SPEAKER 1: We're
looking at a painting by Salvador Dali
in the Tate Modern. It's The Metamorphosis
of Narcissus, and it dates to 1937. It's a pretty wild painting. SPEAKER 2: So what
I see that relates to that is this hand
that seems to be emerging from the earth, that
holds an egg from which seems to be hatching Narcissus. SPEAKER 1: Except that so
many of Dali's paintings, and rendering in
Dali's paintings, which are painted in that
kind of classical manner in terms of it's sort of-- SPEAKER 2: It's very realistic. SPEAKER 1: --it's
precision, It's careful rendering of space, even
if that space is distorted, of shadow, of line. If you look at the egg from
which the flower is emerging, it seems to be emerging
from a crack that is also the shadow of the flower
at the same moment. And so it's both those things
sort of simultaneously. And, in fact, the
whole painting seems to be about forms being one
thing, and, at the same moment, another. SPEAKER 2: Because there
is, behind that hand, another hand that seems to be
emerging from a pool of water. This time not rock, but
something-- because it's brown, maybe it seems more earth-like. And holding also
an egg-like shape, but actually it looks a
little bit more like a walnut. But it also has a crack. And from that seems to emerge
a hair that looks like a flame. SPEAKER 1: Because the hand is,
in that second iteration, not so much a hand, as
actually a crouching body-- the body of Narcissus. SPEAKER 2: You can
see knees and arms. SPEAKER 1: But
what's wonderful is that whereas the figure
that's yellow on the left, slightly further back, is a
body where the head is a walnut. On the right, it's
more clearly a close-up of a hand holding an egg. And yet, they're
precisely the same forms. It's that doubling. It's that mirror that's so
incredibly disconcerting. All of this needs to
be contextualized. What in the world is Dali doing? Well, what he said he was doing,
and what Andre Breton lauded him for-- he was a writer often
seen as one of the leaders of the surrealist movement-- SPEAKER 2: And he wrote
The Surrealist Manifesto. SPEAKER 1: Right. All of the surrealist
manifestos, or at least a
number of them, yes. They called the ability
of Dali to do this, to see things simultaneously
as more than one thing, as a result of a
psychological state which they called
paranoiac-critical activity. SPEAKER 2: Sounds
scary and dangerous. SPEAKER 1: [LAUGHS]
Well, I think they loved the fact that
it was scary and dangerous. And it was based on the kind
of willful misreading of Freud. You know, Freud talked
about the filters that kept the unconscious
and the conscious mind apart. But Dali claimed that in a state
of paranoid critical activity, he could actually embrace both
the conscious and unconscious simultaneously so that his
conscious mind could actually do the painting. The brilliance of
understanding that form as both a hand and a
body, as flesh and stone, simultaneously, that,
Dali, would have claimed was absolutely the result
not of the rational mind-- impossible in the rational. But it was the result
of the irrational, of a conversation
between those two states in this state of
paranoid critical activity. [LAUGHS] SPEAKER 2: OK. It was incredibly important
to the surrealists to access that unconscious,
to access something that was more
authentic, that lacked the control of the
conscious mind. SPEAKER 1: For them, that
was the engine of creativity, absolutely, was this
motherload of the creative. I mean, when we think
back to the 19th century and we think back to
artists like Gauguin, wanted to get back to
nature, like Courbet wanted to get back to nature. The unconscious,
for the surrealists, that was the great goal. That was it. SPEAKER 2: Right. SPEAKER 1: So what's
so interesting is the surrealists go
at this from a number of different points of view. SPEAKER 2: Right. SPEAKER 1: People like Miro
will try to, in a sense, allow for the
unconscious to emerge, and paint using an
automatic method that is not allowing the conscious
mind to interpret. Whereas Dali is sort
of wanting both. He wants the perfection
of the academic style to render the inspiration
of the unconscious.