Since the early 1930s, Savador Dali’s iconic painting of melting clocks, called The Persistence of Memory, has been viewed by millions of visitors to the New York Museum of Modern Art. So for museum tour guide Brian Marin, it was somewhat surprising on a recent museum tour when a 9-year-old boy from Lincoln, Neb., innocently asked, “What’s the deal with the drum kit in there?”
Said Marin, “Yeah, that kind of blew me away. I’ve given thousands of tours and told people all about the symbolism of the melting clocks, the artist’s theories of space and time, and all that crap, and then this little kid suddenly yells out, ‘I see drums … why did he paint those drums?’ My jaw just dropped because, you know, how the hell did we ever miss that? I mean, it’s not like you have to stare at it in a weird way or catch it in just the right light. It’s not even like a freaking Where’s Waldo drawing, because you actually do have to look pretty hard to find Waldo. Those drums are just right in your face.”
The painting is said to epitomize Dalí’s theory of “softness” and “hardness,” which was central to his thinking during the time of this painting. Some art historians suggest that the soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order, and some just say that Dali was doing a buttload of opium.
“He might have just been high,” said Marin. “I mean, those melty clocks are pretty freaky and they do look like something you would paint if you were listening to the Sgt. Pepper album and dropping acid.”
The question remains, however, as to why Dali painted what appears to be the Traps A400 flat, portable drum kit into his iconic painting. Marin has a theory. “We do know that Dali loved music, and in his other works we have seen him frequently include gourds and other percussion-oriented pieces. So the drums here appear to be a clear nod to his no-so-subtle proclamation that he wanted to kick out the jams and blast a phat beat on the drums.”
But what remains a mystery in the art world is the implied symbolism of the orange clock swarming with ants. Said Marin, “Yeah, supposedly Dali used ants in his paintings as a symbol for death, as well as a symbol of female genitalia, which is weird, I know. I mean, if I’m a woman, I’d be a little pissed because that’s just rude. In what world does a vagina mean death? But then again, drummers can be pretty weird dudes.”