Thoughts on the Giacometti exhibition
September 19th 2006 03:37
Sculpture can't be photographed.
Photographs will never give you the size of a sculpture, whether large or small, will never give you the feeling of that size.
Nor its weight and solidity, nor the way it occupies its space.
Photographs will never give you the sculpture's thereness, the assurance that it’s real -- your immediate response to its presence in all its detail, its changeability, its different angles, its varying shadows and light.
And photographs will attempt to frame the sculpture, will comment on it, will hold it up aestheticized for the pornographic gaze. Whereas in a garden, or a marketplace, or even a gallery, the sculpture is encountered as an object in the world, that you interact with, as part of the world, with no frame.
Giacometti sculptures take my breath away.
I look at one, and the world disappears, and all I see is the sculpture.
Overwhelming messages. There is too much information. The awed gaze travels over the sculpture. The texture, the colours, the shapes, the expression. Every mark and furrow is meaningful -- and crafted, unaccidental. Every groove has as much character as wrinkles on a face. Each roughness and smoothness tells a story, like battle scars; and you can't verbalize all that's expressed.
Too much thought and skill has gone into it, too much symbolism woven into it. And this is largely the secondary experience, sculpture as sculpture.
When I first meet the sculpture, I don’t read it -- it's not Giacometti trying to express himself or capture his experience or capture some truth. I don’t see what an artist says about a subject. I see the subject -- a living, real thing. I respond to it directly, not by way of intended meaning. My buttons are pushed, and there is a confusion and intensity of feeling. The sculpture is unexpected and fascinating. I am frightened by its size, disgusted by its patterning, disturbed by its distortions.
There is something living in the sculpture's presence. It would be easy to mistake it.
There is something living in its profusion of detail. I have seen this texture on skin, and in bacterial masses.
These sculptures crawl with life. All these apparently random, apparently natural little details, combining into the whole. Order emerging from chaos, irregularity, uncleanness.
The eyes are enormously expressive. They don't just look, they look at, though you don't know at what.
People turned to stone -- but then continuing to live.
Some moving through stone as though through water.
You can’t ignore the monumental head. It’s a metre tall, it’s solid, and it’s there.
The monumental head sprouts from the ground, comic and phallic. It forces its way out of the ground -- it has grown despite the odds. How could nature have grown this? It is unbelievable -- it could not be, and yet there it is. And it’s just asking to be cut off. It’s an aberration, and it disturbs in the regularity of its shape. You want to hurt it -- you don’t want to face it, you don’t want to humanize it.
But it's embarrassingly naked and raw -- an expressionist painting, all its inside on its outside. It confronts you with personality and emotion, and you must empathize. It’s very alive, more human than a human head, all its details magnified.
-- Alive, and also a monument. The eyes look, but they do not look at you; they are locked worlds away. You sense the stillness of the stone -- the geological eras of the feeling -- the centuries-long forming of the personality into this single, distilled essence -- this cry, or this stare. The moment lasts unfathomably long. You feel stasis -- in you, and in the statue -- the rock of centuries deepening, exacerbating the emotion.
It’s so old and scarred.
The expression is resigned. The monumental head is trapped, bound to this spot.
But is it sad, or is the sadness in you? Is it lonely, or does it make you lonely? Is it desperate, or are you desperate on its behalf?
They are viewable as a set, or viewable as individuals.
The artist comments on humans as a set, or on humans as individuals.
The standard Giacometti sculpture. It is a rock (though cast in bronze), and it is a plant. It explores and expresses the rockiness and the plantiness of personality.
It has the dents and fissures of rock, and each sculpture is unique, has personality.
Some are more stone than others.
It is sometimes misshapen and unfinished like a natural object or like proto-life. It is sometimes rough and earthy. It is sometimes smoothed or flattened by time. It is sometimes formed by flowstone drippings. It usually has dark, morbid colours -- the grey of sameness.
One can admire it like one admires and responds to the natural world. It has a stillness and silence about it, a stage presence. One can think of the slow growth of centuries and the force and markings of the elements.
