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salvador dali, female figure with head of flowers, 1937.
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salvador dali, woman with piano skin, 1936.
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salvador dali, the ballet of the flowers, 1980.
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salvador dali, transcendent passage, 1976.
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i'm very annoyed with myself because i found this and added it to my stockpile of wonderful things, but i cannot trace its origins or the artist. 
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from weheartit.com
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alexander mcqueen, 2007.
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natalia vodianova, vogue.
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bosa horse flower pot by jaime hayón.
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face plant

i was in zacatecas, mexico summer of '07 or '08, hard to recall now. i had been living in guadalajara taking two spanish language courses and an english course on contemporary mexican art and politics. the teacher was a rough floridian with a steel personality and see-through linen skirts. we did a weekend trip to zacatecas, a small city built on top of itself in the hills of north-central mexico to visit the plethora of museums that have rooted there in the heart of the world heritage site town. it's a place of rich spanish history, bragging a massive sculptured memorial of the rebel hero pancho villa, and lots of money due to its location along the "silver route".  anyways, for one reason or another, the place has like ten different museums, some world class, some anthropological aztec shrines. the whole trip is stuck to my heart, but there was a moment on that trip that raises above the rest (even the mini coronas and red velvet jazz bar). we were meant to select on piece of work to write a report on, as we always did when we studied in-field. i kicked along the museum halls browsing through real picassos and some other sure classics. but i remember even the hall where we turned and where i stood when i saw salvador dali's woman with the head of flowers. there were three women, all lean, skeletal ghost-like figures with long arms and boney crutches holding them aright. their legs burst open with drawers of diminishing size railing until their ankles. and their heads, of course, their heads were the real brains of the operation. the ghoulish damsels were dead women walking if you ignored the vibrance and vitality of their heads exploding with pansies, poppies and geraniums. his preoccupation with the drawers is linked to his admiration of freud, for which he said, "the only difference between immortal greece and our era is sigmund freud who discovered that the human body, which in greek times was merely neoplatonical, is now filled with secret drawers only to be opened through psychoanalysis." the drawers then, have something to do with sexuality (surprise!) and the subconscious (another surprise!). the flowers i think symbolize the decadence of ribbons and perfumes of the high-minded and rich aristocrats who surrounded the surrealist groups. their heads although tragically beautiful, were empty. he replaced the heads of his characters with flowers and other objects often.
whatever he was thinking, those blossoming heads are beautiful in a way a face could never be. and whatever you he thought of the frivolous and the superfluous, i'm almost certain he has a few lilies sprouting from his brain.

this issue captures some of my favorite face plants, inspired by the devilish dali and his slightly hypocritical genius. 



3/15/2012 04:43:54 pm

Just thought I should leave a short comment saying thank you for your hard work and effort putting all this information together. Some of us appreciate it.

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