TheGreatMasturbator

Phalluses, ants, and olive trees.

M. I. Flores Nachón

When I started as a student of Art History and Curatorship student, I declared myself a genuine fan of Salvador Dalí. Little by little, I discovered we both had a fixation on the ticking of the clock and the pain of loss. However, after reading and analyzing, I came across the idea that Salvador Dalí and I are pretty different. Our coincidences are more part of the world's thought system and the spirit of the time, universally shared and not necessarily an interspatial-timeless connection.

However, his work, like that of each artist hand, is the highest form of a message, as well explained by Arnold Hauser:

In its highest form, the work of art is a message, and while those who affirm that a correct, suggestive and energetic expression is an indispensable condition for the effective transmission of the message are undoubtedly right, those who affirm that a A form, however perfect it may be, is meaningless if it is not animated by a certain message.(Hauser, 1968, p.24)

Psychoanalyzing Salvador Dalí is probably a common practice, and quite adventurous, especially for an art historian who hardly feels virtuous enough to talk about the facts, not assumptions.

This is how uniting greats like Hauser, Freud and Jung, I can dare to cast a hook in the works of Salvador Dalí and fish a little about his mind behind his brush.

It is well known that his works denote a part of his unconscious. A fear, a disagreement, a fetish. In each of them we see elongated figures, contrasting with each other. Between their flaccid and hardened characters, erect and collapsed. Archaeological reminiscences that remind us of the first figures referring to fertility and what is consistent with the tears of Eros. Salvador Dalí had hidden souls behind his works.

In Freud, the unconscious, although it appears as an acting subject, is nothing other than the meeting place of these forgotten and repressed contents, and only because of these does it have a practical significance. (C. Jung, 1997)

Olive trees, clocks, ants, lions, elephants, grasshoppers, noses and mustaches. Obsessed with these elements, he remembered the disagreement that Freud describes, the forgotten, the repressed, which he loudly paints. Let's take as an exampleThe Great Masturbator (1929).In it, we see a big-nosed and mustachioed face, effectively a self-portrait of the author facing the ground, facing a grasshopper being eaten by a group of ants. Both the grasshopper and the ants signify a latent fear in Dalí's life, one being a phobia and the other being part of the shared terrors towards death.

On the same face, skin to skin melts into the shape of a bust, a woman who temptingly approaches the genital area of a classical sculpture. Delicate, with her eyes closed next to a gannet that covers her chest. Beneath it we see a monstrous face that seeks to devour without mercy. Dalí openly commented on different occasions about his sexuality and his fear of intercourse. Although he felt a great complex about the size of his phallus, his fear increased due to a bad experience given through reading a sexual book in which venereal diseases were described in depth, which greatly impacted the author.

Olive branches extend from the lower left corner, and seem to reach the veins of the delicate woman. It is well known that Gala, Salvador's wife and eternal lover was his muse in various works, is no exception. Her skin, as described by Dalí, was pale and olive-colored. Hence the branches and their extension. Behind the scene, the shadow of a couple, united under the sexual tension that unfolds in the foreground of the painting.

Salvador Dalí spoke of himself as if he were a myth, allowing himself to become the brand he is today. His self-portrait, The Great Masturbator, allows us to delve into the most powerful disagreements of his unconscious. Dalí and I share more than the fear of the passing of time and the dream that ants will eat us. We share a sexual fear that represses us and imprisons us in a body. Salvador invited me to discover his work, the place that houses the repressed. The fearful, the hurtful.

Jacques Rancière (2005) The aesthetic unconscious Editorial From the Publishing Shelf, Argentina

Carl Gustav Jung (1997) Archetypes and Collective Unconscious Paidos, Spain

Hauser, A. (1968) Introduction to art history. Guadarrama.