the centre cannot hold....

Salvador Dalí. The Virgin of Port Lligat. Oil painting, 1950.

After World War II, Salvador Dalí became fascinated with particle physics: the idea that all matter is immaterial. That things we had always taken to be solid or liquid, were in fact just dense gases. That all substance is made up of infinitesimally small particles, held in suspension in the void. And held together by what? The almost imperceptibly small gravitational pull of the next particle? The minute magnetism of protons? 

I’m no scientist, so I defer humbly to scientific journalist Robert Kunzig, who writes:

“You do not know what stuff is, you who hold it in your hands. Atoms? Yes, stuff is made of atoms. And every atom is a nucleus orbited by electrons. Every nucleus is built of protons. Every proton is - but there you reach the end of the line. Inside the proton lies the deep, unsettling truth: Stuff is made of nothing, or almost nothing, held together by glue, lots of glue.”

And even that glue is “massless and evanescent.”

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This new understanding shattered Dalí’s world. In The Madonna of Port Lligat, he depicted the Virgin and her child contained within a fragmented architecture, pieces floating away, outward from the central figures. Chunks of stone suspended in the void above the same kind of empty landscape seen in The Persistence of Memory, or Soft Watch at the Moment of First Explosion. Seemingly permanent structures rendered weightless. Rendered immaterial.

The Virgin herself has the same void in her torso as does the Venus de Milo in Dalí’s later work, Le Desir Hyperrationel; and so does her son. Her head is split open, presaging the absence of the head in Le Desir. Calling to mind the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus. Calling to mind the rent in the veil: a seismic shift. A new order. 

The disintegration of everything once held to be solid.

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As Yeats says: “Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.”

its violent beginnings....

Salvador Dalí. The Persistence of Memory. Oil painting. 1931

Those melting clocks. They're among the most over-exposed or well-known images of the twentieth century. And still they speak.

Time distorts. Time oozes. Time drips and falls away. Time refuses to hold its shape; refuses to be contained. Time refuses to move in a perfect circle; denies its own orbit, its ties to the sun.

Dalí was only 27 when he created The Persistence of Memory. To me, that seems awfully young to be so... aware. To know time as anything but a roller coaster ride. But even that has its distortions I guess.

Salvador Dalí. Soft Watch at the Moment of First Explosion. Oil painting. 1954.

His later painting, Soft Watch at the Moment of First Explosion, was completed at age 50. To me, that seems more true. That fiftieth birthday comes in with bells ringing. Time takes on a new urgency. Time loses meaning. Time melts, twists, fractures, detonates.

Time revisits its violent beginnings.

the something that is not nothing....

Salvador Dalí. Le Désir Hyperrationel. Glass and metal. 1984

Recently, I was in the Winnipeg Art Gallery for the exhibition Dalí, Up Close; a survey of works by twentieth century Surrealist Salvador Dalí. In amongst the expected melting clocks and waxed moustaches, was a small, sea-coloured glass and metal sculpture entitled Le Désir Hyperrationel. 

Le Désir is a miniature rendition of the Venus de Milo, but it’s a Venus deconstructed. Or maybe, surgically altered. Gutted. The female body -- created to contain, made for fullness -- here is emptied. A doorway is cut through her torso — an opening, an absence. A void that contains "the pregnant possibility of everything.”*

Beside her on a pedestal is the missing piece of her abdomen, surmounted by her head — also absent from her body. From the body. The body that has been reduced to a frame; framing nothing. Framing everything.

René Magritte. L'embellie. 1962

Compare this to René Magritte’s L’embellie — a painting of a door frame, implausibly erected on a beach, opening onto sea and sky. Opening onto emptiness, onto absence. An unlikely presence that frames our perception of the void beyond it. A frame within a picture, that challenges how and what we see. A doorway from here to here.

J.R. The Ballerina in Containers, Le Havre, France. Photograph. 2014.

Or look at contemporary photographer J.R.’s 2014 work, The Ballerina in Containers, Le Havre, France; an image in which the absence created by the open doors of a shipping container is occupied by a presence. By a female body; a dancer -- both artist and work of art. The form in the void that gives perspective; that brings life. The body framed. Contained. 

The something that is not nothing.



* Michael Paul, in axel vervoordt: wabi inspirations, page 83.