Only the vio­lence and dura­tion of your hard­ened dream can resist the hideous mechan­i­cal civ­i­liza­tion that is your ene­my, that is also the ene­my of the ‘..pleasure-..principle’ of all men. It is man’s right to love women with the ecsta­t­ic heads of fish. — Sal­vador Dalí, “Dec­la­ra­tion of the Inde­pen­dence of the Imag­i­na­tion and the Rights of Man to His Own Mad­ness” 

What­ev­er orga­niz­ers of the 1939 New York World’s Fair thought they might get when Sal­vador Dalí was cho­sen to design a pavil­ion, they got a Coney Island of the Sur­re­al­ist mind. The vision was so ini­tial­ly upset­ting, the com­mit­tee felt com­pelled to cen­sor Dalí’s plans. They nixed the idea, for exam­ple, of repro­duc­ing a gigan­tic repro­duc­tion of Boticelli’s Venus with a fish head — as well as fish heads for the many par­tial­ly nude mod­els in Dalí’s exhib­it. These and oth­er changes enraged the artist, and he hired a pilot to drop a man­i­festo over the city in which he declared “the Inde­pen­dence of the Imag­i­na­tion and the Rights of Man to His Own Mad­ness.”

It was all part of the the­ater of the “Dream of Venus,” Dalí’s so-called “fun­house” and pub­lic exper­i­ment play­ing with “the old polar­i­ty between the elite and pop­u­lar cul­tures,” says Montse Aguer, Direc­tor of the Dalí Muse­ums.

This con­flict had “changed into a tense con­fronta­tion between true art and mass cul­ture, with all that the sec­ond ambigu­ous con­cept brought with it con­sumed by the mass­es, but not pro­duced by them.” While Dalí rained down a “screw you” let­ter to the estab­lish­ment, he also seduced the pub­lic away from “the stream­line style that dom­i­nat­ed the Expo in 1939” — the “mod­ern archi­tec­ture, which with time had turned against mod­ern life.”

Rather than a sleek “World of Tomor­row,” vis­i­tors to Dalí’s pavil­ion encoun­tered “a kind of shape­less moun­tain from which sprouts out, like the body of a sticky hedge­hog, a series of soft appendages, some in the shape of arms and hand; oth­ers of cac­tus or tips and oth­ers of crutch­es…. The world of machines, cars and robots had been replaced — or should one say chal­lenged — by a uni­verse of dreams.” Inside the weird struc­ture, a god­dess stretched out on bed, dream­ing two dreams, “wet,” and “dry.” As Dan­ger­ous Minds describes it, once vis­i­tors entered the exhib­it, through a giant pair of legs, they encoun­tered:

Two huge swim­ming pools fea­tured par­tial­ly nude mod­els float­ing around in the water. In one of the pools, a woman dressed in a head-to-toe rub­ber suit that had been paint­ed with piano keys cavort­ed around with oth­er “mer­maids” who “played” her imag­i­nary piano. In fact, the place was filled with scant­ly-clad women lying in beds or perched on top of a taxi being dri­ven by a female look­ing S&M bat­woman. There were func­tion­al tele­phones made of rub­ber as well as an off­putting life-size ver­sion of a cow’s udder that you could touch—if you want­ed to, that is. 

The exhi­bi­tion had been coor­di­nat­ed by archi­tect, artist, and col­lec­tor Ian Wood­ner and New York art deal­er Julien Levy. It was so pop­u­lar “it reopened for a sec­ond sea­son,” notes Messy Nessy, “but once torn down it fad­ed from mem­o­ry and its out­landish­ness became the stuff of urban myth.” In 2002, the pho­tographs here by Ger­man-born pho­tog­ra­ph­er Eric Schaal were redis­cov­ered and col­lect­ed in a book titled Sal­vador Dalí’s Dream of Venus: The Sur­re­al­ist Fun­house from the 1939 World’s Fair. See rare footage from the pavil­ion in the short doc­u­men­tary at the top and read Dalí’s man­i­festo here.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Most Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Sal­vador Dalí’s Paint­ings Pub­lished in a Beau­ti­ful New Book by Taschen: Includes Nev­er-Seen-Before Works

When Sal­vador Dalí Met Alice Coop­er & Turned Him into a Holo­gram: The Meet­ing of Two Kings of Camp (1973)

