Perceptions of "Persistence of Memory"

Although visual art is looked upon differently by all, everyone has a either a favorite piece or at least something that catches their eye. Personally, I don’t have a piece of art that I would label my absolute favorite, but during a Spanish research project found that Salvador Dali’s work really stood out. “The Persistence of Memory” painted in 1931 by Dali, a highly renowned surrealist painter, is among the most interesting works I have ever seen. Even though the painting itself is rather simple in quality at first glance, what Dali’s must have been thinking about while creating this work is strikingly complex. The painting is attractive to me because it deals with the concept of time, something that everyone in the universe is continually worried about. Time is evident in the painting because four gold, old fashioned, pocket watches are shown melting away, which is a rather depressing concept to think about. Although it may be hard to think about for most people, Dali gives and accurately describes how he perceived time as able to decay or melt. The ants crawling on the overturned watch symbolizes that time decay is analogous to insects eating cheese. The painting reminds viewers of the fleeting aspect of time, and that we may not be here tomorrow or the next day. In order to maintain a somber attitude, Dali composed the painting of darker colors with the exception of the largest watch having a bluish hue, and the picturesque mountain landscape being reflected into the sea. The mountain scene strikes me as being a representation of something else that flees away with time; the ability to benefit from what nature has created for its onlookers.

Though the conscious and subconscious are things that are not wholly understood by everyone, Dali clearly uses both parts of his mind in order to create a painting with images that no one else could have possibly imagined in the same way. It is reasonable, I think, to assume that most people could have created a landscape painting with mountains being reflected into a sea, and that may have been Dali’s goal when he started to paint “The Persistence of Memory.” However, there remains no doubt that Dali’s subconscious was at work here because no one else could ever imagine the exact image depicting “melting” time as seen here. The conscious part of the brain is the area that is alive and comprehends what is happening to one and the world around one. The landscape, Catalonia, Spain (Dali’s hometown), was the result of Dali’s conscious mind because he was living it and taking it in with his own two eyes. Everything stemmed from thoughts of daydreams, bad memories, and other possible goods or evils that dwell in the subconscious mind. Wikipedia explains that Sigmund Freud believed that the unconscious mind was a depository of wishes, desires, socially unacceptable ideas, traumatic memories, and/or painful emotions.

Dali’s painting appears to be representative of mainly the subconscious mind because many of the elements in the painting express objects or ideas that are highly characteristic of memories, dreams, or even socially unacceptable elements. More importantly, The Museum of Modern Art explains that a year before this painting was made Dali began to undergo his “paranoiac-critical method” which stimulated self-induced hallucinations in order to create art. Forms of hallucinations are definitely considered to be part of the subconscious because the mind is not fully active, and one cannot be aware of one’s actions or surroundings. Objects in the painting such as the melting watches, Dali likened to soft, overripe Camembert cheese. The idea to make the clocks like cheese probably came from a memory of eating such cheese throughout his life. It would also make sense because if the clocks represented melting cheese, this is probably why Dali chooses ants to be eating one of the clocks. Similarly, Dali may have seen ants eating cheese on a picnic which created the idea for them to also eat away time or the clocks. Dali’s subconscious appears again with the elongated face in the middle of the painting that also appeared in Dali’s earlier painting, “The Great Masturbator.” The face is his own, and it originates from the sexual thoughts of his previous painting and the fact that his father made him look at pictures of people with venereal diseases that left him mentally scarred for the rest of his adult life. These impressions made him believe that sex led to putrefaction and/or decay which may also be significant with the decay of the clocks in “The Persistence of Memory.”