Lobster Telephone
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Lobster Telephone (also known as Aphrodisiac Telephone) is a surrealist object, created by Salvador Dalí in 1936. Dalí wrote of lobsters and telephones in his book The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí , wherein he demanded to know why, when he asked for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, he was never presented with a telephone.
The piece is a bizarre hybrid of an ordinary working telephone and a lobster (made of plaster). It is approximately 15 × 30 × 17 cm (6 × 12 × 6.6 inches) in size.
Dalí created this object with the specific intention of aligning the lobster's genitalia with the end of the phone into which one would speak. Thus, aligning a person's mouth with the lobster's genitalia.
Four copies of the full color object were made. One now appears at the Tate Modern in London; the second can be found at the German Telephone Museum in Frankfurt; the third belongs to the Edward James Foundation; and the fourth is at the National Gallery of Australia.
There where also six all white versions which were produced, one on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
The phone is on the cover of Stranger Than We Can Imagine (2016).
