William Horberg: Hello, Dali

The National Gallery of Victoria here in Melbourne has a stunning exhibition of work by Salvador Dali called Liquid Desire. Although some of his most famous paintings such as The Persistence of Memory are not in the show, it is the breadth of his work over seven decades in so many mediums including painting, drawing, watercolour, etchings, sculpture, fashion, jewelry, cinema, photography, as well as book illustrations, that make this show so spectacular.

I was familiar with his famous film collaborations with Luis Bunuel as well as Alfred Hitchcock (the dream sequence in Spellbound) and Walt Disney - the amazing cartoon Destino that was shelved back in the day, but recovered and restored a few years ago.

Equally cool and less known to me were the illustrations that Dali did for The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, a book that many years ago John Patrick Shanley told me was one of the most amazing stories he had ever read.

I was also unfamiliar with the Dream of Venus pavilion that Dali created for the 1939 World's Fair, pictured below.

According to the museum's literature, although it was torn down after the fair, the surviving photographs of Dali's creation mean that is now recognized as one of the earliest full-scale installation pieces. Lured by a siren's recorded chant (sung by B-movie legend Ruth Ford) visitors purchased twenty-five cent tickets from a fish-headed booth, and then passed through an entrance flanked by two towering legs clad in stockings and high-heels. Inside the building, visitors entered a lavish grotto, the centerpiece of which was a nude sleeping Venus, who reclined in a 36 foot-long bed covered in white and red satin, flowers, and leaves. Her dream was staged underwater in the adjacent aquarium, where women wearing revealing costumes adorned with fins and spikes milked a mummified cow, tapped on giant typewriter keys, and answered oversized submerged telephones.

I also learned about Dali's friendship with Harpo Marx, who he sought out as "the most surrealist figure in Hollywood" and saw as a kindred spirit. He even gifted him a surrealist harp with barbed wire strings and teaspoons and forks for tuning knobs.

With his restless searching intellect, later in life Dali became fascinated by the work of Dennis Gabor, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1971 for his invention of the hologram.

From the website of the Centre for Dalinian Studies we learn that:

In 1965 his interest in holography and three-dimensional art began to be awakened. Over the course of the decade he continued to study the latter aspect and the work of Gerard Dou, in whose canvases he discovered dual images, that is, stereoscopic images. From that time, 1970, he began to work with a Fresnel lens in order to put together these images. In 1971, when Denis Gabor was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on lasers, Salvador Dalí interested himself in holography and in 1972 staged his first hologram exhibition at the prestigious Knoedler Gallery in New York, where the hologram Holos! Holos! Velázquez! Gabor! was presented.

With little time off from shooting, we took the whirlwind tour of the exhibit.

I hope to get back soon to take a more leisurely stroll and savor the kaleidoscope of imagery on display. If you make it down to this neck of the Southern Hemisphere, don't miss it!

william