(piano music) Steven: At the Museum of Modern Art there
is this tiny painting by Salvador Dali, which is the painting that
everybody wants to see. That and Starry Night by
Van Gogh are the two stars. We thought it would be really
interesting to talk about why this
painting is so wildly popular. This is the Persistence of
Memory by Salvador Dali. Sal: And here I understand why
people kind of connect to it now. I mean anybody who has
ever tried to make an album for a rock band is
inspired by Salvador Dali. There is also this kind of fun
of, "What are you looking at?" is really playing with reality. It's kind of like a visual brain teaser. Steven: 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: Yeah, it's mind trippy. I like the way you put it.
It's an attack on the rational. I guess I don't ... There might
be more to it. That's my sense. Steven: You know, you were
talking about album cover art
and posters in maybe a dorm room. What's interesting is that these artists
took these ideas really seriously. This was Surrealism.
This was painted in 1931. Dali, the Spanish artist,
this Catalin Artist, had just come to Paris and had
joined the Surrealist group. Sal: I'm assuming he's
considered significant because
he was the first person to essentially do dreamscapes, and as
you mentioned, attack on the rational. Steven: When you walk into this painting
visually, you enter into this really deep open and lonely space, and
is this really quiet image. Sal: Yeah it's kind of this desert-scape,
ignoring the melting clocks for a moment, you feel that okay if you
were in this landscape, yes,
time really does not really carry a lot of weight. You
could just kind of wither there
and die and no one would care. Even that kind of water in the background. There's no waves in it. It's like they've had time to settle down. There's literally no activity. Steven: There's this
unbearable sense of quiet. There is almost no movement and I think
it does feel very desert-like, very hot. Literally time has melted, right? But we have this absurd environment. We do have this very
naturalistic rendering but the things that are being rendered are not naturalistic at all. You mentioned the dead tree on the left but it's growing out of
something that seems clearly
man-made or at least geometric, a table top 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: Oh that's what that is.
I couldn't fully make it out. Okay so they're eating away at a
time piece. That's fascinating. Steven: And of course you
have the drooping clocks. And that's such an interesting
and provocative 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: Well one you have that tabletop. There's another one in the background. And even the way the light is
set up, especially on the cliff, it looks like it's sunset
so it's kind of like, "Hey another day has passed, who cares?" Steven: 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 our
historians have recognized. The cliffs in the back are,
we think, the cliffs of the
Catalonian coast in Northern Spain where Dali is from and so
this is his childhood perhaps. 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 the nose? Sal: This is the whole
optical illusion part of Dali. 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 a nose. Steven: Yeah, Dali 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: That goes back in the category of is
this more that kind of dorm room optical illusion type art. Steven: Well that's right. Surrealism positive to that, the rational
world that we have so much faith in, was perhaps not worthy of all that faith. The irrational was just as important but was something that we had sublimated. Something that we had tried
to drive out of our life. And 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 have 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: This is something
that often confronts me. 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. Look, there are 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. Steven: When people have looked at
this painting they have sometimes, I think unconvincingly, tried to
link it to fine signs earlier, ideas of the ... Sal: Time dilation. Steven: Exactly and time in
fact was not a strict thing. I think there is more evidence
that Dali is thinking about, ideas of a philospher's
name who is Berkson, who thought about time as something that
was not simply what struck on a clock, but that there was something
that kind of unit of time that was more subjective and
that expanded and contracted according to our experience. Sal: Time is this thing
that sometime scares us. We completely don't understand it, even
though it's kind of the most fundamental component of our existence. We fundamentally don't understand it. We try to measure it out. We try to constrain it and define it
in some way that makes sense to us. Actually I think that's what
this piece is maybe trying to do. It's like, "Look these clocks are stupid." These are just our futile
attempts to try to label. It's kind of like if you label something or you measure something, you feel like you actually
understand it even though you don't. Steven: I think this is that moment when all of those safe ideas
of objectivity are being blown out of the water
and we're seeing an art that is in some really
interesting ways confronting that. (piano music)