This month’s collaborative video essay “Under Construction, An Ekphrastic Essay” by Richard Hoffman and JD Scrimgeour assays Salvador Dali’s horrific painting, “Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, Premonition of Civil War (1936),” which was first exhibited in England six months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Hoffman and Scrimgeour chronicle Dali’s prophetic vision of what Robert Burns called “man’s inhumanity to man” in his poem with that phrase as its title and whose last line reiterates the diachronic legacy of war’s visceral deconstruction of humanity’s collective body. The body in Dali’s painting, like Spain itself, has broken up. Hoffman and Scrimgeour exegete Dali’s painting body part by body part, revealing each part as a symbolic, evocative synecdoche for the larger whole of internecine Spain on the brink of civil war. The tour is haunting in its duel effect as both an art history and history lesson, “screaming’ out also an obvious influence on Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” painted a year later in 1937.
–Chard deNiord
Yuexi Wu is an English major in a dual-degree program with Salem State University and Nanjing Normal University. She just completed her thesis, Under Water, a collection of essays. Her podcasts and writing have appeared in Red Skies. She is interested in collaborations in which media becomes one with literature and culture.
This essay began as an exchange of 100-word responses to Dali’s painting. Each of us aimed to say something that built off what had come previously, but more importantly, something that interested the other. After the usual juggling and shaping of the various bits, we made the first important aesthetic decision—to turn two voices into one. The second important decision, of course, was to add visuals, and to collaborate with the talented and patient Yuexi Wu. It wasn’t written as a response to the current moment, but it sure feels like it.
