It could've been a shoe.

It is worth noting that the 1960s witnessed the so-called "democratisation" of art, as low-culture and high-culture were rendered relative and the distinction between the two became increasingly blurred. It was the birth of postmodernism, as well as the beginning of entrepreneurial art. Pop Art began as a satire on the burgeoning obsession with image, as soup tins worth pennies in the supermarkets were transformed into prints worth thousands. In a studio known as "the factory" Andy Warhol and his assistants churned out those famous prints, which epitomise the repetitive monotony of consumerism. The psychedelic prints of soup cans and bottles of Coca-Cola were ironic. There was no message, no point at all and it was intended as a joke. But it  was a satirical slant on the rampant consumer culture of Western capitalist societies. The prints later increased in value to obscene amounts of dough, and yet they were famously depictions of banal objects - the sort of thing you throw in the trolley in the supermarket. It was soon absorbed by what it was mocking, the burgeoning commercialism.

It was never the aim to undermine the Establishment and melt down consumer capitalism to unleash the creative capacities of the proletariat. Its satiric reflection of passive consumption and pop culture was sold to the same consumers ensnared in fashion trends. Rather the capitalist system had to exit in order for it be mimmicked cynically with a nudge and a wink. It was a part of the burgeoning commercialisation of cultural forms. Pop Art could be seen as conservative in this way, it would inevitably be subsumed into what it was mimmicking as it subverted the traditional standards of fine art. The radical relativisation of all standards leveled the art scene, but only to become the Establishment. Today it's Tracy Emin as well as Gilbert and George who are the conservatives. What about Warhol? He died a millionaire. Before doing so, he decorated his own home with antiques and fine art which he personally picked over the work he delivered to the world. Ultimately the trajectory is nihilistic, again this is something else capitalism has in common with it. As Warhol remarked when asked why he painted Elvis Presley "No, it could've been a shoe."

However, Warhol was not the first to get rich quick in the art world. It isn't particularly shocking to us today, as we now live in a world where the man who had a shark preserved in formaldehyde has amassed an estimated net worth of £235 million. In 2008 Damien Hirst sold an entire show for £111 million, if we want to know where this began we have Salvador Dalí to thank at a fundamental level. In a sense Dalí was the prototype for the postmodern artist now predominant. You know, the crass kind who revel in commercial success. He would sign his name to hundreds of blank pieces of paper sometimes at $100 a pop, which were then used to produce forgeries of his work and in turn undermined the value of his own paintings. It should be noted that all along Dalí was fixated on commercial success and courted it with great luck thanks to his business manager and wife Gala. A lot of the money went to funding an extravagant lifestyle, of multiple homes and multiple lovers. The commercialism in which Dalí indulged as a whore artiste inevitably drew the ire of his fellow surrealists even before Dalí's shameful complicity in Francoism.

 

In the later works we can detect a fundamental shift to the postmodern Dalí after the Second World War where the works increasingly began to degenerate into high kitsch - with only a few glimpses of exception. In these years Dalí was guilty of the reduction of art's value to an instrumental level, whether the end be the stated aim of reaching a higher plain of consciousness or filling his wallet. He never shirked from offending the aestheticism of the Establishment as well as his fellow surrealists. Ironically, he may have given greater ground in his work to the extreme formulation of aestheticism that "What is useful is ugly!" As the work of Duchamp and Picasso were formerly derided as "ugly" before becoming the Establishment, so too has Dalí and the process began in his lifetime.  The accusation that this particular brand of surrealism exemplifies bourgeois decadence is not entirely undeserved. It could be that the work of the surrealist school, in its bid to empty-out the subconscious onto the canvas, has been symptomatic rather than exemplary.

Punk Russia.

 

With Pussy Riot in the news we may read into the origins of this punk band and look to Voina. It seems somehow significant that this movement to shock cultural conservatism out of Russian society. The fall of the Berlin Wall affected a lot of people in a number of ways. Before the fall there was an entire underground scene of avant-garde art, music and literature, the work was defined by its opposition to the Soviet socialism as well as American capitalism. There has to be a new side to take, beyond left and right. It wasn’t just the emergence of democratic institutions, but the birth of a set of political options that were stunted in utero. We’ll get back to this later. Russia actually has a long history of avant-garde art and we should not mistake Pussy Riot for a deviancy of the post-Communist federation. As the Kremlin prefers to frame the Church as an anti-Stalinist institution it conveniently forgets the importance of the avant-garde in Russian history. Not just in the origins of the Soviet Union, but in the escapism from Brezhnevian repression.

