Object of Symbolic Function also known as: Scatalogical Object Functioning Symbolically-Gala's Shoe / Objet

Surréaliste à fonctionnement symbolique (Soulier de Gala)

1931 lost; reconstructed 1973

Assemblage of objects

19 x 11 x 15 inches

Reconstructed edition published in 1973 by Max Clarac-Sérou, Galerie du Dragon

Edition: 8/8 from the numbered edition of eight, apart from the four artist's proofs;

William Jeffett

Human fetishism... listens with an entirely different ear to the recital of our expeditions. It must believe thoroughly that it really has happened. To satisfy this desire for perpetual verification, I recently proposed to fabricate, in so far as possible, certain objects which are approached only in dreams and which seem no more useful than enjoyable... I would like to put into circulation certain objects of this kind, which appear eminently problematical and intriguing. — André Breton, 1924-1925i

Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone (ca. 1936-1938) and his Venus de Milo with Drawers (original plaster

1936, Art Institute of Chicago; edition 1964) have become two of the most iconic Surrealist images. Along with a select group of equally enigmatic objects — Object of Symbolic Function (1931 lost version; Reconstructed

1973), Retrospecitive Bust of a Woman (1933; Museum of Modern Art) and Surrealist Object (1936, Museo

Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía) — these works represent Dalí’s most provocative contributions to

Surrealism and indeed to the broader field of sculpture.

At stake, at least in Dalí’s mind, was the notion that the external arena of so-called "reality" was to be discredited and dismantled in favor of another internal and mental reality (the "REAL"). From the mental REAL

a new category of objects would be born which would awaken a dormant desire. Desire, the motivating force of the REAL, was conceived by an erotic energy originating in human sexuality.

Dalí’s considerable contribution to was based on two theoretical innovations: the "Paranoiac-

Critical Method" and the Surrealist Object, also known as the Object of Symbolic Function. The first proclaimed the supremacy of thought and the rejection of banal constructions of reality. It was expressed primarily in through the double image. The second sought to make concrete (REAL), objects born of the human imagination. These often departed from familiar objects, which were joined to other objects in ostensibly irrational relations, in order to rob them of their pragmatic, utilitarian function. Objects were claimed as the terrain of pure thought. Dalí’s two theories were interdependent, as he explained in his 1936 essay

"Honneur à l’objet!" ["Honor to the Object!"], "The Surrealist Object claims, and will know how to impose, its paranoiac-critical hegemony."ii

Dalí had rehearsed well his theoretical arguments. As early as 1927 he had written, "To know how to look at an object... is to see it in its greatest reality."iii The process of looking, dissociated from our distorting intentions by the new mechanisms of photography and cinema produced a new objective form of unconscious vision. By the spring of 1929, in anticipation of his imminent trip to Paris, Dalí proclaimed:

Alongside the Surrealist Objects already created and defined, Breton has proposed the constructing

of new objects that equally meet the needs of human fetishism, assuming a particular lyricism that

appears to be in relation to the lyricism of the Surrealist Object that the Surrealist text is to the

dream text.

These new objects, which could be considered dream objects, satisfy, as Breton says, our perpetual

desire for verification; he adds that, to the extent that it is possible, there should be constructed

some objects that one can encounter only in dreams, and that appear to have little justification when

considered in terms of their usefulness or in relation to pleasure.iv

Thus the Surrealist Object was identified with the "Dream Object." While the fabrication of such objects had first been suggested by Breton in his 1924 "Introduction au discours sur la peu de la réalité" ["Introduction to the

Discourse on the Paucity of Reality"], it was Dalí who would make the most brilliant contribution to this form of

Surrealist practice.

The Surrealist Object was one of the major projects of visual Surrealism during the 1930s, a category of activity codified in 1931 in the movement’s official organ, Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution [Surrealism at the Service of the Revolution]. Dalí first ventured into this terrain with the production of his Object of

Symbolic Function (1931), which included the unorthodox materials of a woman’s high-heeled shoe, a glass of

'warm' milk, a sugar cube suspended on a thread, a woman’s pubic hair, a turd, a wooden spoon, an erotic photograph and other small representations of a women’s shoe. The overall effect was fetishistic, in Sigmund

Freud’s sense of "displacement," and specifically evocative of obsessive foot fetishes. As Dalí described it,

A woman's shoe, inside of which a glass of warm milk has been placed, in the center of a soft paste

in the color of excrement.

