Scatalogical Object Functioning Symbolically-Gala's Shoe / Objet

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 Surrealism 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 painting 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 Alberto Giacometti’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 collages, 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.

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