Sal­vador Dalí Explains Why He Was a “Bad Painter” and Con­tributed “Noth­ing” to Art (1986)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Dur­ing the past year’s stretch­es of time at home, quite a few of us have attempt­ed to intro­duce more plant life into our sur­round­ings. By some accounts, indoor gar­den­ing ranks among the most cost-effec­tive ways of increas­ing the qual­i­ty of one’s domes­tic life. But those of us who get too deep into it (aggres­sive pur­suit of inter­ests being a known char­ac­ter­is­tic of Open Cul­ture read­ers) may find them­selves get­ting more than they bar­gained for, or at any rate pay­ing more than they intend­ed to, espe­cial­ly if they go down the road of bon­sai. Though it has its ori­gins in the Chi­nese prac­tice of pen­zai, one must look to Japan to find the prac­ti­tion­ers who have made the great­est invest­ments in the art of grow­ing pro­por­tion­al­ly impec­ca­ble dwarf trees — invest­ments of time and mon­ey both.

Buy­ing a mature work of bon­sai can cost up to near­ly one mil­lion U.S. dol­lars, accord­ing to the episode above of Busi­ness Insid­er’s “So Expen­sive” series. That was the price of one tree at the 2012 Inter­na­tion­al Bon­sai Con­ven­tion, but oth­ers have received val­u­a­tions near­ly as impres­sive. This reflects the enor­mous amount of labor a prop­er bon­sai demands: not just dai­ly water­ing, but “years of prun­ing, wiring, repot­ting and graft­ing,” as the nar­ra­tor puts it.

“Many of these tech­niques require years to mas­ter, and any errors made can result in per­ma­nent­ly ruin­ing the shape, or even killing a plant that has been grow­ing for cen­turies.” The work of bon­sai is the work of gen­er­a­tions, a fact embod­ied by Chieko Yamamo­to, the fourth-gen­er­a­tion bon­sai mas­ter shown explain­ing the pur­suit in which she’s spent more than half a cen­tu­ry.

Even Yamamo­to’s rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple-look­ing bon­sai have tak­en fif­teen, per­haps 25 years to take their shape. When exe­cut­ing a new idea, she must wait about five years just to see how it turns out, and the out­come isn’t always to her sat­is­fac­tion. “There are no imme­di­ate answers,” she says, “so I need to live a long life to see the results.” Bon­sai has on its side the famous longevi­ty of the Japan­ese pop­u­la­tion, as well as the equal­ly famous ded­i­ca­tion of Japan­ese civ­i­liza­tion to cul­ti­vat­ing mas­ter crafts­man­ship. But even so, the now-dimin­ish­ing num­ber of bon­sai busi­ness­es aggra­vates an already severe lim­i­ta­tion of sup­ply ver­sus demand, and the trade itself has cer­tain for­mi­da­ble bar­ri­ers to entry. “The bon­sai parts and the tools are often hand­made,” says the Busi­ness Insid­er video’s nar­ra­tor, “and can cost thou­sands of dol­lars them­selves.”

In the case of Sasuke scis­sors, pro­filed in the Great Big Sto­ry doc­u­men­tary short just above, they can cost tens of thou­sands of dol­lars. In his shop of that name out­side Osa­ka, black­smith Yasuhi­ro Hira­ka — a fifth-gen­er­a­tion scis­sor­mak­er, and the last of his kind in Japan — works for a week or longer, ten hours a day, just to make one pair. A stan­dard mod­el runs about $1,100 and a deluxe one costs more than $32,000, but a full-fledged bon­sai mas­ter can­not set­tle for less. “I nev­er thought I would be able to have them,” says one such adept, Masakazu Yoshikawa, of his first Sasuke scis­sors. “It was very emo­tion­al.” But the mere act of tak­ing them in hand, he adds, “makes me want to make good bon­sai.” For Hiraka’s part, he says, after 50 years of scis­sor-mak­ing, “I final­ly think I am start­ing to reach my peak.” As we West­ern­ers say, you can’t rush qual­i­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art & Phi­los­o­phy of Bon­sai

This 392-Year-Old Bon­sai Tree Sur­vived the Hiroshi­ma Atom­ic Blast & Still Flour­ish­es Today: The Pow­er of Resilience

A Dig­i­tal Ani­ma­tion Com­pares the Size of Trees: From the 3‑Inch Bon­sai, to the 300-Foot Sequoia

Daisu­gi, the 600-Year-Old Japan­ese Tech­nique of Grow­ing Trees Out of Oth­er Trees, Cre­at­ing Per­fect­ly Straight Lum­ber

See How Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Can Build a Whole Build­ing Using No Nails or Screws

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.