The mechanism consists of the dipping in the milk of a sugar lump, on which there is a drawing of a

shoe, so that the dissolving of the sugar and consequently of the image of the shoe, may be

observed. Several accessories (pubic hairs glued to a sugar lump, an erotic little photograph)

complete the object, which is accompanied by a box of spare sugar lumps and a special spoon used

for stirring lead pellets inside the shoe.v

The Surrealist Object was literally an object of thought. As Dalí tells us, it was indebted to ’s

"sculpture," Suspended Ball (1930); the element of movement, or at least the suggestion of movement, was one of its central characteristics. Giacometti’s work was already imbued with the pregnant suggestion of erotic coupling, and his Suspended Ball further invited the viewer to place it in motion by touching it. For Dalí mechanisms in motion allowed for the direct engagement with the viewer and the subversive provocation of hidden desires: "the object itself and the phantasms its functioning could set off always constitute a new and absolutely unknown series of perversions and, as a result, of poetic acts."vi

The first Surrealist Objects reproduced in Surréalisme au service de la Révolution were made not only by artists but by Breton and other literary figures. They were by their nature made of materials intended to produce

a poetic shock, and so they were ephemeral and non-artistic. For this reason, Dalí’s first Object of Surrealist

Function was lost and known only through photographs, though later it was reconstructed.

As the Surrealist Object was, by 1935, one of Surrealism’s principle visual tools, Breton gave it enormous emphasis in his Prague lecture, "Surrealist Situation of the Object." Breton made a distinction between the

Surrealist Object understood as an assemblage ("a type of little object, which is non-sculptural") and the movement’s approach to the object understood as a philosophical category ("its more general philosophical meaning").vii Surrealist poetry, objects and painting were part of a larger project which sought to undermine our understanding of reality and to impose an alternate one according to the functioning of thought.

Surrealism’s understanding of the object represented a demonstrable shift towards pure mental representation: perception and representation would be reconciled. Poems by Eluard, Péret and Dalí, Ernst’s , Dalí’s theory of the Object of Symbolic Function and Breton’s own call for the fabrication of such objects all represented interventions in the REAL. Breton concluded that:

Painting and surrealist constructions have until now permitted... the organization of perception in an

objective manner. These perceptions... present a shocking character, revolutionary in the sense that

they imperiously call, to external reality, that something respond to them. One can foresee that...

this something will be. viii

Surrealism projected the Object into the public arena in 1936 through the Surrealist Exhibition of Objects presented at Galerie Charles Ratton. The group’s "Surrealist objects" were presented alongside an extensive range of non-western artifacts from the Americas and the Pacific. Breton provided a genealogy of the Surrealist object, arguing that Surrealist Objects transformed our understanding of the sensible world.ix

The display of the objects was non-hierarchical and, if the catalogue suggested categories, no single category was given priority. Thus Picasso’s Guitar constructions and Dalí’s Aphrodisiac Jacket were mounted directly on the walls just as were the American and Pacific masks were displayed. And Dalí’s Surrealist Object

(Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía) was laid out in a vitrine alongside found and natural objects. In another vitrine, Duchamp’s Bottle Rack (Porte-bouteille) (1914) and a sculpture by Picasso were placed

alongside mathematical objects; similarly Miró’s Object (circa 1932; Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Oscar

Domínguez’s Arrivée de la belle époque were shown alongside a Katchina Doll.

Although this exhibition lasted only eight days, its importance was recognized by Cahiers d’art, which published a lavishly illustrated special number devoted to "The Object" ("L’Object"). There Breton resumed his philosophical speculations on the "Crisis of the Object" ("Crise de l’objet)." Arguing that the Surrealist Object represented a "desire to objectify," Breton went on to proclaim that "one will discover more in the reality concealed within the entity than in the immediate data surrounding it," so producing "a total revolution of the object"x This revolution, manifest in the various categories of the object (Ready-mades, Found Objects,

Surrealist Objects etc.), was based on the notion that the object revealed a new inner logic of laying beyond the surface of appearance. Anti-metaphysical and materialistic, Breton argued that the hidden real was there to be discovered in the object, only to unmask internal laws of natural structures (e.g. the rocks, fossils and crystals which illustrated the text).xi

Though it was not included in the 1936 Objects exhibition, Dalí had by then conceived the Lobster

