A GLANCE at Giacometti’s antediluvian face reveals his arrogance and his desire to place himself at the beginning of time. He ridicules Culture and has no faith in Progress—not in the Fine Arts, at least. He considers himself no further “advanced” than his adopted contemporaries, the men of Eyzies and Altamira.* Then, when nature and men were in their prime, there was neither ugliness nor beauty, neither taste nor dilettantes nor criticism. The man who first had the notion of carving a man from a block of stone had to start from zero.
His model: man. Neither a dictator nor a general nor an athlete, primitive man still lacked the dignity and charm that would seduce future sculptors. He was nothing more than a long, indistinct silhouette walking across the horizon. But his movements were perceptibly different from the movements of things; they emanated from him like first beginnings and impregnated the air with signs of an ethereal future. They must be understood in terms of their ends—to pick a berry or push aside a briar—not their origins. They could never be isolated or localized.
I can separate a bent branch from a tree but never an upraised arm or a clinched fist from a man. The man raises his arm, the man clinches his fist, the man is the indissoluble unit and the absolute source of his movements. Furthermore, he is an enchanter of signs; they cling to his hair, shine in his eyes, dance between his lips, perch on his fingertips. He speaks with his whole body; when he runs he speaks, when he talks he speaks, and when he falls asleep his sleep is speech.
His substance: a rock, a lump of space. From mere space Giacometti therefore had to fashion a man, to inscribe movement in total immobility, unity in infinite multiplicity, the absolute in pure relativity, the future in the eternal present, the loquacity of signs in the tenacious silence of things. The gap between substance and model seems unbridgeable, yet exists only because Giacometti has gauged its dimensions. I am not sure whether he is a man bent on imposing a human seal on space or a rock dreaming of human qualities. Or perhaps he is both and mediates between the two.
The sculptor’s passion is to transform himself completely into extensity so that from its fullness can spill the statue of a man. He is haunted by thoughts of stone. Once he was terrified by the void; for months he walked to and fro, accompanied by an abyss—his emptiness in the process of achieving awareness of its desolate sterility. On another occasion it seemed to him that objects, spiritless and dead, were no longer touching the ground; he lived in a fluctuating universe, knowing in his flesh and even to the point of martyrdom that there is neither height nor depth nor length nor real contact between things; but at the same time he was aware that the sculptor’s task is to carve from the infinite archipelago a face filled with the only being that can touch other beings.
I know no one else who is as sensitive as he to the magic of faces and gestures. He looks at them with passionate envy, as if they were from another kingdom. At his wit’s end he has at times tried to mineralize his equals: to envision crowds advancing blindly toward him, rolling across boulevards like stones in an avalanche. Thus each of his obsessions was a task, an experience, a means of experiencing space.
“He’s crazy,” people say. “Sculptors have been carving away for three thousand years—and nicely, too—without such rigmaroles. Why doesn’t he try to produce impeccable works according to tested techniques instead of pretending to ignore his predecessors?”
The truth is that for three thousand years sculptors have been carving only cadavers. Sometimes they are shown reclining on tombs; sometimes they are seated on curule chairs or perched on horses. But a dead man on a dead horse does not make even half a living creature. He deceives the rigid, wide-eyed people in the Museum. His arms pretend to move but are held fast by iron shanks at each end; his rigid outlines can hardly contain infinite dispersion; mystified by a crude resemblance, the spectator allows his imagination to imbue the eternal sinking of matter with movement, heat and light.
It is therefore necessary to start again from zero. After three thousand years the task of Giacometti and of contemporary sculptors is not to glut galleries with new works but to prove that sculpture is possible by carving. To prove that sculpture is possible just as by walking Diogenes proved to Parmenides and Zeno the possibility of movement. It is necessary to go the limit and see what can be done. If the undertaking should end in failure, it would be impossible to decide under even the most favorable circumstances whether this meant the failure of the sculptor or of sculpture; others would come along, and they would have to begin anew. Giacometti himself is forever beginning anew. But involved here is more than an infinite progression; there is a fixed boundary to be reached, a unique problem to be resolved: how to make a man out of stone without petrifying him. All or nothing: if the problem is solved, the number of statues is of little consequence.
“If I only knew how to make one,” says Giacometti, “I could make them by the thousands….” Until he succeeds, there will be no statues at all but only rough hewings that interest Giacometti only insofar as they bring him closer to his goal. He shatters everything and begins anew. From time to time his friends manage to save from destruction a head, a young woman, an adolescent. He raises no objection and again takes up his task. In fifteen years he has had but one exposition.