It grows from the ground; and it takes its colour from the ground. One can be disgusted, as one is disgusted by nature. It's connected to the environment, because it's simply material, it's produced by nature, it's of a piece with the rest of nature. And it's a unified organism in itself -- you are your clothes and hairstyle -- the suit and officiousness are part of the suited man.
It is served up, presented on an square base -- unnatural nature. And the base varies with the figure, is part of the figure, even grows with the figure. The base completes the figure and isolates it, spells finitude to your possibilities.
The marks of a lifetime are on it (in the same way that every sin lines the portrait of Dorian Gray). It is emaciated, wasted, furrowed, pockmarked -- by what sort of disease? (Isolation, mourning, melancholy, regret?) It is exposed to and shaped by the elements, cruelly irregular, imperfect, weather-beaten -- by what sort of weather? (Life?)
The face and head-shape is individual, precise, particular. Always very human, and very true.
-- Human, but also more than human, a primitive deity like an African or Easter Island statue. Some will even have exotic headdress.
It stands majestic and upright. And it stands isolated: in a forest of others, each is alone on its pedestal. And each is bound to its pedestal -- rooted, unfree -- the hands melding into legs -- the legs melding together.
There may be an attempt at motion, but it isn’t going anywhere.
It has elongated neck and legs. Its long legs are threatening, like a long shadow. Its ghost-thinness is fragile and frightening (will it break?), and disgusting like stick insects. Its thinness is expressive of the inner and a fact of the outer. Its thinness is minimalist, naked, just the pared-down essentials. Its thinness is elegant and graceful.
Its life is painfully barren, against the right backdrop.
Is it growing into being human, or growing out of being human?
Says Jean Genet: “[T]he oscillation between woman and goddess is perhaps the most disturbing thing about them. Sometimes, the emotion is unbearable.”
But there are many strange combinations here, too many contradictions to resolve: human and superhuman, yes, but also such as fragility and strength; motion and stillness; simplicity and complexity; life and stone; natural and unnatural; tortured and sedate; primitive and artful; cartoonishly caricatured and brutally accurate.
And these abstract qualities -- "simplicity", "complexity"… Do you not sense them? Are they not part of the meaning of the sculptures, and haven’t they an emotional force?
The forest (square, seven figures and a head) (1950).
Groups of growth… These are disgusting, these things, these people-plants, growing.
They are a set -- form out of chaos and nature; the head menacingly presides over and completes the set.
Each figure is solitary on its own base (and the bases grow with the statue).
But all the figures then rest on one large base, emphasising their belonging together.
Bust of Diego (1954).
Diego is a mass, a mass that's grown a head.
The mass is expressive of personality.
And it's also as if the eye, the consciousness, of the artist has written off the body and focuses only on the face.
Head of Diego with rolled collar (1951-52).
Diego is presented on a plate, and it is horrifying that he can thus be captured.
The lines of Diego's lifelike face are expressive -- there is too much information -- muscles, wrinkles, nose, eyes.
And Diego disturbs in how he sprouts -- unnatural natural -- a little head-flower from Little Shop of Horrors.
"Nature grew all this?" you ask yourself, worried.
Women of Venice (1956).
In Calvino's book, all his cities are Venice. So all of Giacometti's women are the same women (and are they, too, Venice?).
The obsessive compulsion of Giacometti; the claim that he could be happy in his studio, for the rest of his life, drawing and redrawing a single apple… Every statue you make of your goddess captures something different about her; and you are doomed to replicate; and it is part of your tribute, your worship, to try to penetrate the mystery of her, though the absolute resists expression.
Sculptures, drawings, prints, from the Maeght Foundation in France.
On at the NSW Art Gallery until 29 October 2006.
Costs $10.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Alberto Giacometti.
Photographs will never give you the size of a sculpture, whether large or small, will never give you the feeling of that size.
Nor its weight and solidity, nor the way it occupies its space.
