Sunday Dalí: Aphrodisiac Telephone (black and red version), 1936.

Dalí famously wrote in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, “I do not understand why, when I ask for a cooked lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a telephone.” Dalí’s sense of humor and sense for the absurd shine through in this piece.

The work was created when Dalí suggested that Edward James, a wealthy patron of the surrealists, fill his rooms with what Dalí called ‘The surrealist object - one that is absolutely useless from the practical and rational point of view, created wholly for the purpose of materialising in a fetishistic way, with the maximum of tangible reality, ideas and fantasies having a delirious character.’

James had four of these in his house. They were completely functioning telephones. Dalí constructed the lobsters to position their sex organs directly over the mouthpiece of each telephone so that the user is speaking and expectorating into the genitals of the lobster.

There were also six all-white versions which were produced, one of which is on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and one at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

(original post via herrmachine)