|
|
|
Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity 1915 |
Girls Gone Wild Spring Break 2005: Anything Goes |
Aaah, Spring Break in Florida. I took up Mike’s offer to hang out at his folk’s place in St. Pete, a small peninsula at the mouth of Tampa Bay. It’s a resort-town, and, according to its official website, with the “advent of air conditioning” in the 1950’s, also a haven for retirees. Mike’s folks, believe it or not, live in Paradise Island, a small islet in a cove enclosed by Sunshine Beach to the north, Treasure Island to the west, and Sunset Beach to the south. The backyard of their bungalow abruptly ends at the sea, where their boat is docked, and where pelicans and herons would occasionally roost.
Mike is an undergrad working on the same project as me, investigating the tribological properties of polymers at interfaces. A regular surfer dude, he braved the 60-degree waters of the Gulf, while I chickened out on the beach, and stayed a safe distance away reading Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas. What I wanted to do on this trip was to visit the Salvador Dalí Museum which holds one of the most important collections of the painter’s works, covering a broad period from 1917 to 1970. I was also curious what a museum of avant garde art is doing in, of all places, a resort and retirement town of tacky-colored condos and townhouses.
I stayed only for a couple of days in St. Pete, and returned to Gainesville through the “scenic” Greyhound route, passing through Tampa, Orlando, and Ocala, with a bus-load of regular rednecks. I don’t know if being originally from Texas had something to do with it, but I could not get rid of Harry Nilsson’s Everybody’s Talkin from my head.
-
Everybody’s talking at me
I don’t hear a word they’re saying
Only the echoes of my mind
People stopping staring
I can’t see their faces
Only the shadows of their eyes
I’m going where the sun keeps shining
Thru’ the pouring rain
Going where the weather suits my clothes
Banking off of the North East wind
Sailing on a summer breeze
And skipping over the ocean like a stone
When I got back I found a stack of Oxford University Press’ Very Short Introductions at the student union bookstore. I’m a huge fan of this series for its brief, expert, and straight-to-the-point treatment of its subject matter. Like Borges, I’m a firm believer in brevity, and insist that everything be said in under 200 pages. Anyway, I picked up David Hopkins’ Dada and Surrealism, having just been to the Dalí Museum, and found the puzzling picture of Francis Picabia’s Portrait d’une jeune fille americaine dans l’état de nudité, printed in the Dada magazine 291 in 1915. What the heck does a spark plug have to do with a female nude? It can’t be some form of Freudian displacement–Picabia was a Dadaist not a Surrealist–and therefore must be some politically loaded social critique. Hopkins later explains its relation to anti-humanist tendencies in Dada, originating in the mind-body dualism of Descartes.
The human body is posited as a machine which has no natural relation with the soul or mind. On one level we could see the ghost of French philosopher Descartes lurking behind all of this. Cartesian dualism, which formed the basic philosophical premise for modern scientific method, notoriously asserted that the mind, as a thinking substance, is disembodied, leaving the body to be considered… purely as a mechanism. It could be, then, that the Dadaists were upholding the Cartesian viewpoint, although tinged with intense irony… Francis Picabia, for instance, produced some extremely cynical responses to sexuality… equating female sexual availability with the operations of the spark plug. (from Dada and Surrealism)
But why specifically americaine? Certainly, the sexual mores in the United States in 1915 was nothing like what it is now, after the hippie/free-love counterculture movement of the 1960’s. The spark plug specifically references the automobile, whose mass production was scaled up to dizzying efficiency–one car every 15 minutes–by Henry Ford in 1914. It is therefore doubly ironic to put this image, which for Picabia represented the mechanization, and therefore the banality of female sex, side by side the DVD cover of Girls Gone Wild, showing American college girls flashing their boob-jobs while intoxicated on Spring Break–an example, par exellence, of the Cartesian dissociation of mind from body.
