This painting isn't dream art but dream-frustration art; it shows that maddening state when you dip in and out of hypnogogic sleep, with images flowing and overlapping but never quite cohering into a dream. On hot nights, I'm a restless sleeper; I tangle up in thoughts (and sheets!) much like this.

Tanning did a lot of these flowing pieces in the fifties--she liked paintings that worked both as abstracts and figuratives. The more you look, the more hidden creatures you find. The first I spot are a blue-faced girl in a nightgown (center); a smaller chalk-white face (center-right); a dog with a small, turned head suspiciously like Leonardo's portrait of a girl with a ferret (bottom), then a shadowy woman throwing her head back (upper right). I'm certain there are more. A whole night's worth.

Mind you, I'm lazy, and find it takes work to try on different scales and orientations, looking for eyes, limbs, genitals, references to the history of painting. The sensation is familiar; recently I tried, for the third time, to plow through Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. A few dozen pages in, I was exhausted. All those riddles, puns, games. I think John Lennon was right to keep it short. His In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works have Joycean word games, but set in short poems and stories--a page or two. One pun can be revealing and funny. Too many... urp.

So Tanning's storm of visual puns or ambiguities, where a shape may be an arm, a cheek and a thigh all at once, do work for me, but I lack the patience to decode them fully. Of course the painting's meant to hang on your wall, giving you years to see new shapes in it. Squinting at a small copy for a minute or two on the web just can't do it. To be seen truly, this piece requires its full size in all four dimensions--including time.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Dorothea Tanning ed. by Alyce Mahon (2018), p.145

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