Immersed in Dalí

Following the huge impression of the immersive Gustav Klimt exhibition, the prospect of seeing Dalí in a similar manner was enticing. Though not displayed in such a vast space as the Klimt show at the Soho Art Center in Praga, the subject matter was even more suited to the immersive, 3D, animated and AI-enhanced experience. Watching fragments of surreal images morphing into one another on the walls, on the ceilings and floors is mind-blowing. Gigantic elephants on insectoid legs marching across weird landscapes, flaming giraffes, lobsters leaping out of the ocean. Dalí's imagination comes to life.

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) lived across such fascinating times. Born six months after the first man-powered flight, Dalí lived well into the atomic age and the computer age. Yet had he still been alive today, the technology would have taken his work further. The promise was there – a pixelated Raquel Welch programmed by Dalí back in 1965 on an IBM mainframe computer. He understood where computers would take art.

Although Dalí's art doesn't resonate with me emotionally, in the way that his fellow surrealist Giorgio de Chirico's unworldly dreamscapes do, it is instantly familiar and unsettling. As famous as Picasso or Warhol – the artist as celebrity.

However, this exhibition at the Art Box in Fabryka Norblina was absolutely first-rate in placing Dalí into context; the influence of surrealism on his art, and his influence on surrealism. His falling out with his surrealist friends as a result of taking the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War and his fascination with science and biology. 

A political reflection: below is a screenshot of Dalí's City of Drawers (1936) taken from Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble (1976). In the film-within-a-film, Budują nasze szczęście ('They Build Our Happiness'), Wajda has his Stalinist propaganda narrator exclaiming: – Popatrzcie do jakiego stopnia zwyrodnienia doszły te dzieła artystów kapitalistycznego zachodu. Nie jest rzeczą przypadku, że postać człowieka zatraciła w ich rękach ludzki kształt, i ludzką treść. ("Look at the extent of degeneration to which these works of artists of the capitalist West have come. It is no accident that in their hands, the human figure has lost its human shape and human content".)

Now here's the thing. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) also liked to juxtapose his figures, did he not? And yet he was not denounced by the Stalinist machine as 'degenerate'; rather, Picasso was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1950 and remained a member of the French Communist Party until his death – despite the brutal Soviet suppression of Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. Dalí, however, sided with Franco after the Spanish Civil War, and for this, all his old surrealist friends turned their back on him. (I can understand them totally, shunning as I do former friends who supported Brexit or Corbyn.)

Dalí and his wife/muse/manager, Gala, found New York an ideal place to escape from European politics and to build the Dalí brand. Their commercial nous and a gift for self-publicity resulted in the carefully crafted celebrity that we all recognise.

Yet within the pompous bravado was a curious mind, fascinated by subatomic physics, DNA and psychoanalysis. As well as hobnobbing with the celebrity set, Dalí sought the company of people like Schrödinger and Heisenberg, Crick and Watson, and of course Sigmund Freud. 

All in all, I'd thoroughly recommend this show and indeed the entire concept of immersive, interactive art exhibitions. Highly didactic! So much better than simply staring at canvases.

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