Giacometti
As our eyes move
upwards... Upwards from the base,
to elongation, the dried out sinews,
the stretched limbs... the eviscerated metal... a ‘drying out’ and an
evaporation...
Evaporating
metal... This paradox: a modernist paradox or semantic contrast... the welding
together widely disparate meanings...
Two
complementing sources of meaning... requiring two approaches, combined.
First:
what is recognized, or made reference to, and what is new, in this case new to
modernism... the challenge of form, the fragmenting of time and space of
modernism (as evinced by the experiments of Braque and Picasso in the visual
arts, the ‘stream of consciousness’ or shattered narrative in the verbal arts
and the evasion of tonality or simple tonic/dominant relations in music). And
we immediately pass to the ‘meaning’; the product of what we recognise, including our genre expectations, as of field of
sculpture and the human figure, and of what is new...
which is what provokes our response, emotional and intellectual. What do we
feel... and what associations does this raise... what, in turn, do we think
about this... and how does it fit in with life in general? So moving from the
form and the means of expression, the shape of the materials used, to their
larger content, or meaning... Our reception, an effect ranging from affect to
implication... leading to the relation to meaning as to a whole, a final
assertion of semantic cohesion... The ‘making sense’ of what is ‘given to the
senses’.
This last stage
already suggesting the sense of a larger meaning, a reference to first and last
things, to ‘the totality’, to ‘higher matters’, or what we would usually call,
‘a sense of the sacred’...
So
the second step involves that part of the new meaning which ties in, links,
forms, a semantic whole, a step to general meaning... Otherwise put: the
necessary relation of the artwork to the sacred, or
transcendental, to the sublime, or to an ‘other pointing’, external deixis, an evocation of the sublime or a rhetoric of
eternity... A relation or ‘effect’ described differently according to
discipline (philosophy, theology, anthropology)... but always felt by the
viewer as some form of ‘higher meaning’... as ‘something more’. More than just
itself... A reference to ‘first and last things’. The
result of these configurations, of the form and means of expression, of the
material and its shape and the relation of this shaping to our expectations or
‘default’ or genre’ meaning’ or ‘relation to reality’, as well as to prior
tradition up to and including the then newly arrived modernist tradition...
So
regarding what is, ’high’ or ‘up’; looking up, pointing up, and to whose place?
We have various genres of explanation... sciences and the evolution of human
culture, yielding numerous approaches to the sacred... the transcendent, the
holy; the definitions of roles of these, according to philosophy, religion,
anthropology and history... and their art history. All witness to the desire
for sacred as physiological, as ‘hard wired’; part even of the repeated demand
for ‘high art’... Integral ingredient of high art or ‘art culture’... After
Durkheim, we have the representations of the sacred in ritual as representative
of society... as a whole. Again in linguistics, we have the semantics of ‘the
Whole’... of ‘indirect lexical cohesion’ and its head words, abstractions...
And extended into interpretation, as ‘the meaning’ of literature, from the poem
to the novel. Concerning statuary, of statues, we have their genealogy: from
the sacred portable ‘Venuses’ of the Paleolithic, to Neolithic shrines, to
temples, churches, a trail and trajectory of power, of priests and kings and
nobles; the representation of gods and goddesses, of immortals and the
powerful...
The
rhetoric of size is a feature of all cultures, hyperbole or exaggeration
together with repetition, connoting status; power and sacrality,
gods and goddesses, immortals or kings and queens; elongated figures are also a
part of this rhetorical assertion of a special identity. So we find figures elongated, long,
tall, like the depiction of aristocratic castes in many civilisations,
in the statues of the South East Asian cultures of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and
Burma, the vertical magnification a rhetoric of
importance, privilege or the sacred... Perhaps a more elegant variation on the
rhetoric of size; the trope of hyperbole that offers us giant statues of heroes
and worse... An effect complemented by the parallel effect of a corpse like
desiccation or organic condensation and ‘evaporation’, even a ‘particle-isation’... That is, even
suggesting a relation to an increasing abstraction or manner of formalisation, as the coming apart of the body, its
secession from the laws of gravity, its upwards rising as an effect of both
tallness and fragmentation, of being above the laws of gravity, the miracle of
the molecularisation of metal... An uplifting, or
upwards symbolic drive, or connotation... presence in the process of
dissolving, evaporating; the evaporation of the solid, of material, of metal...
of iron... The presence of paradox, which also drives the richness of meaning
in many other art forms: of poetry. The contradiction of means and implication,
of earthly matter and heavenly deixis, offer an
implied narrative, as in drama and literature; a conflict and a resolution, a
problem and solution... both materialisation and its
escape... The feet rooted in the metal base and the ever rising, pointing up; a
relation familiar from the analysis of the picture, the two dimensional image,
but also present in the statue, an art form that makes its own frame, has
always already appropriated its own environment... The absent top half, the
skyline, and beyond, the heavens, which signal the rhetoric of eternity...