Telephone, since it was illustrated in the magazine American Weekly, where a man reaching for a telephone receiver is depicted as shocked when he sees that it is a lobster. The caption reads, "New York Dream — Man

Finds Lobster instead of Phone."xii Though the Lobster Telephone is often dated 1936, it appears unlikely it was produced in its present form until 1938. The American Weekly illustration, however, may have sufficed to suggest the work did indeed exist, as in 1936 Breton wrote,

In New York, Dalí has exhibited a telephone painted red, with a live lobster for a receiver...xiii

The well-known group of ten telephones (six white; four red and black) were commissioned by Dalí’s patron

Edward James, who played a substantial role in their production. These working telephones were made of

Bakelite, with their receivers cast in the form of lobsters; they were intended for use in James’s residence (Wimpole Street), which was transformed into a Surrealist environment. Their realization took some time, as indicated in James’s archive; for this reason, Sharon-Michi Kusunoki locates the dating of their fabrication towards 1938 rather than 1936.xiv

The Lobster Telephone makes its public appearance in the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition held in

Paris at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts (it was listed as cat. 49 with the title Aphrodisiac Telephone [Téléphone

Aphrodisiaque]). Further, the accompanying Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme (Abridged Dictionary of

Surrealism), compiled by Breton and Eluard, included Dalí's text "Aphrodisiac Telephone" (Téléphone aphrodisiaque), "The telephone handset will be replaced by lobsters, whose advanced state will be made visible by phosphorescent plates, true truffle fly-traps."xv This entry was illustrated by an image of flies swarming around a telephone with a lobster receiver. The entry devoted to "Salvador Dalí" indicates his activity in the movement since 1929 and is accompanied by a photo of Harpo Marx playing a harp on which the strings have been replaced by barbed wire, itself a form of Surrealist Object.xvi The entry on "Object" ("Objet") provided a résumé of the categories already laid out in the texts from 1931 and 1936, giving credit to Dalí for the 1931

Object of Symbolic Function.xvii

Kusunoki further suggests that the Lobster Telephone functioned in part as a three-dimensional word play, because James recalled that in June 1936 Dalí and some other friends were at James’s Wimpole Street apartment, sitting on a bed and eating lobsters, throwing aside the shells, when one landed by chance on a telephone.

The British Surrealist Conroy Maddox (1912-2005) suggests similarly that Dalí’s Venus de Milo with

Drawers (1936 for the plaster in the Art Institute of Chicago) derived from a cross-linguistic, confusion originating in the English expression "Chest of Drawers" (meaning commode in French), which Dalí took in the anatomical sense of the word, so he placed drawers in the figure’s chest.xviii Dalí likely made the 1936 plaster with the technical assistance of his friend , and is said to have exhibited it twice privately during the 1930s,xix but the bronze edition, which is painted white, was not cast until 1964, the same year it was first exhibited at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris.xx

Another possible poetic source for the telephone image (if not that of the lobster) may lay in Breton’s own

"Discourse on the Paucity of Reality" ("Introduction au Discours sur le peu de la réalité"), the text which had first proposed the fabrication of dream objects:

They talk about wireless telegraphy, wireless telephony, wireless imagination. This is an easy

induction, but in my opinion, permissible. Invention, human discovery, that faculty we have

possessed so meagrely throughout the ages; to have that which no one before us dreamed of — all

this is likely to throw us into an immense perplexity.xxi

The success of the Lobster Telephone was due to Dalí’s understanding that the aim of the Surrealist Object was to dislocate one’s false sense of rational certainty and thrust the viewer into the disorientating realm of enigmatic doubt. The subversive goal of discrediting reality, reaching its paramount example in Dalí’s deliberately bizarre objects, captured an essential element of the revolutionary Surrealist project.

