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Credit: Far Out \/ Alamy \/ Allan Warren<\/p>\n
During the peaks of his shock rock fame, Alice Cooper<\/a> found himself the bizarre, living subject to one of Salvador Dal\u00ed\u2019s surrealist imaginings.<\/p>\n Rubbing shoulders with the stars of the music industry and the Hollywood elites was nothing new to Dal\u00ed, much to the chagrin of the arts community. His skills were without doubt. Defining the surrealist movement with 1931\u2019s The Persistence of Memory, his unforgettable imagery and stirring dreamscapes brought respect in his field, but the flamboyant excesses of his celebrity peacocking rubbed his peers the wrong way.<\/p>\n Legend has it that fellow artistic radical Pablo Picasso personally implored him to stop playing the clown and focus on his \u201cexceptional gifts as a painter\u201d.<\/p>\n However sincere, Dal\u00ed always maintained that artistry rivalling anything from the aloof pedestals of academia or historic stature could be found among the pop culture, once naming Walt Disney, Cecil B DeMille, and Harpo Marx as the \u201cthree great surrealists\u201d<\/a>. Naturally, Cooper\u2019s hard rock vaudeville would pique Dal\u00ed\u2019s interest. Live snakes, guillotine props, and the band\u2019s smeared-mascara glam would radiate their own surrealist danger while Billion Dollar Babies was topping the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.<\/p>\n The two would cross paths in the spring of 1973. Meeting at New York\u2019s St Regis Hotel, Dal\u00ed waltzed into the room in full eccentric theatre: a giraffe-skin vest proudly sported along with gold Aladdin shoes and purple socks, surrounded by associates decked out in pink chiffon.<\/p>\n Picasso wouldn\u2019t have been impressed, but Cooper, who was a huge fan, dug the ostentation and struck up a friendship with Dal\u00ed<\/a>, eventually leading to the unlikely proposal of his living, breathing feature in the Spanish artist\u2019s next creative venture.<\/p>\n It was an ambitious project for the early 1970s. The idea was to dress Cooper in a million dollars\u2019 worth of Harry Winston diamonds, sit cross-legged on a rotating pedestal while holding a model of the Venus de Milo like a microphone and be captured via hologram technology. Behind the hologram was a chocolate \u00e9clair atop a plaster brain and all crawling with live ants, a representation of the shock rocker\u2019s grey matter, as Dal\u00ed saw it at least.<\/p>\n Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n Was it just more clowning? First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper\u2019s Brain was certainly a pioneering vision and flashed imagery that matched the surrealist conjurings he\u2019d found fame with decades earlier, as well as pioneering the emerging multimedia convergence of the arts and tech. The original piece is on display at Figueres\u2019 Dal\u00ed Theatre-Museum with a replica at Florida\u2019s Salvador Dal\u00ed Museum, and Cooper tried to keep the brain as a keepsake before the veteran artist shot down the idea: \u201cOf course not, it\u2019s worth millions!\u201d<\/p>\n What was it about Cooper that Dal\u00ed found so creatively appealing? It could have been shameless celebrity ingratiation, or a surface fascination with the band\u2019s shock rock glam, but perhaps the master surrealist saw in the \u2018School\u2019s Out\u2019 singer<\/a> another example of a character placed out into the pop landscape like a piece of art in itself, Cooper no less a creation than Dal\u00ed\u2019s Pierrot antics performed on the world\u2019s stage.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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