The Persistence of Memory
The Persistence of Memory © Salvador Dali (1931)
Best Interpretation: “What the beginning, end or warp of time represents and means, is beyond me. In dreams, we go to a place, which runs on a different time clock. In this dreamland, time is not linear. The past, present and future are all one.”- Cathy Lo
Issue Jan 2007
Surrealism
14 Responses to “The Persistence of Memory”
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I think this guy put some little coloured papers under his tongue!
I always imagined that Dali wanted to stop time, capture a memory. A pleasant snapshot of a moment in his life, to never forget it and to be able to relive it. When I thought more into the title of the piece, it leads me to think something different, “persistence of memory”, such as waiting on something to the point of melting. An idea, a memory we want to keep alive and in present time, but it slowly fades as time continues to move forward. That even when we persist on keeping something as is, life continues to evolve and change. Time a variable that we cannot control.
Dali’s duality of hating and loving ants is quite interesting. He had an aversion to ants, yet uses them to form a decorative pattern over a watch. If you dislike something this much, why add it into a painting? Was it, his therapeutic way of accepting a fear? Did he have reoccurring nightmares with ants—reflecting a point-in-time that was persistent in his memory?
We have draped time like sweaters on boulders, on sand, we have hung
time’s empty clothes on a tree branch and believed in hours that could be shed that way, like sweaters or skins, in minutes pounded-out or melted-down, in what passes for well-lived instead of worn-out. We should fingerprint the afternoon, leave our own spiral signatures on the clockface, our hides.
What the beginning, end or warp of time represents and means, is beyond me. In dreams, we go to a place, which runs on a different time clock. In this dreamland, time is not linear. The past, present and future are all one.
Dali is cool.
Memories surpass every limitation time presents to us in the real world…they persist till time dries out …for eternity!
Time is out of reach in our dreams, we are floating in our own dimension. We are lost and helpless.
Maybe he wanted to say that time can make us suffer…
To me it it represents a point in life where time has died (the ants feeding on the stopwatch, the fly on the face of the drooping clock, the dead branch on the stone). Also the darkness that covers the foreground appears to give off a sense of ending. However, looking toward the water, some light appears at the water’s edge, and grows brighter as one looks further toward the sunlight. In the sunlight, even the grass is still green on the hill. It is almost spiritual—the darkness is past and dead. The future is through the living water.
This pictures depicts how futile his attempts is to remember his past, as it seems to melt with time (symbolised with the melting clocks). The landscape is also similar to the way he painted the Island of the Dead–the face appears in six other paintings which seem to represent his mother. He is trying to remember her, but can’t.
Its portraying how time is such a precious thing that is slowly being wasted.
In response to Adriana… The ants on the only clock isn’t yet melted, it represents death.
Here we see Dali’s home in the distant golden cliffs that represent the coast of Catalonia. As opposed to this realistic element, the rest of the image is from another reality. This “dreamlike” quality is typical of surrealism. The softness and hardness of things being reversed is often used by artists of this genre and seen in the melting clocks. The fleshy creature in the painting’s center could be a bizarre animal, but in it we see the artist’s self portrait. Ants, a repeated element in Dali’s paintings, are representative of decay and are meant to reflect that time has no meaning–the central message of this painting. So time has no meaning, yet memory persists.
The painting is influenced by Dali’s realisation of the theory of relativity laid out by Einstein in the paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” which identified that time is not fixed in space but is in fact relative to the position and motion of the observer. Dali was obsessed with the nature of matter as a result of many of the breakthroughs being made in physics during his life. His work “The Disinitgration of the Persistence of Memory” deconstructed the subject matter of the original Persistence of Memory into the quantum world - Dali composing the picture of representations of the building blocks of matter, a reflection of the realisation that all matter is comprised at the quantum level of particles. Other references to mathematics in his work include depictions of the fractal spirals of the Romanesco Broccolli, Rhino Horns and Swallows Tails, which are the subject matter of his last work “The Swallow’s Tail” - based on the work of the mathmetician Rene Thorn in the field of catastrophe theory