By the early 1930s Stalin had solidified his position with the help of his appointed bureaucrats, the New Economic Policy could be abandoned in order to pursue the brutal collectivization of agriculture. It was at this time that Stalin heralded a new era in Russian art and architecture, it would be known as socialist realism. In the early years of the Revolution the aesthetic of Bolshevism became constructivism and, to a lesser extent, futurism. The Soviet artists were organised into Prolekult, at its peak the organisation had over 84,000 members active in studios and factory groups. The revolutionary avant-garde went back to the earlier uprisings against the Tsar in 1905 when they emerged as left-wing Bolsheviks and became enthralled with the idea of inspiring mass-revolts through art. After the long anticipated 1917 Revolution the avant-garde exploded in its activities even though it was never all that popular with the Orthodox Marxists in the ranks of Leninism.

This was not unique to Russia it has to be said as the surrealists climbed into bed with socialists to the extent that Leon Trotsky contributed to Breton's Surrealist Manifestos. In fact, Andre Breton once summed up the simplest surrealist act as "going into the street, revolver in hand, and firing at random into the crowd for as long as one can". Breton was keen to shape the surrealist movement to fit his own tastes, which carried the symptom of scorn for the novel (with a few exceptions). He also had no interest in music whatsoever. He went onto ostracise Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille and Salvador Dalí from the group for a variety of reasons. Dalí is a notable exception, to this pattern of artistic radicalism, in his violent passivity at the rise of Franco in the 1930s. This was while Picasso conveyed the horrifying emergence of Fascist Spain over the corpses of a great number of leftists in his own painting. Naturally a mutual disdain burned between Picasso and Dalí.

The leading figures were either absorbed into socialist realism, died off or found themselves marginalised in later life. The avant-garde would only re-emerge in the 1970s and 80s as a negative opposition to state-socialism and liberal capitalism. This time it offered little in positive vision, only a mockery of what had been for so long. At best the artists reverted to the politics of anarchy, forever leftwards. The underground scene thrived in Leningrad and Moscow. There the youth (including the spawn of prominent bureaucrats and commissars) turned to cultural activities – especially music – to capture and mock the absurdity of the USSR. Politics had precious little to offer for the children of Brezhnev, it was not a means to reorganise society. The youth reached out to American Punk because only change seemed possible outside the political realm. It was a way of retreating from any engagement with the corrupt politics of the state that had no place for them to participate in the first place.

For the poet Eduard Limonov the new music scene embodied everything good about Russian maximalism – the tendency to take things to the extreme. The collision of bland bureaucracy and vapid optimism in Russia under Gorbachev could only be met with a militant anti-establishment fervour. Perhaps at some level this was an attempt to recapture the Russian tradition of nihilism. The hero of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons was Bazarov, an idealistic young radical, a devotee of universal freedom destined for tragedy. The novel reflected the Russian nihilism of the late 19^th Century. This was when nihilism was of a generational rejection of the old traditional and cultural whole. It was better to profess a faith in ‘nothing’ than to buy into the conventions of traditional religion. The nihilists looked for a better understanding of this world as the future hope rather than living for the promise of salvation in the afterlife.

When the poet Eduard Limonov returned to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union he was appalled by the imposition of Western-style capitalism through ‘shock therapy’. It was a disaster and Limonov was convinced that the liberal societies of the West were no better than the old totalitarian model that had collapsed. Capitalism was just more sophisticated in its oppression. He decided to take drastic action and formed a new political party to take back Russian society from the rapacious forces of globalisation. Limonov set out to develop a new kind of politic out of the avant-garde scene that he had come out of it. He set out to take ideas and tendencies from within avant-garde art and music to redefine his oppositional politics. The aim would be to establish an alternative that would break through the bourgeois illusions of Western democracy to show the masses that the elites were greedily eviscerating Russia to feast on the entrails. 

