Portrait of the Artist as an Object // Rebecca Salazar
Rebecca Salazar examines the concepts of strangeness and eccentricity among artists, asking, among other things, "who can afford to don strangeness as a luxury, and to remove it when convenient?" This article is part of our guest edited month examining the theme “Life is Stranger Than Fiction."
I am lying on the floor of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, about to be crushed by a horse. A swirling storm cloud manifests from the horse’s belly, and from this cloud, a single jasmine flower has sprouted in midair. Or so it seems.Behind me, a polite, bilingual placard on the wall instructs gallery guests to “please feel free to lie down in front of the painting”—specifically, Salvador Dalí’s towering, 13-foot-tall Santiago El Grande. There are faint, black rubber scuff marks on the white wall just below the painting: scrubbed remains of the shoe prints of hundreds of tourists who have lain in this spot and felt the same vertigo as I do now, as the painting’s central, hyperreal white horse appears to leap out of the painting over you, its thick hooves looming so close, you squint anticipating impact.The painting is tremendous in size and scope. Though I have been familiar with the image for most of my life, seeing Santiago El Grande in person is overwhelming. No book-sized print or Google image search has been so clear and vivid as to see the detail in the sunlit cliffs, the stormy oceanside village, or the tiny, languid self-portrait of the artist at the bottom edge of the painting. No photograph could recreate this sense that the painting is alive, and in motion.I had never noticed the expression on the face of Gala Dalí, the painter’s manager, wife, and collaborator, who is painted in the bottom right corner. She peeks significantly over steepled hands that hold a shroud around her body—it is barely a glimpse, but enough to recognize her from so many of her husband’s artworks. The painting rises before me, unattainable but pulsing with hyperreal detail, the outline of each brushstroke glinting in the angled gallery lighting. I feel dizzy, towered over.
*
My first encounter with the melting clocks and warping bodies of Salvador Dalí was in a heavy, gold-leafed, Spanish-made art book my grandparents sent to my father: a gift sent from Colombia, long after he left and moved to Canada. I might have been twelve or thirteen when the book caught my attention, its cover intricately gilded to frame a print of The Persistence of Memory.I was an isolated, introverted, presumed-straight Catholic schoolgirl living in a mostly pre-internet household, which is to say I was boring. If I was remarkable at all to my peers, it was for the wrong reasons: my brown skin, frizzy hair, immigrant parents, and pathological shyness. If I was strange, I wasn’t cool.Something in me felt a deep connection with Dalí’s drippy clocks, stilted figures, and agonized, decaying faces—cut to me unpacking this years later in therapy. Surrealist art became an unwitting outlet for some early, repressed trauma. If at the time, I should have been horrified or skeptical, I missed the cue and instead became transfixed. At school, I printed out my favourite paintings and portraits of Dalí, his moustache tipped with flowers or flames, to glue-stick to my notebooks. I filled sketchbooks with countless nude figures with pencils for limbs, or with stretched, floppy legs propped on sticks, or with clock gears and compasses fused to exposed ribcages. At some point, Brendan Vidito (also in this month’s Town Crier!) and I co-produced a stop-motion video for a class project, in which a tiny clay figure enters a nightmare world full of melting, winged clocks.I imitated Dalí because I wanted to be him—or, I wanted to be what I thought he was. The vision I had of him gave me permission to imagine I could make obsessively erotic, gratuitously gory, dark-humoured, strange art. How was I to know the avant-garde is hardly led by awkward, traumatized, 17-year-old virgin girls? How was I to know the art I loved takes girls like me for prey?
*
In retrospect, paintings like Dalí’s Young virgin auto-sodomized by the horns of her own chastity should have been red flags. Who was I to know? This painting, and my dictionary searches after puzzling at its title, provided more sex ed than my high school ever did—no thanks to Ontario’s Catholic school curriculum. This painting still explains more about my early sexuality than I care to admit.
