The eccentricity of Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali is unquestionable. However Dali’s articualtion of what he termed ”The Paranoiac Critical Method” was a coherent theory and discovery of an artistic sensitivity not previously elucidated. Surrealists like Dali effectively challenged the mechanistic rationalism that was ingrained in the political, business and academic classes of the early 20 th century. Dali’s views by extension, were also antagonistic to the existing artistic belief structure.
The Ghost Of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used As a Table
Dali felt that the dominance of linear and cartesian thought processes were the sources of materialism and militarism. Dali painted dream style photographic paintings attributed to his paranoiac method. It was an effort to systematize inner thought which would result in viewing objects as extensions of our subjective self and which drew directly from case studies of interpretive disorders of the clinically paranoid.
Paranoiac critical method is a surrealistic technique employed in artwork involving optical illusions. ”The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can be Used As A Table” is an example of turning everyday life into the inanimate where Vermeer morphs into a table and where successive golden rectangles can be divided into infinite squares in a geometric fashion. The resulting work is a double image or multiple image in which an ambiguous image can be interpreted in many ways. Dali (Conquest Of The Irrational 1936): Paranoic-critical activity is…”spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the interpretive critical association of delirious phenomenon”.
Dali: The Invisible Man
Essentially, the paranoic critical method, according to Dali permits the artist to ”trick” himself into going insane which would unleash and enhance part of our brains ability to perceive links between things which are rationally not linked. One consciously taps into the subconscious internal mechanisms of paranoiac phenomenon. The paranormal thus assumes the place of the rational. This mechanism permits a simulation of the paranoiac in which Dali could undermine his rational view of the world which would be replaced by a continuous stream of associations subject to further transformations and permutations. As Dali once stated, ”I don’t take drugs, I am drugs.” He is also quoted as saying, ”The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad!”.
The conclusion confirms the impossibility of conceding or defining any value to immediate reality since it may represent or mean or be subject to an infinite number or meanings and interpretations. ”Real” tangible objects and the world in which they are arranged loses validity since everything is subject to a continuous flux. It is analogical to mathematicians inability to establish absolute value and the finite ,which are created constructs to facilitate life ,but have limited basis in fact. Magicians such as Houdini also in a sense manipulated objective reality by morphing elements of the irrational into a visual representation of illusion.
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