It would be the National Bolshevik Party. It became the embodiment of the resurgent nationalism – through which the masses could be harnessed as a force – that has sought to quash the Russian process of modernisation since the 1990s. During the bombardment of Sarajevo, Limonov was present in solidarity with his Slavic brethren and there he was with Radovan Karadžić and was filmed taking a turn firing into the streets below them with a rifle. In the meantime, the drink-sodden Yeltsin and the gang of free-marketeers around him practically destroyed Russia only to give way for the rise of Putin. Some of the musicians from the Russian Punk even scene joined the National Bolshevik Party where they would aestheticise the political. As Walter Benjamin would remind us, with great wisdom, behind every Fascism you can find a failed revolution. The disillusionment that had carved out a comforting oppositional aesthetics to the Commissars found no way to define itself after the collapse of really existing socialism.


Once it was the Punk movement of New York City that had offered escapism to the Russian youth, only for it to boil over into a neo-fascism with Limonov's leap from a radical poet in exile to a full-blown reactionary. He had arrived in 1974 just in time to see the Punk scene kick-off in New York. Limonov became close to the likes of Richard Hell, Patti Smith and the Ramones. Limonov took the Punk vision fused it with the pervasive disillusionment of Soviet society. Now Pussy Riot blends Punk with a feminist politic in the post-Soviet Russia where the Kremlin seeks its authority in religiosity and jingoism. It still smacks of the comfortable resistance of artists in the 1970s and 80s. The anarchic form and subversion of any traditional standards without necessarily any positive vision to take the place of the dysfunctional institutions of really existing democracy in Russia. Nevertheless, it is clear that Pussy Riot embodies a valuable tendency in Russian music and art that should not be suppressed as it was under the Stalinists.

The Marriage of Reason and Nightmare.

The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th Century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century - sex and paranoia.

Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves. Just as the past, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age, so in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present. We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.

In addition, I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction - conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. Freud's classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of the dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality.

Given these transformations, what is the main task facing the writer? Can he, any longer, make use of the techniques and perspectives of the traditional 19th century novel, with its linear narrative, its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting their domains within an ample time and space? Is his subject matter the sources of character and personality sunk deep in the past, the unhurried inspection of roots, the examination of the most subtle nuances of social behaviour and personal relationships? Has the writer still the moral authority to invent a self-sufficient and self-enclosed world, to preside over his characters like an examiner, knowing all the questions in advance? Can he leave out anything he prefers not to understand, including his own motives, prejudices and psychopathology?

I feel myself that the writer's role, his authority and licence to act, have changed radically. I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts.

Crash is such a book, an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation, a kit of desperate measures only for use in an extreme crisis. Crash, of course, is not concerned with an imaginary disaster, however imminent, but with a pandemic cataclysm that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures millions. Do we see, in the car crash, a sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology? Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our own psychopathologies? Is this harnessing of our innate perversity conceivably of benefit to us? Is there some deviant logic unfolding more powerful than that provided by reason?

Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man's life in today's society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way. Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.

JG Ballard on Crash, 1995

Dalí's Black Feathers.

Premonition of the Civil War (1936)

"If the twentieth century was the Freudian century, so that even its worst nightmares were read as (sado-masochistic) vicissitudes of the libido, will the twenty-first be the century of the post-traumatic disengaged subject, whose first emblematic figure, that of the Muselmann, is multiplying in the guise of refugees, terror victims, survivors of natural disasters or of family violence?" - Slavoj Žižek

Given the Surrealist circle that Salvador Dalí moved in as an artist it was inevitable that he associated with leftist artists such as Andre Breton, but he was an aberration of a radical art movement as he supported the Fascist regime of Francisco Franco once he returned to Spain after the war. So it was ironic when the Spanish establishment sought to mobilise international praise for Salvador Dalí on the centenary of his birth in 2004. The chosen portrayal of the surrealist was as a "rebel" and an "anti-establishmentarian" who stood up against the tide of art. But this is a misleading portrait of a man who sat on the fence for far too long. It was Picasso who painted Guernica, to some the quintessential painting of the fight against Franco, in opposition to Fascism and in support of the democratic forces in Spain. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War it was Dalí who refused to take a side and avoided the fighting. When Breton insinuated Dalí was a National Socialist he responded "I am Hitlerian neither in fact nor intention." In the end he found himself excommunicated from the Surrealist group.


