Dali House

Jim Stewart’s fermenting things are a source of fascination and amusement at his California-based website Zymoglyphic Museum. Death is given new life, as in the former whatever-it-was reborn as a “Leatherwing”, which Stewart defines as “a night-flying species related to the Zymoglyphic Mermaid and the Jenny Haniver”.

The former is another of his creations, while the latter has been around since the 16th century — a ray carcass pulled from the sea, twisted up and dried for fun and freak-outs. Wikipedia has Jenny here. Dali House pokes bravely at taxidermy here.

This fascinating amalgam entitled “Monument of St Redon” is one of dozens on view at Exhibits From The Imaginary Museum, where the copyright is assigned to Thomas Ligotti, but the creator seems to be also known as Aeron Alfrey. Aeron has a slew of websites, with his infernal creatures at Monster Brains also of special note.

Dalí’s collaborator Philippe Halsman took a series of photos of Sal’s divine whiskers for the 1954 book “Dalí Moustache”, including the Mona Lisa embellishment above (a real moustache, apparently), which I’ve lined up against Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated “LHOOQ” from 1919.

At least one commentator has chastised Dalí for being far too late with this gag, regardless of whether this was intended as a mere pun or as a renewed declaration of war on old-school painting. But maybe Dalí knew something about Duchamp that still isn’t widely known.

“Parody” is the word most often used in describing “LHOOQ”. Others are hot bum, hot ass, hot arse and hot pants. Commentators do the jitterbug when they “translate” the title. Pronounce the letters aloud in French slowly, quickly, in a slurred fashion, with gusto, and you ought to hear Elle a chaud au cul, common street lingo for “She has a hot arse” or “She is hot in the bum / ass” or “She’s got hot pants” or, Duchamp once dubiously offered, “There is fire down below”, by which someone else presumed “She’s horny”.

Maybe “LHOOQ” is supposed to be read in English as “look”, said another, which is a good title for an artwork, after all. I suggest that, read in English when very, very drunk, the letters suggest, “Shhhe’s sooooo cute.” Any takers?

The most interesting thing about the postcard view of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa that Duchamp randomly defiled in 1919 is that it’s apparently not a randomly defiled postcard of the Mona Lisa. See the rest.

The chiropractic skills of people who make balloon animals becomes acutely evident upon examination of the blow-up puppy. American Jason Freeny has obliged with an autopsy, not just revealing the skeletal structure but the internal organs too, on his astonishingly clever and frequently funny website MoistProduction.com.

Added May 2008: Looks like Jeff Koons may be the guilty party in this dog’s demise. This piece, “Balloon Dog (Blue)”, from 1955, was on the auction block at Sotheby’s “Modern & Contemporary Art” sale in Milan this month and expected to chow down as much as 5,000 euros!

What happens when a painting’s title forgets its place and crawls all over the canvas? Too ambitious to loiter meekly in the little sign card next to the frame, the words decide they’re just as important as the picture, and the next thing you know you have anarchy, graffiti run amok, images and text forming a labour union and subverting the millennia-old conventions governing visual representation.

A detail of Georges Braque’s “Pedestal Table” from 1913.

Pop art made words in paintings commonplace, but its grandfather, cubism, was a sucker for shards of text blowing through the scenery, and its crazy old great-uncle, surrealism, kept scrapbooks of every flitting message scrap, quite sure they would one day all make sense.

Andre Derain’s “Portrait of a Man with a Newspaper” from about 1912.

Pictures and words are natural enough collaborators, of course, both being central to the fine arts, but traditionally they never appeared onstage together. I really don’t want to dig too deeply into this, because there are websites that are quite happy to take you on very long and not particularly interesting strolls along Semiotics Street, returning by way of Semantics Boulevard. In the case of Rene Magritte the University of Washington has an especially heavy-breathing thesis online, but do watch out for words like “intersubstitutability” — you could injure yourself.

Then there’s David Scott’s 2005 essay for Image & Narrative, “the Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative” about the words found in Paul Delvaux’s art, which I found a bit more intesting since Delvaux is a bit more interesting, not least because he was forever painting naked women sleepwalking around train stations. (He also painted a fine “Leda” in 1948, a subject I’ve lately been rattling on about.)

Dali House has also joined the wool-minders pondering the meaning of “Et in Arcadia ego” in Nicolas Poussin’s “The Shepherds of Arcadia”, but that was hardly on the same level as Magritte’s patient experimenting with what exactly it is that words and pictures do, how they do it and how you can pull the rug out from under them.

“This is Not a Pipe”, from 1929, and it’s still not a pipe today. Magritte did a string of variations on this picture over the decades in a bid to expose “the Treachery of Imagery”, ultimately putting the words on a bolted-down plaque so it looked as though the affirmation could never be removed. I think of the image every time I hear David Byrne sing, “This is not my beautiful wife!”

What was Magritte on about? Michel Foucault found a litany of layered possible interpretations in a 1973 book about the pipe picture, one cancelling out another. This picture of a pipe doesn’t make the pipe a pipe, of course, but there’s much more. This painting is not a pipe? Art is not a pipe? If you focus on the words and realise this sentence is not a pipe, suddenly a picture reclaims its dominance over the written word. See the rest.