Dali’s Persistence of Memory #AtoZChallenge 2018

Salvador Dali (904-1989) is a Spanish artist best known for his surrealist paintings, although he also sculpted, made films, did print making, and performed as a performance artist. The reasons he makes it into my exploration of memory for the April 2018 A to Z Blog Challenge,  are twofold.

First, he created images by mining the subconscious using psychoanalytic techniques.  In other words, he use Freudian theory as a base for his artistry–exploring how to visually represent our dreams, fears, hallucinations, and paranoia.   Since we’ve seen that long-term memory and emotions are entangled, we cannot separate our memories from the imaginary and shadow worlds we create for our selves.

Second, perhaps one of Dali’s most famous paintings is aptly named the The Persistence of Memory.  Seen above,  (or you can see it for real at the Museum of Modern Art in New York), the image shows soft watches melting in the sun, as if in a dream state.  The swarming ants and melting clocks signal decay.

There are different ways to interpret this, but for this theme, the key is that time passes differently in a dream state. Perhaps, in that dream state, time has much less meaning than we give it in the real world.  Marry this thought to the title of the painting,”The Persistence of Memory,” and we can imagine that the same is true of our memories.  Because as we learned that memories are tied to emotion, and we reconstruct them through our personal filters, its not a hard leap to conclude that the memories that persist, warp our sense of our past, and equally shape our present and future.

What do you think?