Yet we should remember that the inaction of Salvador Dalí was violent in nature and proved conservative when Franco came out on top, he then proceeded to applaud the brutal repression that followed and congratulated the dictator for "clearing Spain of destructive forces". Dalí went on to send telegrams of praise to Franco as he signed the death warrants of political prisoners. Just before his death Francisco Franco had four more political prisoners executed and Dalí sent him a telegram. He later came out as an admirer of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange Espanola. Dalí sought to present himself as a dedicated servant of the Spanish Church, which was still celebrating Queen Isabella for expelling the Jews from Spain and stood behind Hitler in support of the Holocaust every step of the way. Dalí denounced his old friend Luis Buñuel as a Communist and an atheist. He pulled all the strings he could in America to have Buñuel sacked from the Museum of Modern Art, where Buñuel had tried to start a fresh after fleeing from Fascist Iberia.

Eventually Dalí had to flee Portlligat when the locals came for him. As the regime crumbled in the aftermath of Franco's death only then did Dalí emerged as an ardent defender of the monarchy. The only other despot to provoke a telegram from Dalí was Nicolae Ceaușescu, who was busily crafting a Kim Il-Sung personality cult around himself and had gone as far as to start carrying a sceptre around with him. The telegram Dalí sent to the Conducător, in which he showers Ceaușescu with praise, was a work of satire. Nevertheless, it was published in the Scînteia as a serious endorsement of the Communist regime. Post-modern irony had yet to penetrate really existing socialism. Before the collapse of Fascism in Spain he had made a point, especially in his visits to the US, to pray for the health of Franco. Dalí never strayed away from publicly announcing his unconditional support for the regime at press conferences and he only "dissented" from the status quo to praise Lorca. We might read deep into the lifelong adoration he had for Lorca as an expression of a yearning to dissent and really all of his support for Fascism were just forms of post-modern irony. I myself find this reading a bit too generous.

The Fascist regime in Spain became a blockage which had festered corruption on a huge scale and would inevitably have to be circumvented by the forces of capital. The marketplace tends towards relativism, plurality and individualism in spite of the fact that it requires a degree of traditionalism, bigotry and cohesion in order to maintain itself. So it undermines the very values which insulate it from revolution, this is true whether it is the moralisms of the Church, the conspiracy theories of nationalists or the syndicalist Third Position. When the socialist acts, the Fascist reacts and in a perverse sense Fascism was never violent enough to obliterate capitalism totally. Instead the promise of Fascism is an alternative modernity in which the class struggle is nonexistent rather society is unified through nationalism against the forces which are a threat to its' greatness. It opted to bring "super-capitalism" from bringing down the nation, in a similar way to social democracy it aimed to buy-out the revolution. 

Face of War (1940)

It is clear where Dalí stood, a bourgeois pig wallowing in the sheer decadence of it all. He sold himself to fuel a life of sexual and aesthetic excess, pushing the boundaries of taste further and further. All the while he claimed to be a "good Catholic" and posed as a "loyal citizen" to the state. Dalí could have been so preoccupied with fantasy and art that he found no need to take radicalism beyond the canvas to the streets of Barcelona. The prospect of anarchy was a terrifying one and order was necessary for aesthetic contemplation let alone creation. Dalinian surrealism was constrained to the tabula rasa of the canvas where anything could be expressed freely whilst it was enclosed by an oppressive framework of the state. To accept this we would have to swallow the line that Dalí sustained himself as a whore artiste by fawning over Franco at every turn. If that is the case then Dalí is no different than a Muslim who accepts all the liberal values of Western civilisation. A non-invasive Muslim that we can easily fit into our system of rights and liberties, someone who can be looked at in the same light as a middle-class white person with politically correct thoughts.

