Luca Signorelli, Bartolomeo Bramantino, Cima de Collagliano, Ercole De'Roberti and Raphael Sanzio.

In “Hyperialogic Sky” Dali dares to penetrate the mysteries of today’s most astounding cosmological idea, Plasma Theory, the colloidal state of the universe before the creation of matter. His working method is to search for truth through the eyes of the mind and through the forces of plastic art. Here, the theory of holes, anti-matter fields, and the thin membrane that covers Dirac’s Ocean are represented by an old disheveled sheet on a vast cosmic bed that serves as a battlefield where biomorphic forces mingle with those of modern theoretical physics. The universal gravitational field seethes with vulvae, clitorises, testicles, valves, phalluses, breasts, navels, intestines, pustules, scabs, and fissures, all of which slip into black holes, throbbing in a perpetual turning motion that leads them nowhere.

The anthropomorphic landscapes of Dali’s Surrealistic period underwent a metamorphosis, a sudden mutation into anti-matter – anthropomorphic matter. Now, man’s thoughts, his sins, his feeble desires and his sobs have invaded the frightening and empty spaces of Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and Dirac. Like Pascal, Dali shows us Man, with his feeble powers of reason, groping within the immensity of abstract space, to find his true place of glory, a space for which Dali produces a visible and credible anthropomorphic model. In fact Dali has made the bureaucrats of modern art rather uncomfortable. Because they don’t understand him they try to denigrate the creative value of all of Dali’s work. They pretend to ignore it in favor of their sycophants, those do-it-yourself scatologists of official art: collagists, bull-shit artists, fuck-ups, realistic impressionists, tachists and photogenic pornographists.

If the task is to animate mathematical space with Eros, Dali recognizes that he must first reaffirm the grandeur, the variety and the infinity of the depictions and the nuances of the eroticism hidden in the underground history of the past and in the false, trumped-up and manipulated history of the present. In “Metamorphosis of Narcissus,” “Apotheosis of Homer,” and “Hecuba lifts the skin of the sea and asks Venus for an instant more before she awakens Amour,” Dali has rediscovered the sublime nature of the classical Mediterranean world, a noble and melancholy ecstasy that in warm and liquid rhythm quivers in the flesh of those who have lived in the Golden Age. Incest, the love of beasts and monsters, sodomy, Onanism, sacred prostitution, Dionysian rituals, all the delights of an imaginary Kama-Sutra of atavistic and uterine memory, are restored to their true place in our image of pagan love. The pseudo-classicism of art is cast off and is replaced by the true magic and mystery of Luca Signorelli’s “Education of Pan.”

Today The Great Pan is dead for everyone, and Dali has replaced it with “The Eternal Woman-Child,” “The Specter of Sex Appeal” and “The Great Masturbator,” the various cruel exploitations of Gala, the clinical, mechanical, masochistic and gynecological froideur of “The Illuminated Pleasures” and “Accommodations of Desire.” The gods and the heroes of yesterday are tortured, castrated and suffocated in the vaginal tide, expansive as the night, of “an Old Bitch Gone in the Teeth.” In “Resurrection of the Flesh” Dali raises the skirts of that well-bred young lady of contemporary moral civilization and aerates her murderous, usurious and devouring vagina, where past history, the legends of the ages, dreams and poetry are ground into nothingness. Sex is no longer the sad, sweet, distant, melancholic manifestation of Eros and Theocritus, but rather a frenetic movement, a brutal simultaneous stimulation of the five senses, where blood, excrement, and ejaculate, where the scents and stench of the mechanized world, and where cries of horrible pain all co-mingle and confuse love and war in the 20^th Century. Rubber, nylon, plastic, suppositories, steel, electric outlets, telephones and Coca-Cola bottles create the acrid odors of modern sexuality, the ozone of the mechanical beast in heat of Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s “Future Eve,” this robot she-wolf who now displays in her chest a high fidelity turntable.

In “Young Virgin Auto-sodomized by her own Chastity” Dali shows us a goddess of modern love, “rear view,” antiseptic, a pasteurized Marie Chantal. (Sally Sunshine) The eternal creative forces of the trigonometric spiral (are) symbolized by the rhinoceros horns vainly searching for a place to penetrate her hard buttocks. She -- Marie Chantal -- chews her chewing gum, rubs her thighs, and laughs at the history of Rome, at galaxies, and at all the boys who have fallen in modern wars.

“The Great Masturbator” is Dali’s answer to modern warfare and was painted immediately after his military service. “Civil War” depicts the war of the sexes. “Autumn Cannibalism” is self cannibalism, in which Sigmund Freud eats the end of his own viral member. “Illuminated Pleasures” depicts, à la copulating praying mantises, the post-coital death of the male. Politics matteres little to Dali, but he painted the enigmatic “Premonition of Civil War in Spain” because he is a born Pythagorean, and couldn’t allow himself to eat boiled beans or pare his nails during the sacrifice, nor eat the heart of the victim. “Don’t stir the fire with the iron,” said Pythagoras. Dali left the stupid fires of the world to burn while he played dreamlike melodies on “Cranial Harp” in the company of busts of Nero and Napoleon at Port Lligat.

It took Dali almost fifty years of ruses, farces, cosmic jokes and simulated exhibitionism to finally find inner peace and earn the time to construct his real oeuvre, that of miracles, marvels, the sacred and the moral. He was handsomely paid by the nouveaux riches, and he threw his outrage right back in their faces: his portrait of Chester Dale a case in point.

Since the 1950’s there has been a new and sudden mutation in the creative intelligence of Dali, which can be seen in his religious paintings. “Crucifixion” (corpus hypercubus) bursts upon the desanctified, atrophied and incarcerated conscious, and upon dechristianized art, much as the Cross revealed itself to Constantine at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Dali’s Christ announces a new rebirth of counter-reformation, a Christianity synchronized with the gnosis of the 20^th Century where the Misericordia of the “Passion according to St. John” fills the gravitational field with transfinite numbers — antigravitation matter — antimatter and hypergeometric spaces.

“The Last Supper,” the Christ of “St. John of the Cross,” and “Hypercubic Crucifixion” are creations greater than art, indeed the only creations inspired by dignity, grandeur and sacred mystery since the Baroque Age. Dali recaptured this divine element, formerly bemired in the material of inferior regions, this “logas,” this “pneuma,” “Pistis Sophia,” the “Galla Placidia” of Ravenna, of Port Lligat and “Priscillien, Bishop of Avila.” The victory of Saint Dali the Evangelist is a victory for us all, the great loners who are never alone in this world of men – this world, a nothing, “a strand of hair left by God in a whorehouse.”