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  • (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)

(piano music)

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サルバドール・ダリ『記憶の持続』1931年 (Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931)

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    Caurora に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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