 

What's wrong with this suggestion? If it were simply a case of that then Dalí would have been no less conservative had he lived in the US. The difference is that he would be fawning to a liberal democracy and it's constitution of rights and liberties. It was not the case that Dalí had no other means of survival as Fascism emerged in Europe and reigned on the Iberian Peninsula for 30 more years than Hitler and Mussolini governed. He did not have to just take the sides of the people who murdered Frederico Garcia Lorca, a man Dalí loved. It was not impossible to live as an exile in opposition to the most homicidal ideology in history. The way in which ideology functions is systematic, it is material rather than immaterial and it remains hegemonic if it unchallenged. This is the way that Salvador Dalí lived in Spain as a fixture of the ruling ideology, it is not necessarily that he was a Fascist but it is the case that the inaction he chose was violent in it's complicity with Franco. He wasn't a non-invasive radical, he was complacent and increasingly so as the years past.

Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937)

It was about money and when it wasn't about that it was about fucking. Even as it all came crashing down Salvador Dalí stood by tradition, specifically the monarchy, and just posed as another kind of conservative. It was the opposite position that he took in the art world where he was "anti-establishment" to the point of sabotaging the supply and demand logic behind the value of his paintings, he  would sign thousands of blank sheets of paper at $100 a pop to saturate the market with forgeries. It was an unabashed act of avarice and exhibitionism as well as a befitting expression of a particular aspect of surrealism. Of course I'm referring to the emphasis on paranoia, we can't even be sure we own a genuine painting by the man or even a copy of such a piece. We might even be tempted to write-off his appearances in adverts for chocolate as "ironic" but we should really just accept that he was a whore artiste of stupendous proportions for a very long time. It is the same lack of scruples which Dalí had demonstrated in his inaction around the Spanish Civil War and the aftermath. Perhaps Orwell was right to say of him "One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being." 

The Divine Anus of Salvador Dalí.

The Great Masturbator (1929)

 

"[Lorca] was homosexual, as everyone knows, and madly in love with me. He tried to screw me twice. I was extremely annoyed, because I wasn’t homosexual, and I wasn’t interested in giving in. Besides, it hurts. So nothing came of it. But I felt awfully flattered vis-à-vis the prestige. Deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dalí's asshole. He eventually bagged a young girl, and she replaced me in the sacrifice. Failing to get me to put my ass at his disposal, he swore that the girl’s sacrifice was matched by his own: it was the first time he had ever slept with a woman." - Salvador Dalí

When beholding the Great Masturbator which Dalí painted in 1929 around the time he met Gala it is worth noting that as a young man he flicked through his father's book of explicit photos of the "advanced effects" of untreated venereal diseases. The photos of grotesquely damaged diseased genitalia fascinated and horrified young Salvador, and he continued to associate sex with putrefaction and decay into his adulthood. He later pinned his "impotence" on his father, as well as his mother, and naturally Dalí went on to fantasise of sodomising his dying father. This also might explain the direct kind of gynophobia Dalí later developed. It has been suggested that he was molested by a teacher who used to have Dalí sit on his lap while he stroked him. That would explain the artist’s lifelong hatred of being touched. The subject of twelve of his early paintings was Dalí's sister Ana Maria, a number of which tellingly depict her from the rear, which has led some to conclude that the relationship between them may have been incestuous. The sex life of Salvador Dalí was not a common one to say the least.

Cabaret Scene (1922)

When he was 18 Salvador Dalí met Luis Buñuel and Frederico Garcia Lorca, who was 23 at the time, both of them weaved odes to one another into their work. Dalí and Buñuel lived to mourn the death of Lorca at the hands of Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, later Dalí betrayed Buñuel. For Dalí the obsession with Lorca would last a life time. At 25 Dalí was still a virgin (in heterosexual terms) when he met Gala and she was a sexually adventurous 35 year-old looking for a way out of a relationship. Gala had been married to Paul Éluard, it was a marriage characterised by free love as a rule and possessiveness as taboo. The old conventions and repressive traditions were washed away for this lot. Group sex was high up on the menu so Gala and Paul would often share their bed with Max Ernst. When Lorca got the news of Dalí's new found love he said "It’s impossible! He can only get an erection when someone sticks a finger in his ass." The two were together for 53 years, Gala filled the roles of a muse, a business manager and a lover. 

