Some have suggested that our continuing series of “Lobsters You May Have Heard Of” borders on the surreal; and we agree that there is something at least slightly surreal about presenting a list of obscure lobsters while insisting that you “may” have heard of them. In that spirit, of course, we present to you this week’s lobster profile.
Borne of Salvador Dali’s strangely comical notion that he never once received a telephone in a restaurant when he had ordered a live lobster (“I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone;”), the small sculpture known as Lobster Telephone typifies Dali’s unpredictable nature as an artist. Known widely for his surrealist paintings, and less so for his writing, Dali also produced an impressive number of sculptures, with Lobster Telephone (1936) arguably the strangest, and most identifiable, among them. 
In his 1942 autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, Dali noted that lobsters and telephones are never confused for one another. Perhaps in an effort to remedy such an unfortunate slight against telephones (or maybe against lobsters), Dali sought, six years earlier, to combine the two disparate creatures for the purpose, presumably, of pointed surrealism.
But Dali’s notion that the two could somehow be confused, the lobster and the telephone, presumably gives rise to the idea that if the two can be somehow confused in one’s mind, then certainly they could be combined in one’s art.
Of course, only in certain minds, Dali’s for example, would lobsters and telephones so easily relate. Indeed, Lobster Telephone comes to you from the mind of a man who once thought it necessary to kick “a legless blind man sitting in his little cart,” so there may be no explaining Dali’s thoughts (a life’s work alone it would seem). But from the moment that Dali replaced the handset in that cradle with a lobster, people must have wondered, as the kids say today, WTF?
The striking contrast of those two seemingly disparate items certainly helps to define the piece as “surreal” but does nothing to answer the question of why, on a deeper level, Dali chose to marry a telephone with a lobster. So we’d like to speculate some, perhaps examine why the lobster and telephone are a better fit than they might at first appear.
From a technological perspective, perhaps Dali was combining high-tech with low-tech, the prehistoric animal that is the lobster with the height of human technological ingenuity at the time. Of course, in 1936, that telephone did represent technological innovation even if, today, it looks as though it, too, crawled out of the Paleozoic Era.
Or perhaps, to Dali, it was a statement about luxury; during the Depression era, the telephone was a luxury, as was lobster. Maybe Dali simply intended to bring two very different luxuries together, both of which required use of the mouth.
And we can’t ignore the possibility that Dali was melding the organic and inorganic. If we consider carefully both the telephone and the lobster, we find a hard, seemingly inorganic shell encapsulating the organic; in the case of the lobster, there exists an animal within the exoskeleton, and in the case of the phone at least two.
Of course, there remains a distinct possibility that Dali was merely being funny, and that there was no greater meaning behind the work than his own amusement. But such a conclusion ignores entirely the fact that the work is also known as Aphrodisiac Telephone.
Sorry, Sal, we’re just not feeling you on that one….WTF?
Join us again next week as we take a less surreal look at Lobsters You May Have Heard Of.
