iMedia: The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory

Well...

This is quite the painting. I have grown up with a mixed education of art. Some people have told me that each piece of art has only one interpretation of what it really means, and others have told me that art is what it is, and still others have told me that art is what you want it to be. I personally am a fan of the two latter opinions, and I think that my belief in the freedom of art will be expressed in this blog post.

Salvador Dali provides art viewers with a very open ended piece of art in this painting. I will provide a little background on this painting. First of all, he painted this from 1952-1954, as a rerendering of The Persistance of Memory, which is his most famous work. In The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, it is said that Dali repainted this after the atomic bombs were set off to show the contrast between the setting in The Persistence of Memory and in The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, but there are so many other things that I see. The thing most prominent to me, are the clocks; they look like uncooked pizzas that were tossed and allowed to land on the most uneven of surfaces. But they also look like they're melting. I see that as how time goes by, no matter what you do with it, it melts and runs through your fingers and you can never pick it up, or get it back. To me, the sagging clocks illuistrate how the passing of time is inevitable. Another little interesting thing that I noticed is how the tree that is closer to the viewers is broken up into floating logs. When a tree is cut, you can see its age rings and how old it is. I seriously doubt that Dali was going for that effect but I saw it anyway. Also, going back to the melting clocks and melting time metaphor, the melting clocks are touching everything, showing that everything suffers the flow of time, except for the water in the background. I was thinkning about how we can see the effect time has on trees, on the earth, on people, but how we can't see it in water. If you put a glass of water in front of anyone, they couldn't tell you how old the water inside was or how long it had been there. This illuistrates that there are some things in this world that are timeless. In this painting, what stands out to me is how prominent this idea of the enormity time and it's passing, yet not everything is affected by it.

Here's a link to the painting: http://www.artinthepicture.com/paintings/Salvador_Dali/The-Disintegration-of-the-Persistence-of-Memory

(Don't worry, I tried to avoid talking about anything in the discription)