Peter Fuller, husband of my collab fren @steffullerart and father of noted actor and NFT artist @LaurenceFuller , was an art critic with incisive wit who did not give one whit about common convention and screamed "The Emperor Has No Clothes" to anyone who would listen and many that did not.
The love his son Laurence still has for the man, unfortunately no longer with us, is obvious in how he keeps his memory alive through sharing his wisdom and treading his creative path. This piece is in response to a contest Laurence is sponsoring to further his venerable aim.
You understand that Mr. Fuller (of blessed memory) isn't a Dali fan from the first sentence of his 1980 piece, "Salvador Dali and Psychoanalysis". But even as a Dali detractor, Fuller respected the creativity and technical virtuosity that's made the artist famous. He gave credit to the manner in which Dali wove disparate elements into cohesive unity in two of his pieces.
But the rest of his piece is a duly entertaining screed asserting that Dali was basically a glorified voyeur whose art bore no depth because it wasn't based on his own experiences. He mercilessly deems Dali a shallow bottom-barrel marketer, comparing his work to vapid commercial advertisements in the following passage:
"These advertisements insult because of the enormity of the gap between the experiences and sentiments they allude to and that which they are in fact selling to us. Similarly, Dali evokes such things as our fears about bodily aging, fantasies infantile and adult about our own bodies and those of others, and our capacities for imaginative and iconic symbolization in dreams: but he, too, insults because all these intimate impingements are deployed for but one purpose, that of impressing upon us what a smart-ass painter he is."
This forthright expression of said goal without any floofy bandying-about certainly elicited an authentic grin from myself. I don't know of many modern artists who aren't driven by that goal.
But yeah, Dali was a trickster. He wasn't Van Gogh, trying to sublimate his demons through the lead paint that theoretically may have made him even more mental. He wasn't HR Giger, an architect who expunged his night terrors through his art (which admittedly bore staggering commercial success within his lifetime, in contrast to Van Gogh). Fuller helps the reader conclude that Dali was a poser whose entire outlook was based on the desire for commercial success.
On that note, Dali well succeeded. Long after his death, his melted clock is a mass marketer's staple at everywhere from Ali Express to the now defunct Bed, Bath and Beyond. I actually had one for a long time before it broke. But I digress.
Fuller goes on to describe a meeting between Dali and famed father of modern psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, whom he proceeds to analyse the feces out of - some pun intended. Fuller takes Freud as a walking paradox - both as a human and within the "science" he created. He points out that Freud cared for subject matter more than the way it was delivered. He didn't even like music (the cad) and felt the "oceanic experience" of aesthetic experience was lunatic.
So, Fuller basically concludes, Freud liking Dali has no bearing on the bona fides of Dali's artistic prowess. Fuller believes Freud wouldn't have known what good art was if it had jumped up and bit him on his oh-so-reasonable derriere due to Freud's own self-imposed mental and psychological constraints. Dali basically sold Freud his peepshow. And Freud's eyes were already tainted by his own paradigms.
A melting clock, frankly, gets more Jungian about the whole thing with its blatantly pure symbolism regarding modernism and how both Freud and Dali were about eschewing past thought for a "brave new world." (Don't ask me to go down the Huxley rabbit hole with this, please. LOL).
But then Fuller digresses into his own philosophical meanderings with his endorsement of psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft, who believed "the idea that there really is some entity somewhere that instigates whatever we do unconsciously, some entity which is not the same entity as instigates whatever we do consciously’."
As a religious Jew, I have no patience for any of this prognostication from people whom I feel are talking out of their tailpipes, to put it mildly. Every human has an animal soul, which Freud termed the ego. This animal soul is all about fulfilling bodily desires and the desire to take everything it can from the world around it. This animal soul is the impetus for sin. Every human has a G-dly soul from which is birthed self-restraint, self-sacrifice, and the desire to give. This soul is meant to bring the human to be more like G-d and fulfil the purpose of existence. Everyone has these drives, but the human condition is a result of the choices one makes. You are what you choose. And you can defeat your nature.
Freud was a dumbass because he thought otherwise. Freud was an unaffiliated Jew who was torn from his heritage as many German Jews were, only a few generations before the Holocaust. German Jews, only decades before, cast off the burden of the Torah in order to become enlightened and be like every other non-Jew in the world in equality, equanimity and tolerance of all. We all know how that story played out during the Holocaust and how it continues to play out today all over the world.
"Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time."
And we see the same story enacted by those of Freud's ilk over and over again throughout history.
"Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power."
Again I make the bold and oft-proven assertion that there is no way to analyze or even conceive of the human experience whilst leaving G-d out of the picture.
Freud's search for meaning was predicated by the notion that Torah Judaism was archaic and useless. And that is where as a Jew and as a human he failed. His superficial understanding of what man is and his own ego's need to bathe in the stench of his intellectual flatulence created an emotional and spiritual blockage within him that made it impossible to understand the depth of human experience.
As much as he tried, he could not squeeze truth of any sort out of the philosophical equivalent of a melted clock. And, as Fuller basically shouted from the pixels of the blogpost I just read, neither could Dali. Even if it did look kinda cool.
That's modernism for you.
