Regarding strategies: Salvador Dali, modernism and paranoid vision.
Item
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Title
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Regarding strategies: Salvador Dali, modernism and paranoid vision.
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Identifier
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AAI3024790
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identifier
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3024790
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Creator
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Glass, Angela G.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Jack Flam
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Date
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2001
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Psychology, General
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Abstract
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By my dissertation title, Regarding Strategies: Salvador Dali, Modernism and Paranoid Vision, I mean to imply a reconsideration of the strategies of seeing, the historical politics of looking, the aesthetics of regard and disregard vis-a-vis Salvador Dali. To do this, I look at some of the fundamental arguments and assumptions of the discursive traditions of modernism, I identify Dali's early formal, iconographic and structural borrowings from other artists, and I explore alternately the subject as visual agent and visuality as object of critical inquiry.;In Chapter One, "Introduction: Dali, Painting and Its Tradition," I trace and re-articulate some of the discursive determinations of the history of modern art. My aim here is to examine Dali's oeuvre within the context of art history, a history with which he has had a combatively ambivalent relationship. In Chapter Two, "Regarding Strategies," I describe the evolution of Dali's paranoid-critical method and significant commentary about it. I also look at the relationship between Dali's art production and the work of Georges Bataille, Andre Breton, and Jacques Lacan. Although by no means a flawless strategy, Dali's exploitation of paranoia confirms his fascination with the territory between interpretation and authorship, reality and fiction, and the structures of organization and production. In Chapter Three, "Regarding Dali's Paintings," I look at the paintings themselves in light of the groundwork laid in the first two chapters. In Chapter Four, "Conclusion: From the Optical Unconscious to the (Self)Conscious Optic," I explore Dali's marginalization from mainstream modernism and his relevance to postmodern art practices.;To consider Dali's art in the context of surrealism is to witness his critical engagement with major currents of modernist thought. He merits our attention because his persona and vision are so symptomatic of our times. Dali crystallizes the paranoiac circumstances pervasive in our society and confirms our suspicion that what we see is colored by a mixture of experience, memory, conjecture and imagination. His best paintings capture the texture of quotidian reality by communicating both its precious order and terrible uncertainty. Moreover, they assure us that a canny approach to visual representation has a long history.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
