Chapter 46
Thwarted by a sponsor who would not allow him to explode live giraffes in his pavilion at the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair, Salvador Dali still managed to create a prototype of art installations the avant-garde has been milking ever since. Called “The Dream of Venus,” the pink-and-white freestanding structure’s exterior sported supersized images of da Vinci’s Saint John the Baptist and Botticelli’s Venus, whose wavy locks competed with women in bathing suits waving bamboo fishing rods to lure guests in. Cadaver-white hands and other appendages shot out of the exterior (imagine a rectangular candle, liquefying in the sun) like a cross between a spiny albino fish and zombies crawling out of a bleached Earth.
Beneath the ex-sanguinated limbs and lusty models stood a ticket kiosk that resembled a severed fish head: Inside its eye cavities sat ticket-takers selling admissions to the show within, a trip making LSD seem no more disorientating than a handful of M&Ms.
Inspired by the popularity of diving shows, where women, often clad in mermaid-like garb, plummeted into tanks of water, Dali would concede little to its backers who wanted a show more burlesque than bizarre. His muse a cash register, the surrealist was as commercially astute and successful as Andy Warhol in decades to come. His waxed tadpole of a moustache was as recognizable then as Warhol’s shock of pallor-less hair would be years later.
In a world where the Motion Picture Production Code (i.e., the Hays Code) was in full censorious effect for movies and where art for many Americans might start and stop with “Whistler’s Mother,” Dali strode the creative world like a paisley colossus, celebrated for lecturing while dressed in a wetsuit, for painting the melting watches in “The Persistence of Memory,” and for collaborating with filmmaker Luis Bunuel on 1929’s silent movie “Un Chien Andalou,” whose vile opening scene is a razor gliding across a human eyeball.
Still, Dali’s effort might have seemed doomed from the start, especially when stripper extraordinaire Gypsy Rose Lee declined to headline his marine-themed exhibit. Threatening to walk out on his backers when they occasionally subverted his vision—such as forbidding him from replacing the head on a likeness of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” with a fish’s face—Dali stumbled through a roll call of possible names for his Freudian fest that changed as often as his chimerical blueprint for the pavilion. One day it would be “Dali’s Fish and Flesh and Fowl,” and the next day “Dalinian Dearies,” or “See! Sea! Si! Dali!” before settling on its final nomenclature, “The Dream of Venus.” With no real master plan to speak of, the exhibit moved forward with the normality of a reverie.
After forking over a quarter to the concessioners inside the fish-head ticket booth, visitors entered by walking under two pillars shaped like two female legs in garters and stockings and high-heeled shoes.
In a huge chamber, a live model of a topless Venus sprawled on a thirty-six-foot-long bed under a canopy of rubber telephones and umbrellas. A madman’s junkyard of objects was scattered about the space: a gramophone’s arm fashioned like a human hand, and the record on it shaped like a female breast; a chest with legs made of chocolate, and an “aphrodisiac vampire” covered in whiskey glasses and topped by a leopard’s head. (Dali’s original but abandoned idea for the nosferatu’s coat was to cover it in vials filled with absinthe, inside which squirming worm larvae hatched.)
Eric Schaal, photographer Dali and Gala in the Box Office Queens Museum, from the Jean Farley Levy and Julien Levy Estate, partial gift of Eric Strom
A disembodied voice called out to the fairgoers as addictively as Sirens once did Odysseus: “Enter here men of all kinds and races, victims of reality, you who have the thirst for dreams.” The opiate speech belonged to Ruth Ford, a veteran of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre and film noir notable. “In the fever of love, I lie upon my ardent bed. A bed eternally long, and I dream my burning dreams, without beginning and without end . . . Enter the shell of my house and you will see my dreams.”
Above Venus’s bed was an outsized egg-shaped glass plate through which visitors could see her dream in the nearly naked flesh. Topless mermaids—aka Liquid Ladies—clad in bikinis partially made of lobsters performed four dances in a transparent thirty-by-twenty-foot chamber of water. Inside the aquatic landscape a telephone receiver floated, and a fire somehow burned in a fireplace. The mermaids played a piano shaped like a woman, typed on a floating typewriter, and milked a mummified cow. To break the monotony, they swam languidly against a painted background of Pompeii and caressed a male effigy comprised of table-tennis paddles.
Grandiose and imaginative the pavilion may have been, but it was esoteric and baffling, too, with a figure of Christopher Columbus making an appearance, as well as a taxicab containing a rainstorm inside itself.
Plummeting attendance caused the price of admission to drop to 15 cents. By the second year of the fair, 1940, the backers had had it up to their necks with art. Stripping out much of Dali’s “writhing plaster castle,” the sponsors kept the mermaids but renamed the attraction “20,000 Legs Under the Sea,” instructing the Liquid Ladies, for example, to cavort sexily with rubber octopi for onlookers.
Dalai renounced the pavilion, but the fair did for the artist and surrealism what exhibitions had done for Antoni Gaudi, Moshe Safdie, Buckminster Fuller, et al, delivering them from what was sometimes the furthest perimeter and establishing them firmly in the center of the public’s mind.