*
It wasn’t long ago that I found out that Dalí beat his wife. It was not his only crime. It is the one that, once I learned of it, felt most like a betrayal of my younger self.What for years appeared to have been an ostensibly happy open marriage collapsed when Salvador became jealous of Gala’s affairs with younger male painters. He beat Gala so viciously that he broke two of her ribs. Nor was this beating an anomaly; earlier accounts tell of a 29-year-old Salvador who, as Lauren Oyler recounts in a profile of the artist on Broadly, “‘trampled’ a girl who remarked on the beauty of his bare feet” kicking and stomping her “until his companions ‘had to tear her, bleeding,’ from his clutches.”After her husband broke her bones, Gala drugged him, perhaps in self-defense. Whatever mix of drugs she administered eventually caused irreparable damage, effectively poisoning him. I cannot say whether the abuse in their relationship was one-sided, even before this. But I cannot, and will not, claim that any of Gala’s actions justify the assault she suffered.
*
The past few years in particular have taught me to burn my idols. How many writers I once admired were revealed to be rapists, or racists, or both, in the last year alone?I am desensitized. I have a trash bag in my apartment, hidden in the back of a storage closet, of the books I have purged from my shelves. I do not know what else to do with them. Donating them would feel too much like foisting my complicity onto unsuspecting hands. Burning these books would grant them a notoriety their authors do not deserve. Fredericton, where I live, offers no recycling service to apartment buildings.If I still had it, I am not sure I could add the gold-leaf book of Dalí paintings to the trash bag of shame. I will not defend my reasoning. I am not sure I have any.It should not have taken me so long to find out Dalí was a bully, a misogynist, an abuser. How many years did I spend reading about his art, about his life, about how pleasantly absurd and eccentric he was, without a single biographer mentioning this? At some point, I even enjoyed Adrien Brody’s quirky portrayal of Dalí in Midnight In Paris. I bought into the fantasy until I realized Midnight In Paris was a Woody Allen movie, and felt surrounded, again.
*
In a 2017 article in The Huffington Post, Martha C. Nussbaum writes that “we have created a class of glamorous and powerful men—entertainers, athletes—who are in a most literal sense above the law. They will almost always prevail against all accusations, no matter what they do in the sexual domain, because they are shielded by glamor, public trust, and access to the best legal representation.”We all know a few.Only a few months later, inThe Paris Review, Claire Dederer interrogated her own complicity in how we excuse these men—for her, particularly Woody Allen. “But hold up for a minute,” she writes: “who is this 'we' that’s always turning up in critical writing anyway? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority.” She continues: “We is corrupt. We is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist? Can you? When I say we, I mean I. I mean you.”
*
Dalí. Burroughs. Hemingway. Allen. Any of the CanLit writers whose work was praised as “avant-garde,” “experimental,” or “visionary” before the allegations began to pour anonymously into headlines published over the last few years.We—you and I—have praised these men, have celebrated their strangeness, no matter its cost, or their violence, or who is harmed by it. We—you and I—seem especially reticent to throw out an abuser’s art with the artist’s soiled bathwater when the abuser is a weirdo, a surrealist, an “experimental” artist.I have been instructed to separate the art from the artist. I have been implored not to discount certain experimental poets for their racism or sexual abuse, because we “need” their supposedly revolutionary strangeness. I have also been told that the experimental art made by direct and indirect victims of these men does not count as experimental, but as shallow, hysterical, attention-seeking frivolity.I have been scolded for choosing not to engage with the work of known rapists or pedophiles, because art would be “empty” or “boring” without them.Would it, really? Let’s ask for real: would nobody have gravitated towards strangeness or experiment if whichever shitty men had not? Does imagination only emerge from violence?Do not ask what weird art we would lose if we stopped listening, watching, reading the abusers.Ask instead what we could make if they did not hold all the power.Ask who we could be.