Photographs will never give you the sculpture's thereness, the assurance that it’s real -- your immediate response to its presence in all its detail, its changeability, its different angles, its varying shadows and light.
And photographs will attempt to frame the sculpture, will comment on it, will hold it up aestheticized for the pornographic gaze. Whereas in a garden, or a marketplace, or even a gallery, the sculpture is encountered as an object in the world, that you interact with, as part of the world, with no frame.
Three Men Walking II
***
Giacometti sculptures take my breath away.
I look at one, and the world disappears, and all I see is the sculpture.
Overwhelming messages. There is too much information. The awed gaze travels over the sculpture. The texture, the colours, the shapes, the expression. Every mark and furrow is meaningful -- and crafted, unaccidental. Every groove has as much character as wrinkles on a face. Each roughness and smoothness tells a story, like battle scars; and you can't verbalize all that's expressed.
Too much thought and skill has gone into it, too much symbolism woven into it. And this is largely the secondary experience, sculpture as sculpture.
When I first meet the sculpture, I don’t read it -- it's not Giacometti trying to express himself or capture his experience or capture some truth. I don’t see what an artist says about a subject. I see the subject -- a living, real thing. I respond to it directly, not by way of intended meaning. My buttons are pushed, and there is a confusion and intensity of feeling. The sculpture is unexpected and fascinating. I am frightened by its size, disgusted by its patterning, disturbed by its distortions.
***
There is something living in the sculpture's presence. It would be easy to mistake it.
There is something living in its profusion of detail. I have seen this texture on skin, and in bacterial masses.
These sculptures crawl with life. All these apparently random, apparently natural little details, combining into the whole. Order emerging from chaos, irregularity, uncleanness.
The eyes are enormously expressive. They don't just look, they look at, though you don't know at what.
People turned to stone -- but then continuing to live.
Some moving through stone as though through water.
***
You can’t ignore the monumental head. It’s a metre tall, it’s solid, and it’s there.
The monumental head sprouts from the ground, comic and phallic. It forces its way out of the ground -- it has grown despite the odds. How could nature have grown this? It is unbelievable -- it could not be, and yet there it is. And it’s just asking to be cut off. It’s an aberration, and it disturbs in the regularity of its shape. You want to hurt it -- you don’t want to face it, you don’t want to humanize it.
But it's embarrassingly naked and raw -- an expressionist painting, all its inside on its outside. It confronts you with personality and emotion, and you must empathize. It’s very alive, more human than a human head, all its details magnified.
-- Alive, and also a monument. The eyes look, but they do not look at you; they are locked worlds away. You sense the stillness of the stone -- the geological eras of the feeling -- the centuries-long forming of the personality into this single, distilled essence -- this cry, or this stare. The moment lasts unfathomably long. You feel stasis -- in you, and in the statue -- the rock of centuries deepening, exacerbating the emotion.
It’s so old and scarred.
The expression is resigned. The monumental head is trapped, bound to this spot.
But is it sad, or is the sadness in you? Is it lonely, or does it make you lonely? Is it desperate, or are you desperate on its behalf?
***
They are viewable as a set, or viewable as individuals.
The artist comments on humans as a set, or on humans as individuals.
***
The standard Giacometti sculpture. It is a rock (though cast in bronze), and it is a plant. It explores and expresses the rockiness and the plantiness of personality.
It has the dents and fissures of rock, and each sculpture is unique, has personality.
Some are more stone than others.
It is sometimes misshapen and unfinished like a natural object or like proto-life. It is sometimes rough and earthy. It is sometimes smoothed or flattened by time. It is sometimes formed by flowstone drippings. It usually has dark, morbid colours -- the grey of sameness.
One can admire it like one admires and responds to the natural world. It has a stillness and silence about it, a stage presence. One can think of the slow growth of centuries and the force and markings of the elements.
It grows from the ground; and it takes its colour from the ground. One can be disgusted, as one is disgusted by nature. It's connected to the environment, because it's simply material, it's produced by nature, it's of a piece with the rest of nature. And it's a unified organism in itself -- you are your clothes and hairstyle -- the suit and officiousness are part of the suited man.
