The Sleeping Dali Exhibit

I am spending a few days in Berlin and yesterday I thought I should go and visit the Dali exhibition. Not because I am by any stretch of the imagination interested in Dali, but because sometimes I feel that I should broaden my cultural horizons by taking on topics that hold no attraction for me. You could also call it the result of a British all-girls’ school education.

The Dali exhibition is at the Potsdamer Platz and I found it easily after enquiring at the Film Museum (which I really should have visited instead). The Dali exhibition has large red banners with the word Dali in big letters, so it can be seen from far and wide, or from about a hundred meters away. It has lots of lip-shaped sofas, inside and outside, and the people at the entrance desk are very helpful and polite.

I did find the entrance fee of 11 Euros, plus extra for a guided tour and more extra for leaving your coat, quite steep and I communicated this. The man at the entrance desk told me it was because they are a private museum and receive no state funding. So if you are really interested in Dali, or like me, feel the need to sometimes do things that you don’t like, you might cough up and pay it.

Straight off I’ll tell you that I think you really need to be a Dali fan to go this exhibition. It doesn’t contain any of those large, strange paintings that we know from shiny posters or the slightly older of us remember our weird best friends hanging on their bedroom walls in the mid-1970s. None of your melting clocks or fried eggs or scenes in the middle-distance turning into peoples’ heads and faces. There are a lot of drawings and smaller paintings and to be honest, a lot of erotica. Not even the kind of erotica which made me think, ooh that’s interesting, but the kind where I thought, let’s move on as fast as possible.

So once in, it was like take a deep breath and let’s see how fast I can get through this, I’m afraid. Until I saw the Sleeping Exhibit, of course.

It was when I came up the stairs after a quick tour round the first room that I saw him. A middle-aged, quite tubby gentleman, bald but with a beard, sporting jeans and an anorak and with a shoulder sports bag around his person, with his arms crossed and in full sleep-snore mode on a plastic chair in front of a row of drawings on the wall. As I approached the room up the stairs, he instantly awoke, turned and fixed me with a stare that was a mixture of annoyance and surprise, jumped up and headed straight into the next room.

At first, I was surprised that someone would pay 11 Euros to come to the exhibition and then fall asleep in it. While it could definitely not be described as riveting, it would not have driven me to having forty winks in it either. What remained in my memory however was the look of annoyance in the man’s eyes, as if he was really pissed off at me for having woken him up. I mean, the museum was not exactly swimming with visitors but I was certainly not the only person passing through here, so surely he had been woken up before?

Dutifully I had a quick shufty at every single drawing and painting, sometimes reading the labels, and hoped that the power of the photographic memory would be able to recall a fraction of the art I was bombarding it with should the need arise at a future point in time. And then I walked into the next room.

To my surprise the tubby (previously sleeping) gentleman was once again seated on a plastic chair here, in the same mode as before, arms crossed around chest and in deep sleep, it seemed, while softly snoring. Or, not such deep sleep, because as I approached, he instantly awoke, looked at me, then jumped up and hurried out again like the White Rabbit running away from Alice, into the next room, where, I found out just scarcely minutes later, he promptly feel asleep again.

Now call me thick but even I can eventually work out what the jig is going on. Here we are, in a surrealist exhibition, which frankly could do with a bit of livening up, and the organizers had a brilliant idea! Why not introduce a live, surrealist exhibit. The Sleeping, Darting, Musical-Chairs-Playing, Snoring Exhibit. Confuse the visitors (initially only, of course) and add a bit of spice to the whole thing.

As I moved from room to room, the man preceded me, jumping up in (feigned?) surprise and annoyance as I entered one room, only to hurry into the next where he promptly fell asleep again. Well it certainly bucked things up I can tell you! I left him asleep in the corner of the last room, our game of Chase and Snore over, as I finally wound up my visit to the exhibition and made my way back down the stairs to arrive at reception and wardrobe from the opposite direction.

There were no potential or pending visitors standing at the reception desk so I decided to approach the man there about the Sleeping Exhibit.

“That was a pretty good idea,” I told him. “To have the sleeping exhibit. The guy who moved from room to room.”

“What guy?” was his instant response, and when I explained, he rushed immediately to the monitor which I then saw contained CCTV camera views of each room in the building. “Where is he now?”

Oh dear, I thought. Is this maybe also part of the act? I had been so sure. “Well, I left him in the last room,” I said. “But who would pay 11 Euros to go and sleep in an exhibition?” (especially this one?).

“No, he is definitely not part of the exhibition,” the man laughed. “And you would be surprised! For 11 Euros, you can sleep here all day!”

Well, whatever. I do think it livened the exhibition up and I do think Dali would have appreciated it.