The relationship between them was hardly a faithful monogamy that lasted over half a century, throughout there were staged orgies and plenty of "gifts" for youthful lovers. Gala kept a castle for a summer retreat to which Dalí could only visit if invited by letter and there in the piano room Jeff Fenholt would play music in the middle of the night. The rockstar was in his twenties at the time and Gala was in her seventies, the "gifts" to him included several paintings and a million-dollar home. Fenholt is now one of those vultures which we might describe as right-wing televangelists. For $6,000 Dalí had bought a castle in Púbol in '69 that would serve as a fuck-nest rather than a love-nest. There was plenty of drama at the house of Salvador Dalí, in 1980 Gala attempted to poison him with a dangerous cocktail of medicine that badly damaged his nerve system. Some believe it was an attempt to kill him. When Gala died in 1982 Salvador first attempted to induce suspended animation by deliberately depriving himself of fluids, it was possibly the first of two suicide attempts. Dalí had to be rescued from a blazing fire that he started in his bedroom at the castle.

Portrait of Paul Éluard (1929)

Mind you Dalí had his own indulgences, candaulism for one. He developed a penchant for persuading youths to drop their trousers and masturbate as he watched. He hoarded thousands of photos with many different lads. There has been a long speculation over the exact sexuality of the exhibitionist painter. We might be able to trace the misogynistic, or more accurately gynophobic, tendencies of Dalinian art down to Dalí's fear of a particular part of the female anatomy. To put it more bluntly, Salvador Dalí was a self-professed worshiper of the female posterior. The extent of this obsession drew the concern of his fellow Surrealists, he denied he was coprophagic one minute and in the next instance would state "true love would be to eat one’s partner’s excrement." Perhaps we should keep in mind that the Catalonians are a very scatological people, for it is custom before eating to exclaim "Eat well, shit hard." The specific preference he had was for hermaphrodites, which he never encountered and only ever fantasised about. Not masculine or feminine, androgyne was the order of the day.

The conservative art critic Brian Sewell was led into an olive grove where Dalí had constructed a "debris Christ" and talked into posing for a round of photos. Sewell ended up lying down in the fetal position, trouser-less, in the armpit of the "debris Christ" and masturbating for Dalí who fumbled in his own trousers as he took photos. The photographs he hoarded along with dildos and his most sordid drawings. All the while Gala sat in a giant model egg shell in another part of the garden. It doesn't end there. Rumour has it that Salvador Dalí financed the sex-change operation for the man who is now known as Amanda Lear. After he divulged this rumour  Mark Fisher went on to write:

"The Sadean imagination quickly reaches its limits when confronted with the limited number of orifices the organism has available for penetration. But the Masochist - and Newton is in this respect, as in so many others, a Masochist through and through, as is Ballard - distributes libido across the whole scene. The erotic is to be located in all the components of the machine, whether liveware - the soft pressure of flesh - or dead animal pelt - the fur coat - or technical. Masochism is cyberotics, precisely because it recognizes no distinction between the animate and inanimate. After all, when you run your fingers through your beloved's hair, you are caressing something dead."

Originally the art served as a vent for the eccentricities, fetishes and obsessions that lurked beneath the surface of a shy Catalonian boy. But as he crafted a persona through which he could express these same things with almost the same level of impunity, then the standard of his art went into a steep decline in his later years. The sexual ambiguity, explicit paraphilia and vivid androgyny found so exuberant in Dalinian artwork in tones which drew the approval of Sigmund Freud. These were supposedly liberated from the subconscious and onto the canvas through his paranoiac-critical method. The 20th Century leitmotifs of sex and paranoia are conjoined twins in Dalí's work where we find he anticipated the psychic crises out of which came our paradise and in which lurks uncertain jouissance for the living to discover. We find some of the worst nightmares of the 20th Century conjured up by the more sinister works he churned out, while the juxtaposition with sex introduces a sadomasochistic element into the situations portrayed. That in itself carries a hidden truth of the many horrors of the 20th Century, the functions and dysfunctions of the libido.