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About Camille Paglia
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C O L U M N I S T S
Sexpert Opinion Bestseller Hell Left Hook Right On! Lovers and Writers Under the Covers Second Thoughts American Squirm Unzipped |
A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A | PAGE 2 OF 2
Dear Camille:
Since your favorite subjects seem to include art, sex and culture, I would be extremely interested in your thoughts and observations on Spanish artist Salvador Dali. His paintings were filled with religious, sexual and other taboo imagery.
Richard Heinz
Dear Mr. Heinz:
Thank you very much for your delightful query about Dali, who was one of the
artists most cherished by my psychedelic 1960s generation. His hallucinatory
imagery of magic metamorphosis and pornographic wit seemed utterly
contemporary.
Surrealism, which was directly inspired by Freud's theory of the unconscious,
remains my favorite style in 20th century art. Its influence can be seen
in so many works on my personal all-time hits list, from Jean Cocteau's
brilliant film "Orphée" and Rod Serling's
classic TV series "The Twilight Zone" to Claes Oldenburg's anthropomorphic
sculptures and Andy Warhol's polychrome icons.
Dali's "Persistence of Memory," with its famous melting watches, regularly
appears as an identification question on the final exam for my freshman course
on modernism, and I always focus in class on his prankish or horrific central
paintings involving dog heads and fruit bowls, masturbatory grasshoppers and
self-mutilating hags (the latter a Goyaesque allegory on the Spanish Civil
War).
Privately, however, I am a fan of Dali's more bizarre fantasies such as the
comically sacrilegious "Annunciation," where an otherwise nude harlot in
seamed stockings and penny loafers leans over a balcony rail as giant brown
radio cones stream down from heaven to bump her fleshy buttocks. I also adore
Dali's montage of Shirley Temple crouched as a monstrous sphinx in the desert;
his trompe l'oeil design of Mae West's corpulent
face as a bordellolike art gallery; and his pioneering assemblage, "Lobster Telephone," with its crustacean receiver ready to bite your head off.
Dali's technical or formalistic powers as an artist were nowhere near
Picasso's, which is why Dali's career seemed to sputter out into kitschy
illustration and trivial whimsy. His dashing, cape-clad impresario persona
began in the melodramatic Liszt-Diaghilev manner but later veered toward that
of the Cagliostrolike mountebank or flâneur.
Nevertheless, I revere Dali as one of the canonical artists of the century.
He means infinitely more to me than any number of overinflated major figures
from Kandinsky to Rauschenberg.
Postscript: A full-scale
profile of me by Angela Phillips appeared in the Guardian in London
on Sept. 19. (The front-page rubric was "Camille Paglia: sister or
sinner?") Though written from a somewhat hostile British feminist position,
the article does for the first time explore the early development of my
thought.
While Hole is a tight, energetic band, its work is too derivative to make
genuine rock history, though many young (and overwhelmingly white middle-class) fans clearly think otherwise. Listening to Love blow chance after
chance on "Celebrity Skin" to sing in an honestly direct rather than hackneyed
punk manner, I have to reach for the aspirin -- and then refresh myself with
Savage Garden's beautifully performed "To the Moon & Back"; or Blondie's
"Hanging on the Telephone," "Rip Her to Shreds," "Picture This," "Rifle
Range" and "Die Young, Stay Pretty" (on "Denis," a Dutch compilation with a
drop-dead gorgeous cover photo of Deborah Harry); or practically anything on
the recently released "The Very Best of Dusty Springfield" -- a pop artist of
enormous range and stature.
For true rock dynamite that explodes from the soul, I recommend Foo Fighters'
amazing live version of Jerry Rafferty's 1978 classic, "Baker Street,"
available only on an import CD, "My Hero." When I finally got my hands on a
copy last week, I felt I had stumbled on El Dorado in the midst of a
thunderstorm.
Guilty of youthful indiscretions? Confess to Camille.
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