It is served up, presented on an square base -- unnatural nature. And the base varies with the figure, is part of the figure, even grows with the figure. The base completes the figure and isolates it, spells finitude to your possibilities.
The marks of a lifetime are on it (in the same way that every sin lines the portrait of Dorian Gray). It is emaciated, wasted, furrowed, pockmarked -- by what sort of disease? (Isolation, mourning, melancholy, regret?) It is exposed to and shaped by the elements, cruelly irregular, imperfect, weather-beaten -- by what sort of weather? (Life?)
The face and head-shape is individual, precise, particular. Always very human, and very true.
-- Human, but also more than human, a primitive deity like an African or Easter Island statue. Some will even have exotic headdress.
It stands majestic and upright. And it stands isolated: in a forest of others, each is alone on its pedestal. And each is bound to its pedestal -- rooted, unfree -- the hands melding into legs -- the legs melding together.
There may be an attempt at motion, but it isn’t going anywhere.
It has elongated neck and legs. Its long legs are threatening, like a long shadow. Its ghost-thinness is fragile and frightening (will it break?), and disgusting like stick insects. Its thinness is expressive of the inner and a fact of the outer. Its thinness is minimalist, naked, just the pared-down essentials. Its thinness is elegant and graceful.
Its life is painfully barren, against the right backdrop.
Is it growing into being human, or growing out of being human?
***
Says Jean Genet: “[T]he oscillation between woman and goddess is perhaps the most disturbing thing about them. Sometimes, the emotion is unbearable.”
But there are many strange combinations here, too many contradictions to resolve: human and superhuman, yes, but also such as fragility and strength; motion and stillness; simplicity and complexity; life and stone; natural and unnatural; tortured and sedate; primitive and artful; cartoonishly caricatured and brutally accurate.
And these abstract qualities -- "simplicity", "complexity"… Do you not sense them? Are they not part of the meaning of the sculptures, and haven’t they an emotional force?
***
The forest (square, seven figures and a head) (1950).
Groups of growth… These are disgusting, these things, these people-plants, growing.
They are a set -- form out of chaos and nature; the head menacingly presides over and completes the set.
Each figure is solitary on its own base (and the bases grow with the statue).
But all the figures then rest on one large base, emphasising their belonging together.
***
Bust of Diego (1954).
Diego is a mass, a mass that's grown a head.
The mass is expressive of personality.
And it's also as if the eye, the consciousness, of the artist has written off the body and focuses only on the face.
***
Head of Diego with rolled collar (1951-52).
Diego is presented on a plate, and it is horrifying that he can thus be captured.
The lines of Diego's lifelike face are expressive -- there is too much information -- muscles, wrinkles, nose, eyes.
And Diego disturbs in how he sprouts -- unnatural natural -- a little head-flower from Little Shop of Horrors.
"Nature grew all this?" you ask yourself, worried.
***
Women of Venice (1956).
In Calvino's book, all his cities are Venice. So all of Giacometti's women are the same women (and are they, too, Venice?).
The obsessive compulsion of Giacometti; the claim that he could be happy in his studio, for the rest of his life, drawing and redrawing a single apple… Every statue you make of your goddess captures something different about her; and you are doomed to replicate; and it is part of your tribute, your worship, to try to penetrate the mystery of her, though the absolute resists expression.
***
Sculptures, drawings, prints, from the Maeght Foundation in France.
On at the NSW Art Gallery until 29 October 2006.
Costs $10.
***
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Alberto Giacometti.
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Comment by Karliea
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
If you're a Sydney-sider, I hope you attended (or will attend, before next weekend) the Sculpture by the Sea exhibition. Some very nice work there, and a nice illustration of the way that the environment of a sculpture is part of the sculpture.
Also, a free sculpture exhibition inside the Bondi Pavilion, including some work that I think is Giacometti-influenced.
But nothing with Giacometti's degree of thought.