Rip! Tear! Plop! Smear! A horror movie called art

Let’s hear it for “Un Chien Andalou,” the May 6 flick at the Dali Museum that boasts an open eye razored in half, breasts morphed into buttocks, donkeys dead on pianos and other unconnected scenes as in a dream.

Behold! Surrealism on celluloid – and obviously meant to shock.

Dali made this movie with film director Luis Bunuel in 1929, some 60 years before shock art became all the rage to poke our eyes with its edginess - as if to rub in our pretensions of innocence.

It can be argued that 15th century painter Hieronymus Bosch’s lewd visions of heaven and hell make him the first shock artist - Surreal style. But Dali came in first with slashed body parts, having halved the human eye decades before Damien Hurst sliced a pig in half, rigged one half to inch back and forth on a mechanized track so the pig looked like it was being constantly sliced.

But as shocking as the Dali film is, it’s his painted grotesqueries that seem to disturb more, probably because nightmarish scenes on canvas, unlike motion pictures, don’t fade to black. Dali’s rendering of, say, a woman dissolving into a praying mantis that menaces an emasculated man is fixed in pigment and you’re stuck with it, unrelieved.

Another way to say that Dali’s paintings are tougher may be explained when compared to Goya’s horrific Saturn eating his children.The difference isn’t in Dali’s imagery as much as it is his meticulous rendering of terrible things.

While shock art is often full of anger, Dali’s doesn’t look angry. Rather than distortions of reality, as in Goya’s work, you get carefully crafted, even lovingly made pictures. Which is a little like mass murderer Richard Speck talking without emotion about slashing people to death. Or like someone screaming at you in verse. You feel upset, but at the same time, you're taken with the poetry. And you feel guilty for your admiring glances because of
the distasteful subject matter.

Either way you feel upset, chilled at the sight. It's as if human life were taking place in a petrie dish: Without us. Scaary.