Abstract
Abstract The practice of Ontography deployed by OOO, clarified and expanded in this essay, produces a highly productive framework for analyzing Salvador Dalí’s ontological project between 1928 and 1935. Through the careful analysis of paintings and original texts from this period, we establish the antecedents for Dalí’s theorization of Surrealist objects in Cubism and Italian Metaphysical art, which we collectively refer to as ‘Ontographic art,’ drawing parallels with the tenets of Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented philosophical programmes. We respond to the question raised by Roger Rothman concerning Object-Oriented Idealism in Dalí’s work by showing pivotal changes to Dalí’s ontological outlook, from Idealism to Realism, across the aforementioned period, positing the Ontographic intentionality of Dalí’s ontological project in Surrealist art.
Highlights
Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) draws on Josè Ortega y Gasset’s 1914 “Essay in Esthetics by Way of a Preface” to establish the privileged position it affords to art.1 Ortega’s essay is discussed variously by Graham Harman and is noted for presaging the ‘tool-analysis’ later posited by Martin Heidegger, forming the cornerstone of OOO.2 In his essay, Ortega explains that “a work of art affords the peculiar pleasure we call esthetic by making it seem that the inwardness of things, their executant reality, is opened to us.”3 Here, Ortega assigns a specific ontological function to art, and one may imagine that artists might have Ontographic ambitions for their works
While the seeds may have been planted back it was a decade later when Dalí, living in Paris, developed the theory of Surrealist objects, and discussing Cubism, wrote about the representational aspirations that we describe as Ontographic: We became accustomed during the Cubist period to seeing things assume the most abstract and intellectual shapes; lutes, pipes, jam-pots and bottles were seeking to take the form of the Kantian ‘thing-in-itself’ supposedly invisible behind the quite recent disturbances in appearance and phenomena
This problematization may be expressed through randomization, as we have seen in the example of LatourLitanies, or through alignments and juxtapositions characterized by intentionality, as in Ryōan-ji and Dalí’s theorizations of Surrealist objects and Surrealist art
Summary
Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) draws on Josè Ortega y Gasset’s 1914 “Essay in Esthetics by Way of a Preface” to establish the privileged position it affords to art. Ortega’s essay is discussed variously by Graham Harman and is noted for presaging the ‘tool-analysis’ later posited by Martin Heidegger, forming the cornerstone of OOO. In his essay, Ortega explains that “a work of art affords the peculiar pleasure we call esthetic by making it seem that the inwardness of things, their executant reality, is opened to us.” Here, Ortega assigns a specific ontological function to art, and one may imagine that artists might have Ontographic ambitions for their works. Ortega explains that “a work of art affords the peculiar pleasure we call esthetic by making it seem that the inwardness of things, their executant reality, is opened to us.” Here, Ortega assigns a specific ontological function to art, and one may imagine that artists might have Ontographic ambitions for their works Such Ontographic intentionality — the desire to produce objects that make it seem that the withdrawn and alluring ‘real object’ is opened to us — can be read directly in Salvador Dalí’s 1930s theorization of Surrealist objects and the objects of Metaphysical art and Cubism that had emerged in the two prior decades. We look at the ontological ideas inherent to the projects of Cubism, Metaphysical art and Surrealism that influenced Dalí’s Ontographic theorizations Having established this background, we chart two paths through Dalí’s work: the first taking Heraclitus’ aphorism, “nature loves to hide” into the paranoiac mechanisms of what Dalí called simulacra; the second, looking to Dalí’s phases of Surrealist objects, where Ontography is communicated through veils, colloids and edibility. These paths cross at the end of The Conquest of the Irrational, when Dalí asserts that behind these simulacra lies the ‘grilled cutlet’: an Ontograph, which we will show to be diagrammatically expressive of the very same preoccupations central to OOO
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