Lobster Telephone
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Wikipedia
Featured: A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933) |
Lobster Telephone (also known as Aphrodisiac Telephone) is a surrealist object, created by Salvador Dalí in 1936. Dalí wrote of lobsters and telephones in his book The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí , wherein he demanded to know why, when he asked for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, he was never presented with a telephone.
The piece is a bizarre hybrid of an ordinary working telephone and a lobster (made of plaster). It is approximately 15 × 30 × 17 cm (6 × 12 × 6.6 inches) in size.
Dalí created this object with the specific intention of aligning the lobster's genitalia with the end of the phone into which one would speak. Thus, aligning a person's mouth with the lobster's genitalia.
Four copies of the full color object were made. One now appears at the Tate Modern in London; the second can be found at the German Telephone Museum in Frankfurt; the third belongs to the Edward James Foundation; and the fourth is at the National Gallery of Australia.
There where also six all white versions which were produced, one on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