i André Breton, ‘Introduction au discours sur le peu de la réalité’ in Œuvres complètes, vol. II (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 277. Translated in Franklin Rosemont (ed.), André Breton: What is Surrealism? Selected Writings (Monad Press, 1978), 26. ii Salvador Dalí, ‘Honneur á l’objet!’, Cahiers d’art (Paris), vol. 11, no. 1-2, 1936, p. 56. Translated in Haim Finkelstein (ed.), The Collective Writings of Salvador Dalí (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 310. iii Salvador Dalí, ‘Els meus quadros del Saló de Tardor’, addition to L’Amic de les Arts (Sitges), vol. II, no. 19, October 1927. Translated in Haim Finkelstein, The Collective Writings of Salvador Dalí, 52. iv Salvador Dalí, ‘Revista de tendències anti-artistique’, L’Amic del les arts (Sitges), vol. 4, no. 31, 31 March 1929, p. 10. Translated in Haim Finkelstein, The Collective Writings of Salvador Dalí, 103. v Salvador Dalí, "Objets surréalistes," Surréalisme au service de la Révolution (Paris), no. 3, 1931, 17 translated in Haim Finkelstein, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, 234. vi Ibid., p. 16. Translated in Haim Finkelstein, The Collective Writings of Salvador Dalí, 232. vii André Breton, "Situation surréalist de l’objet; Situation de l’objet surréaliste, Conférence pronncée le 29 mars 1935 à Prague" in Œuvres compètes, vol. II, 475. My translation. viii André Breton, "Situation surréalist de l’objet; Situation de l’objet surréaliste, Conférence pronncée le 29 mars 1935 à Prague" in Œuvres compètes, vol. II, 495-496. ix André Breton, ‘Objets surréalistes’, La Semaine de Paris (Paris) 22 May 1936; in André Breton, Œuvres complètes, vol. II, 1199. x André Breton, ‘Crise de l’objet’, Cahiers d’art (Paris), vol. 11, no. 1-2, 1936, 22 & 24. "volonté d’objectification"; "l’on trouvera plus dans le réel caché que dans le donné immédiat"; "une révolution totale de l’objet." For the English see "Crisis of the Object" in trans. Simon Watson Taylor (trans), André Breton, Surrealism and Painting (London: Macdonald, 1972), 277 & 280. xi André Breton, ‘Crise de l’objet’, Cahiers d’art, 24. ‘La perturbation et le déformation sont ici recherchées pour elles-mêmes, étant admis toutefois qu’on ne peut attendre d’elles que la rectification continue et vivante de la loi’ Trans. in André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 280. "In all of these cases, pertubation and distortion are sought for their own sake, while recognizing hat one should not expect more from these effects than a continuous and vigorous rectification of the law." xii Salvador Dalí, "New York as Seen by the Super-Realist Artist M. Dalí," American Weekly (New York), 17 March 1935. xiii André Breton, "Le cas Dalí" [1936], Le Surréalisme et la peinture (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 135. "Dalí a exposé à New York un téléphone peint en rouge dont le récepteur était formé par un homard vivant..." For English see "The Dalí Case" in André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 135. xiv Sharon-Michi Kusunoki, "Breaking Canon; Edward James: His Life and Work," in Nicola Coleby (ed.), A Surreal Life: Edward James (Brighton: The Royal Pavilion in association with Philip Wilson Publishers, 1998), p. 27 and "Lobster Telephone, 1938" in Dawn Ades, Michael Taylor and Montse Aguer (eds.), Dalí (New York & Philadelphia: Rizzoli in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2004), 286-288. Note that Tate Modern dates their version of the Lobster Telephone 1936. xiv André Breton & Paul Eluard (eds.), Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme (Paris: Galerie des Beaux-Arts, 1938), 27. "Les appareils téléphoniques seront replacés par des homards, dont l’état avancé sera rendu visible par des plaques phosphorescentes, véritables attrape-mouches truffières." My translation. xv André Breton & Paul Eluard, Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, 9. xvi André Breton & Paul Eluard, Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, 18-19. xvii Conroy Maddox, Salvador Dalí 1904-1989 (Cologne: Tashen, [1979], 1990), 78. xviii June 19, 1936 and February 2, 1939. See Robert Descharnes in D'Après l'antique (Paris: Louvre, 2000), 463. xix Le Surréalisme: sources, histoires, affinities (Paris: Galerie Charpentier, 1964). The exhibition was organized by Patrick Waldberg and opposed by Breton who viewed it as presenting a closed perspective on Surrealism. xx André Breton, "Introduction au discours sur le peu de la réalite" in Œuvres complètes, vol. II, 265. Translated as "Discourse on the Paucity of Reality" in Franklin Rosemont, André Breton: What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, 17. "Télégraphie sans fil, téléphonie sans fil, imagination sans fil, a-t-on dit. L’induction est facile mais selon moi elle est permise, aussi. L’invention, la découverte humaine, cette faculté qui, dans le temps, nous est si parcimonieusement accordée de connaître, de posséder ce dont on ne se faisait aucune idée avant nous, est fait pour nous jeter dans une immense perplexité."