Paper for Thursday

Dalí’s surrealist activities and the model of scientific experimentation

Abstract (from author)

This paper aims to explore relationships between Salvador Dalí’s practices at the end of the 1920s and during the 1930s, and models of scientific experimentation. In 1928 Dalí took a growing interest in André Breton’s automatism and elaborated his first conception of surrealism which was based on the model of the scientific observation of nature. Dalí’s writings of this period mimicked protocols of botanic or entomological experiments and reformulated in an original way Breton’s surrealist project: they simulated the conditions and practices of scientific observations of nature. Paradoxically, this documentaristic and hyperobjective attitude led to a hyper-subjective and surrealistic description of reality: objects were taken out of their context, they were broken up and no longer recognisable. When Dalí officially entered Breton’s group and conceived the paranoiac-critical method, he focused his attention on another scientific model: Albert Einstein’s notion of space-time. Dalí appropriated a concept which defined the inextricable relationship between space-time and the object and which became, in his view, the mental model of the interaction between interiority and exteriority, invisible and visible, subjectivity and objectivity. Significantly, the Catalan artist almost rewrote one of Einstein’s own papers, by pointing out the active dimension of Einstein’s space-time and by conferring new meanings on his notion of the space-time curve. I will track down the migration of this concept from physics to Dalí’s surrealist vision by considering its importance in writings where the artist uses his method to interpret the most varied phenomena, from the myth of Narcissus, to English pre-Raphaelitism and the
architecture of Antoni Gaudí.