Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory

[0:00] [music]

Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:03] At the Museum of Modern Art, there is this tiny painting by Salvador Dalí, which is the painting that everybody wants to see. That and “Starry Night” by Van Gogh are the two stars. And I thought it would be really interesting to talk about why this painting is so wildly popular. This is the “Persistence of Memory” by Salvador Dalí.

Sal Khan: [0:23] Here, I understand why people connect to it now. Anybody who has ever tried to make an album for a rock band is inspired by Salvador Dalí. There is also this fun of, what are you looking at? He’s really playing with reality. It’s like a visual brain teaser.

Dr. Zucker: [0:41] Is that it? Is it so popular? Is it on album cover art because it’s this attack on the rational, and that’s such a seductive idea?

Sal: [0:50] It’s mind-trippy. I like the way you’ve put it. It’s an attack on the rational. I guess I don’t…there might be more to it. That’s my sense.

Dr. Zucker: [0:58] You were talking about album cover art and posters on maybe a dorm room. What’s interesting is that these artists took these ideas really seriously. This was Surrealism.

[1:08] This was painted in 1931. Dalí, this Spanish artist, this Catalan artist, had just come to Paris and had joined this Surrealist group.

Sal: [1:16] I’m assuming he’s considered significant because he was the first person to essentially do dreamscapes. These, as you mentioned, attack[s] on the rational.

Dr. Zucker: [1:24] When you walk into this painting, visually, you enter into this really deep, open, and lonely space. It’s this really quiet image.

Sal: [1:34] It’s this desertscape. Ignoring the melting clocks for a moment, you feel that if you were in this landscape, time really does not carry a lot of weight. You could just wither there and die and no one would care.

[1:48] Even that water in the background, there’s no waves in it. They’ve had time to settle down, there’s literally no activity.

Dr. Zucker: [1:55] There’s this unbearable sense of quiet. There is almost no movement. It does feel very desert-like and very hot. Literally, time has melted. We have this absurd environment. We do have this very naturalistic rendering. But the things that are being rendered are not naturalistic at all.

[2:13] You mentioned the dead tree on the left. It’s growing out of something that seems clearly man-made, or at least geometric, a tabletop perhaps. You have ants that seem to be eating and attracted to a piece of metal as opposed to a piece of rotted flesh.

Sal: [2:29] Oh, that’s what that is. I couldn’t fully make it out. Okay, so they’re eating away at a timepiece. That’s fascinating.

Dr. Zucker: [2:34] Of course, you have the drooping clocks. And that’s such an interesting and evocative idea because time is something that is so regimented. Time is something that rules us, that is so associated with the industrial culture that we live in, and here it responds to the environment as we respond to the environment.

Sal: [2:54] One, you have that tabletop and there’s another one in the background. And even the way that the light is set up, especially on the cliff, it looks like it’s sunset. It’s like, “Hey, just another day has passed. [laughs] Who cares?”

Dr. Zucker: [3:05] Now there are some identifiable things. For all the absurdity and for all of the impossibility of what we’re seeing, there are some things that art historians have recognized. The cliffs in the back are, we think, the cliffs of the Catalonian coast in northern Spain where Dalí is from, and so this is his childhood, perhaps.

[3:25] Some art historians have concluded that that strange figure, almost a profile face — can you make out an eye with extremely long lashes and perhaps a tongue under a nose?

Sal: [3:37] This is the whole optical illusion part of Dalí. Yeah, I thought it was a blanket, but now I completely see the eyelashes. I thought it was a duck for a second too. I see the eyelashes and the top of the nose.

Dr. Zucker: [3:48] Yeah, Dalí does that fun thing where one object can actually be several things at once, sometimes really convincingly. Some art historians think this is his face, but elusive and very much a kind of dream.

Sal: [4:01] That goes back in the category of, is this more that kind of dorm room optical-illusion-type art?

Dr. Zucker: [4:07] That’s right. Surrealism posited that the rational world that we have so much faith in was perhaps not worthy of all of that faith. That the irrational was just as important but was something that we had sublimated, something that we had tried to drive out of our life.

[4:24] The way that these artists and writers thought about it was if only they could retrieve the world of the dream. Some of the artists had read Freud. Some of them had only heard sort of secondhand accounts of Freud. But the idea that the dream was a place where the irrational mind came to the fore unrestricted.

Sal: [4:41] This is something that often confronts me is even the notions that how we perceive what we think is objective reality is really based on how our brain is wired. We see these causes and effects, we see linear time. This is how humans are wired. I think that’s what’s fun about these type of things.

[4:58] It’s kind of like, well you know, look, there’s different forms of reality and who are we as creatures that are wired one particular way to be all that judgmental about what’s real.

Dr. Zucker: [5:06] When people have looked at this painting they have sometimes, I think unconvincingly, tried to link it to Einstein’s earlier, ideas of the…

Sal: [5:16] Time dilation.

Dr. Zucker: [5:17] Exactly, and that time was not in fact a strict thing.

[5:20] I think there’s more evidence that Dalí is thinking about ideas of a philosopher whose name is Bergson, who thought about time as something that was not simply what struck on a clock, but that there was a kind of human time that was more subjective and that expanded and contracted according to our experience.

Sal: [5:39] Time is this thing that sometimes scares us because we completely don’t understand it. Even though the most fundamental component of our existence.

[5:46] We fundamentally don’t understand it. We try to measure it out. We try to constrain it. Define it in some way that makes sense to us.

[5:55] That’s what this piece is maybe trying to do, “Look, these clocks are stupid.” These are just our futile attempts to try to label…it’s if you label something or if you measure something, you feel like you actually understand it even though you don’t.

Dr. Zucker: [6:07] I think this is that moment when all those safe ideas of objectivity are being blown out of the water. We’re seeing an art that is in some really interesting ways confronting that.

[6:16] [music]