Tallness:
to the associations of lifting, of lifting of, and the resulting claim to a
higher sense, we might add the connotations due to size/height as art history’s
analogue for class, caste and power, secular as well as sacred... additionally
we have the pop culture image of ‘the tall man’ as uncanny... the ‘red right
hand’ of the popular sublime, augmenting the associations of the sublime in
general and negative sublime in particular... Which path of meaning to take,
the ‘high road’ or the ‘low road’... which mood do we bring?
Which
mood? Or which desire? For one of our key desires along with those for objects or
consumption, and recognition, is that of the sacred, the desire for the
transcendental. A desire configured in art in the upper parts of the image, in
architecture in the upper level of the building or street or square... The eye
movement upwards, after the Greek’s ’hypsosis’, or
‘eye raising’, a feature of classical Greek architecture and the key to another
‘thin’ or spindly’ art form, the Gothic, is the end of the form of the
Giacometti statue, an end which however, reaches beyond the material in all its
aspects... real and imaginary... As the material differentiation, even
fragmentation, of the statues’ heads moves our eyes upwards...
So
we are led, by a modernist innovation, albeit one with an ancient history, to a
region with sublime implications, a lifting of the human to immortal status...
in its suffering or in its transcendence of this ‘mortal coil’... The finding
of the immortal in all humanity: or the witness, the performance in frozen
brute matter, of the moment of becoming immortal... Gift of art: gift of the
human imagination alone...
However,
this is an effect which also depends upon our essential, even formative,
relation to ourselves, our constituting self-consciousness, our ability to
imagine ourselves as object, an object as seen by others... or by the Other in general... out of which the sacral relation to the
other grows or evolves... As with Animism, as object becomes other, and where
all objects are others, as indeed here, in the artwork, where an object,
matter, resembles others... and so implies another: which in general becomes
the Other, or the Subject writ large... a self yet bigger than ourselves... So
the ‘object point of view’, ‘imaging self as others might see us’, in
Giacometti’s statues, is the view of the other onto ourselves, seeing us as
more than human, self as the other (as imagined by ourselves) sees us... as we
imagine ‘it’ sees us... With metal and size, and evaporation as key directions
or clues to the meaning effect... This is the path of the sublime or sacred in
Giacometti’s work, the aspect of the self that the statues call out, to make
their meaning, ‘uncanny’ and profound, spiritual and proud... even in pity for
those greater than ourselves, as in the heroes of a tragedy... As some figures
indeed suggest the tragic element in human existence, the tragic hero motif...
As the history of the statue, which, when divorced from religion, devolves on
to the hero... or heroine alone. Tragic, because trapped by fate, by ‘the
gods’... like Oedipus or Antigone. Or trapped by war and
crisis, like so many in our modern epoch. Or epitomizing the pity for
the lesser, the less fortunate, once the pity of comedy, now... democratized...
As ‘Everyman’. Or ‘Everywoman’.
Allegory of us all... Just as the imaginary ‘object point of view’, that
‘grounds’ these sacred effects, is foundational for us all, for our
self-consciousness, our identity, an identity which we see in Giacometti as
evaporating... even as it is congealed in metal...
But not in stone;
no evaporation like effects are possible in stone, whether in granite or in
marble... As well as being a structurally inconvenient means of expression
regarding Giacometti’s ‘drawing out’ of form... a process most suited to
metals...
Marked
metal. The scales that
make up the human bodies... Scales that float from our eyes, revelation... the
squares and finger marks in metal, petals that seem to want to float away
upwards... lifting our spirits with them... again ‘the secret’ of Giacometti,
his ‘how’, is simple, a simple deixis, a pointing, ‘upwardness’...
An
effect due to a special, even unique feature of statues and indeed, sculpture,
in general: their particular generic property of self-framing, of organising space around themselves... of implying space...
and so suggesting ‘place’; and a sense of place’, as we know, includes ‘the
spirit of the place’, the genius loci...
its animist inference; the sacred other dwelling in the grove, or tree... or
stone. How so in Giacometti? By suggesting a space that shudders, trembles, a
space configured by the desiccation of the limbs, and the fragmentation of the
forehead, indicting the ‘space above’ as a key part of its implied meaning...