*
I am reminded of the adage that what makes the poor “crazy” simply makes the rich “eccentric.” It is not about being the “right” kind of strange, but about who can afford to don strangeness as a luxury, and to remove it when convenient. When Dalí and other monstrous golden boys wear strangeness as a fashion, publicize their neuroses, fuck with gender, or profess their necrophilia to be edgy (yes, he did), this makes them eccentric geniuses. They are allowed to wear the cloak of strangeness as a statement precisely because they can take it off. They are still white men underneath: familiar, acceptable monsters. Weird boys will be boys.It is telling that Gala Dalí is not generally acknowledged as an eccentric genius, even though she was at once Salvador’s wife, manager, model, and artistic collaborator. Many of the paintings she and Salvador produced together are signed with both of their names. While Salvador is still lauded as a visionary, as the perverted father of surrealism, Gala is remembered as “selfish,” “spendy,” a “raging nymphomaniac” and his “demon bride.” Not insignificantly, all of these descriptors are quoted from the same profile of Gala written by Hayley Milliman in 2018, a profile that ostensibly claims to be favourable, and ends by referring to Gala as a “badass bitch.”Only the normative can play with non-normativity for fun; those of us who are non-normative by accident, by virtue of our genders, races, abilities, sexualities, and bodies, are not allowed this luxury. For us, non-normativity makes us repulsive, not desirably subversive—we are sooner called attention-seeking freaks than visionaries.I cannot slip out of my strange body—its brown skin, queerness, illness, femme fluidity, confused Latinidad, its traumas. I never chose my strangeness, never donned it for aesthetic. What I can learn is to eventually embrace it.
*
The first time I embraced the gory, queer femme body horror that had crept into my writing, it was under the guidance of someone who later would hurt me. When this person asked me why I was holding back, why I was forcing my poems to be polite and pretty, it completely changed the way I write, the way I live my writing. I felt liberated in a way I cannot explain.Desiring strangeness in my own art is entangled with the abuse I endured from this person. For a long time, I could not distinguish their influence from my own voice. Desiring strangeness in the art I love and engage with feels complicit in the abuse endured by so many for the sake of Dalí’s art, and for the art of other toxic geniuses.How do I celebrate strangeness when it is so overwhelmingly espoused by toxic people? How do I separate strangeness from the harm done in order to achieve it? How do I embrace my own strangeness without replicating the patterns of abuse that somehow brought me to embrace it?
*
Upon asking my partner that last question, while writing, I received a question in reply.“Have you considered just becoming a huge asshole?”
*
Lightheaded, I retreat from Santiago El Grande to a bench in the larger gallery adjacent to the Beaverbrook’s Dalí room. I can still see the painting from here, framed symmetrically by two free-standing walls that flank the horse with large (but not as large) scale, colour-blocked tableaus by Canadian painter Jack Bush. Even from this distance—about 20 feet away—the Dalí painting is ominous, looming magnetic behind the parting walls.I cannot deny it moves me, though I am not sure to what. I keep fixating on the enigmatic figure of Gala in the bottom right corner, so completely shrouded that from here, I only see the lumpy outline of a figure wrapped in cloth, and barely a suggestion of her face. The brushstrokes that so intimately knew her figure in this, and in so many other paintings, were traced by the same hands that once broke her bones. I can’t unthink it. The sense of Salvador’s hands is dizzyingly tangible in every detail; you can feel him painting every contour, every shadow, as though he could turn around to face you and reach back. It has an eerie, ghostly sense I am not sure I have felt from any other painting here.It is strange to love a piece of art while your body screams against the harm it cost to make. That strangeness is the state I find myself in, often, a state that exists before ethical action, but which demands ethical questions.What am I to do with you, old friend, old fiend.What am I to do with men like you.What am I to do with what you teach me.As I continue scribbling in my notebook, four young women in grey sweatshirts and not-quite-matching Blundstones—a Fredericton uniform—wander past me into the Dalí room. They lie down below Santiago El Grande in a row, elbow to elbow. From where I sit, I can hear them chatting in library tones as they gaze up, take pictures, and point details out to one another.When I look back up, one of the four women is missing, likely tired of the hard floor and now wandering the room. As I begin to leave the gallery, I hear their echoing, hushed laughter.
Rebecca Salazar is the author of the knife you need to justify the wound (Rahila’s Ghost Press) and Guzzle (Anstruther Press). She is currently a poetry editor for The Fiddlehead and Plenitude magazines, and a PhD candidate living and working on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik and Mi’kmaq peoples.
