Dali's dream drifts through Queens.
That more people are buried in Queens than live there is a long-running joke. In truth, when seeking the borough's hidden treasures, a shovel is often more useful than a subway map.
Nowhere is this more true than in Flushing Meadows: New York's very own Pompeii. In 1939, what had been an ash dump and swamp was transformed into the World's Fair: Two years later, the new city within a city was abandoned. In 1964, a second fair was built atop the remains of the first, though save for Shea Stadium and the Unisphere, it too was soon forgotten.
Flushing Meadows is now more palimpsest than park, and most are unaware of what lies below. The cylindrical monument marking the location of the World's Fair time capsules?intended to be opened in the year 6939?is on most weekends draped in a red and white checkered table cloth and enlisted by Ecuadorian immigrant families as a picnic table.
The Queens Museum of Art, itself housed in a building from the 1939 fair, is tapping into the park's art and archeology with an exhibit on Salvador Dali's fleshy, if fishy, contribution to the fair. The exhibit, which opened this June, recreates Dali's long-since-dismantled pavilion in photographs and murals.
In "Dream of Venus," Dali lured fairgoers with the promise of topless and scantily clad beauties, but once they paid the 25-cent admission fee at a fish-head-shaped booth and walked through an archway framed by a pair of women's legs, they entered chambers that were less sexy than surreal. Mermaids swam around sinister telephones, shellfish and a piano whose keyboard was painted upon a nude mannequin.
In the next chamber, Venus herself slept topless on a 36-foot-long bed, as her Freudian freakshow of a dream was performed around her. In the background played a recording that sounded like Aeschylus as performed by a chorus of porn stars.
"Enter, enter here," the voice of Venus intoned. "Men of all kinds and races, victims of reality."
"Dream of Venus," or as Mayor Bloomberg called it?mistaking it for his next weekend getaway?"Dream of Venice," is one of the first examples of installation art. It is perhaps the great-granddaddy of works like Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle.
In the context of the 1939 World's Fair, Dali's pavilion was in striking contrast to the sleek architecture of the "World of Tomorrow," which dreamed of a future in which technology and capitalism would save us all?an odd sentiment at the end of the Great Depression and on the eve of WWII.
"Dream of Venus" was not near Futurama, or the towering Trylon and Perisphere, but off in the Amusement Zone surrounded by rides and girly shows that, compared to Dali's, were more tits than esthetics. But as Dali and his fellow surrealists hoped to engage the masses with their work, he didn't mind?at least not at first.
Dali stormed out of Flushing Meadows before the pavilion opened, furious that his backers had compromised his vision, being unable to accept that a mermaid could have a fish's head and women's legs.
Ironically, it was this clash with commercial interests that landed him the pavilion in the first place. As police investigate the Dali print stolen from Riker's Island, it is fitting to note that shortly after Dali arrived in New York, he nearly ended up in jail himself. Commissioned to design the windows for a Manhattan department store, Dali became enraged when the store management saw fit to rearrange his work to their taste. In a fit of rage, perhaps a deliberate one, he threw a bathtub out the store window onto the street, and in doing so, became the talk of the town.
Tom Finkelpearl, executive director of the Queens Museum, says he hopes exhibits such as "Dream of Venus" will do the same for his Flushing Meadows institution. He plans to unearth other buried treasures of the park and the borough in future exhibits.
In a park that has always been more burlesque than bucolic, he should have little trouble.
"Dream of Venus" at the Queens Museum of Art, New York City Bldg., Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, 718-592-9700, through Sept. 30.