As also the effect of self-personifying, as a copy of a person performs an animism of metal... as likeness, mimesis, suggests
‘other’... another type of being... ‘us’... but ‘not
us’...
Again
with respect to reception, in addition to the ‘tallness’... we have the
‘scales’... marks like squares on the surface of the material... Metal petals
as parts of the surface texture of the object, the object as other, as
person... Petals that have formed on the surface of the metal, and are about to
evaporate... The heritage of Cezanne, Picasso and Braque, in the two
dimensional arts, and of Picasso, in the tradition from Modigliani to Barbara
Hepworth in the three dimensional or plastic arts, as well as the well-known influence of statues and carvings from Africa on
the history of Modernism... So as well as elongation we have a squaring off of
the surface before its distortion, a distortion of space and time. But this is
also an effect which suggests an ‘outside of time’, its abstraction ... a
construction, a quest, the finding of the ideal. A combination so like the
debate of ‘the nature’ of abstract forms and mathematics, shapes and
quantities, in philosophy. And (as with Plato), right for the wrong reasons:
for as ideas and mathematics are indeed ‘beyond space and time’, they are
therefore, ‘nowhere’, abstract... In this way complimenting, rather than in
contradiction with, the sense of terms or concepts or numbers as constructs, as
products of a ‘constructivism’, human products; our mental technology enabling
our material technology; abstractions made in the mind... (So both sides are,
in this sense, ‘true’.) Art carries or creates the ideal, but as a construct;
our construct, producing an ideal, an idealization, made via the manipulation
of matter... The making of the art object. The perception of this manipulation then returning to our mind as a
new meaning, a new thing: a new idea perhaps encapsulating a new ideal; with
Modernism as an acceleration of this aesthetic process...
Solid
illusion, from the two dimensions of the image to the 3D ‘solid surface’ of
solid material, to the illusion of sinews and their elongation. Their extension
upwards, a ‘solar pointer’; like architecture, and the statues on the tops of
buildings... Statues in procession on the tops of buildings... as if marching
in the heavens... Or heaven pointing; a ‘solar deixis’,
with the techniques of formalization as a kind of idealisation...
Also as found in modern sculpture...
Already in Rodin,
we have seen, say in ‘The Burgermeisters of Rouen’, a
tendency to elongation, an upwards extension, with unmistakable connotations
for the general meaning... The sacrality of the
sacrificial victims, the martyrs... with art as witness and so providing a
double immortality...
Centrifugal...
reversed gravity: the response to ‘the pull’ of a greater force... For what we
see are indeed angels: but not as we would normally envision them...
Let
us now look at several famous examples...
‘Three
Men’ (1948) offers an essay on the uses of ‘thinness’... much like an emaciated
version of the Renaissance, ‘Three Graces’, but substituting torqued metal for
plumb flesh... It is on these figures that we then find the ‘scales’ and
‘squares’, the ‘thumb prints’, that are the basic unit, the morphemes in metal
that are the marks of fingers, units of texture in a debt to Cubism, solid
ghosts... and as a gift of the hand, ghost of the artist... Pieces, flakes... that appear ready to disassociate, to discompose the whole
into its constituent parts...
‘The
Forest’ (1950), also an ensemble piece, presents an encounter with a shrine,
the collective effect of an encounter with the figures in combination, a scene
or tableaux for us as we stand before them... Statues of spirits, elementals,
immortals... Totem like: human forms that grow out of the ground, outgrowths of
our sense of the sacred... our desire, for the sacred, or transcendental, or
sublime... complementing our two other desires, for objects (possessions, food
and sex, with the other as object) and for recognition (of others in
particular, and by ‘the Other’ in general).
And
then there are the statues which move us from density to evaporation... As in
‘The Walking Man’ (1947/60) in reality a succession of sculptures made from
1945 to 1960. Or as in ‘Standing Woman’ (1947)... The material offering an
extreme stylisation of the human figure... Figures:
spindly, desiccated... dematerialized, yet forming an increased density, a
matchstick residue, sinews condensed... As if the result of evaporation... As
we, looking down, start from the large, squat feet, weights rooted in the base;
rising to limbs and body increasingly thin, tall, and fragile looking; finally
to the fragment flaking, elongated head. A passage from the solid and weighty
to the ethereal, a triangular pointer, like a mountain; a pointer, a passage, a
compass needle for our visual journey upwards...
