Salvador Dali – The Lugubrious Game (1929)
Dali’s title The Lugubrious Game can be taken as an explicit pointer to the meaning of the painting, which presents castration and the conflicting reactions to it in great detail and with extraordinary expressive power. Without claiming to be able to analyse all the elements in the picture, I wish only to adumbrate the thematic outline. The act of castration is expressed through figure A, the body of which is slit from the belly. The provocation prompted by this bloody act is expressed in B through male dreams of boyish, burlesque recklessness (the male elements are expressed not only in the bird head but also in the red umbrella, the female in the hats). But the deep, age-old reason for the punishment is none other than the disgusting dirt on the underpants of C, a dirt for which there seems no occasion, for this figure finds a new. true masculinity in disgrace and horror. The statue at the left (D) personifies the unusual satisfaction given by the sudden castration, and betrays a need for the none too male poetic extension of the game. The hand covering the statue’s face breaks the rules of Dali’s art, in which people who have lost their heads normally only find them again if they pull horrified faces. We may therefore ask in all seriousness how it must be for those for whom the mind’s windows are opened wide for the first time and who see castrated, poetic pleasure where there is no more than an urgent need to recourse to shame.
Georges Bataille
Этапездетс.
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