Dali House

If Dali House is looking a little forelorn lately for lack of fresh posts, it’s only because I’m in the painful throes of assembling a biography of Salvador Dali for Google Earth (which will be appearing here as well, naturally). It’s a massive job tracking that loon all over the world over the course of eight decades, but it’s not only fascinating, it’s richly rewarding. I’ve come across an astonishing range of facts and anecdotes of which I wasn’t previously aware, so it’s a story worth retelling in full.

One curious little item popped up while I was assembling information on all the celebratory events held in 2004, the centenary of Dali’s birth: A new Dali museum was proposed for Prague, and the name they had in mind for it was …

drumroll, ready with the cymbals …

Dali House!

BISH!

I’m pleased to report that, as far as the Internet is concerned at least, absolutely nothing came of the $26-million scheme. The proponents changed their mind, probably after discovering this blog, and went with “the Palace of Art” instead. Actually, Czech art dealer Miro Smolak — who with World Trade Center rebuilding architect Daniel Libeskind had formalised the audacious notion — was asked what happened to the original name, and said, “People here seem allergic to it.” I’m not making that up.

By any name, the idea was in vain. The Czech National Gallery thought it was a stupid idea, since Dali had no connection to Prague and little influence on Czech art. Smolak pointed out that the citizens of St Petersburg, Florida, might say the same thing, yet that sunburnt city has the world’s most comprehensive Dali collection.

There’s always concern here in Thailand — as in many other parts of the world, of course — that the charms of bygone lifestyles are being forgotten in the rush to modernise. Mankind can’t go backwards, though, as much as we might wish, so we can take some solace in the re-creations of olden days that often crop up, and hope they don’t lose themselves in mere trite nostalgia.

Not so the exhibition Amazing Thai Miniature Arts, on view in Phuket this week, the “good old days” done proud, albeit tiny. Members of the Bang Nam Chan Miniature Club are not small-minded. They man stalls at the huge and tourist-friendly Chatuchak weekend market in Bangkok and keep busy remembering that big old past in such detail that they can evoke it on a very small scale with admirable skill.

These intricately wrought panoramas include working lights, stirring sound and even movement. Entire communities come to life around floating markets, at temple carnivals and in religious parades. Visitors will be peering at little roving vehicles and a working miniature television through a magnifying glass.

Ah, the good old inefficient days, when a long-distance phone call clear across the entire state of Ohio was such a matter of fascination that up to 120 people were apt to queue up just to listen in.

The 1936-37 Great Lakes Exposition in Cleveland, from which this postcard originated, boasted an Ohio Bell Exhibit at which some lucky geek could win a free long-distance call to anywhere in the state, with lights on a large map showing where your call was going and earpieces set out for 120 other people to listen in in envy and frank disbelief.

The winner was escorted grandly into a phonebooth by a fancy bellhop and, man, what a shock Aunt Harriet way down in Columbus was in for!

If you arrange your beans just right — so that the sunlight is hitting alternating batches from opposite sides, it’s soooo relaxing!

There are Chinese miners buried in coal at the moment at Tang Contemporary Art in Bangkok, in an exhibition by conceptualist Xia Jing called “Weapons of Assassination”. Profiled for The Nation by my colleague Khetsirin Pholdhampalit, the show has some harrowing comments on, among other things, our over-reliance on fossil fuels.

Xia gets some sort of message across vividly, at any rate, with a collection of spears and swords of the sort flung about in king fu films, a decapitated Buddha statue, the aforementioned lost miners and the device pictured below, the legendary Flying Guillotine.

This relic of brutality is attributed to an emperor of the Qing dynasty 2,000 years ago, though there’s some doubt that it ever really existed. Xia Jing has come up with a model based on historical hint and her imagination — a sort of hat with a rotary saw on its rim that fits over the head and, with the yank of a chain, severs the neck.

“It took a man’s life the way a camera takes a man’s image,” Xia said cheerfully.

The photos here are by Thanis Sudto of The Nation.