As
marked, exemplified, by a sense of evaporation in process, the act itself,
performative, experienced as a performance of the act of evaporation, a sense
of happening as found in many of Giacometti’s statues. Not least in ’Man
Pointing’ (1947), where, as with many of his sculptures the body itself appears
to be evaporative before our eyes, and where ‘the pointing’ is actually not to
the side, and down: but, as ever, upwards; the rising force of the whole
stretched flaking body contrasted to the earth bound, downwards, deixis of the outstretched arm and finger...
Giacometti
also did sculptural portraits, ‘busts’, heads... Note the angle or tilt of
heads, facing slightly upwards with the eyes, the implied gaze, focused
elsewhere, beyond... or unfocused, lost in the ’middle distance’, angle,
upwards. The marks of formal manipulation of the metal the means of expression,
too are ever present: only rarely is there an attempt at mimicking skin in
metal, in iron or in bronze... found occasionally in the forehead, with this
exception ignoring almost completely the potentiality of cast metal for a
smoothness, a reflective sheen, as found in other sculptors... And as with the
figures, trees in winter, the head often appears if the head of a flower, a bud
stretching up (Diego, Annette) or as if a flower, its petals begin to float
off... elsewhere... Its expression as focused on a place... elsewhere,
somewhere far, far away... Lost to us as the evaporating head itself appears to
be increasingly lost to the air above it...
But perhaps the most uncanny of the sculptures are those where the figure,
the statues, their material, their very matter, metal itself, seems to be
evaporating before our very eyes...
Indeed
we might also consider the effect of the Giacometti statues by the reverse
method, by contrast, by imagining the opposite, with the emphasis on the
horizontal rather than vertical axis... as in the genre of the fat, big
bellied, Buddha, from the popular culture of South East Asia. Note the
completely grounded, everyday and ‘earthy’ effect for
what is also still considered a sacred figure... a ‘figure’ for worldly
success... Giacometti by contrast finds the other or unworldly in formal
emaciation, again the ‘uncanny’ sense of the elongated, as if drawn upward, as,
to give another kind of example, in the case of the Pantheon in Rome with the
illusionism due its roof tiling, where the sense of uplift and lightness of the
concrete dome we normally experience is clearly reversed if we imagine the
tiles’ proportions as opposite, with the broadening and narrowing reversed: all
now feels heavy and earthbound. All these effects are also a part of a rhetoric of uplift and its illusionality,
its felt ‘meaning’, and its connotations, in the case of the upper parts of
many buildings from the outside, or for the inside as in the case of the
Pantheon, as in the placing and proportions of statuary, we find an implied
rhetoric of eternity... ‘Upwards’ points ‘elsewhere’... And we are returned
again to the arts with their many modalities and definitions of the ‘higher’,
the ‘sacred’, the ‘transcendental’... the sense of ‘uplifting’... being
uplifted. Being uplifted.
So
as with so much architecture, in our squares and boulevards, in our traditions
of painterly art, the upper portion ‘the blessed share’, and its deixis, its ‘reference’, its pointing, its ‘pointing up’,
expressed both literally, as in the lines of much architecture, and
symbolically in references to the heavens to the eternal, this sense of lifting
up, is key to art history and to architectural history, how could sculpture be
an exception... and indeed as we have seen, it is not, especially as
exemplified in the works of Giacometti... in the solidity that... yet rises...
And
yet much of Giacometti’s work is nevertheless read as negative, as fraught with
existential angst, as in the realm of the ‘negative sublime’, as expressing
much that is uncomfortable about the human condition... with the uncomfortable
awareness of this as bearing the status as one of the ‘deeper truths’... A
matter of first and last things... Yet we can see how these apparently unlikely
partners in the aesthetic effect of the sculpture of Giacometti, the suffering
and the uplifting, the apparent content and the manifest form, work together to
make his art ever potent: as solid matter... evaporates... upwards. And yet
told by the twisted sinews, the tortured metal, the expressions on, and the
Expressionist like formalisation of, the faces, heads
and bodies so represented, all work to suggest a world of human pain borne
alone. But when read together, this combination offers us... suffering
alleviated. As familiar from the tradition of saints and
martyrs... So with the sense of a larger whole or illusion of
transfigured suffering, we find a kind of aesthetic redemption, one perhaps
available only in the world of art... Indeed as one of the functions of art: to
provide solutions where there may be none...
*
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2026