He consented to the exposition because he had to make a living, but even then he had misgivings and wrote by way of excusing himself: “It is mainly because I was goaded by the terror of poverty that these sculptures exist in this state (bronzed and photographed), but I am not quite sure of them; still, they were almost what I wanted. Almost.”
What bothers him is that these impressive works, always mediating between nothingness and being, always in the process of modification, perfection, destruction and renewal, have begun to exist independently and in earnest, and have made a start, far from him, toward a social career. He prefers simply to forget about them. The remarkable thing about him is his intransigence in his quest for the absolute.
This active, determined worker is displeased by the resistance of stone, which slows down his movements. He has chosen a weightless substance which is also the most ductile, perishable and spiritual of all substances—plaster. He hardly feels it at his fingertips; it is the impalpable reflex of his movements.
One first notices in his studio strange scare-crows made of white daubs that coagulate around long reddish strings. His experiences, his ideas, his desires and his dreams project themselves for a moment on his plaster men, give them a form and pass on, and their form passes on with them. Each of these nebulous creatures undergoing perpetual metamorphosis seems like Giacometti’s very life transcribed in another language.
Maillol’s statues insolently fling in our eyes their heavy eternity. But the eternity of stone is synonymous with inertia; it is the present forever solidified. Giacometti never speaks of eternity, never thinks of eternity. I was pleased by what he had said to me one day concerning some statues that he had just destroyed: “I was happy with them, but they were made to last only a few hours.”
A few hours—like the dawn, like sadness, like ephemera. And his creations, because they were destined to perish on the very night of their birth, are the only ones among all the sculptures that I know to retain the ineffable charm of transiency. Never was substance less eternal, more fragile, more nearly human. Giacometti’s substance—this strange flour that slowly settles over his studio and buries it, that seeps under his nails and into the deep wrinkles on his face—is the dust of space.
But space, even if naked, is still superfluity. Giacometti is terrified by the infinite. Not by Pascalian infinity, not by what is infinitely great. The infinity that runs through his fingers is of a more subtle and secretive type. In space, says Giacometti, there is a superfluity. This superfluity is the pure and simple coexistence of juxtaposed elements. Most sculptors have allowed themselves to be deceived; they have confused the proliferation of space with generosity, they have put too much into their works, they have been captivated by the plump contour of a marble bosom, they have unfolded, stuffed and distended the human gesture.
Giacometti knows that there is nothing superfluous about a living person because everything is function. He knows that space is a cancer that destroys being, that devours everything. For him, to sculpture is to trim the fat from space, to compress it and wring from it all its exteriorìty. The attempt may well seem hopeless, and I believe that on two or three occasions Giacometti has reached the verge of despair. If sculpturing entails carving and patching in this incompressible medium, the sculpture is impossible. “And yet,” he said, “if I begin my statue, like others, at the tip of the nose, it will not be too great an infinity of time before I reach the nostril.” Then it was that he made his discovery.
Consider Ganymede on his pedestal. If you ask me how far away he is, I will tell you that I don’t know what you are talking about. By “Ganymede” do you mean the youth carried away by Jupiter’s eagle? If so, I will say that there is no real distance between us, that no such relation exists because he does not exist. Or are you referring to the block of marble that the sculptor fashioned in the image of the handsome lad? If so, we are dealing with something real, with an existing mineral, and can draw comparisons.
Painters have long understood all that since in pictures the unreality of the third dimension necessarily entails the unreality of the two other dimensions. It follows that the distance between the figures and my eyes is imaginary. If I advance, I move nearer to the canvas, not to them. Even if I put my nose on them, I would still see them twenty steps away since for me they exist once and for all at a distance of twenty steps. It follows also that painting is not subject to Zeno’s line of reasoning; even if I bisected the space separating the Virgin’s foot from St. Joseph’s foot, and the resulting halves again and again to infinity, I would simply be dividing a certain length on the canvas, not flagstones supporting the Virgin and her husband.
Sculptors failed to recognize these elementary truths because they were working in a three-dimensional space on a real block of marble and, although the product of their art was an imaginary man, they thought that they were working with real dimensions. The confusion of real and unreal space had curious results. In the first place, instead of reproducing what they saw—that is, a model ten steps away—they reproduced in clay what was—that is, the model itself. Since they wanted their statue to give to the spectator standing ten steps away the impression that the model had given them, it seemed logical to make a figure that would be for him what the model had been for them; and that was possible only if the marble was here just as the model had been out there.
But what exactly is the meaning of being here and out there? Ten steps away from her, I form a certain image of a nude woman; if I approach and look at her at close range, I no longer recognize her; the craters, crevices, cracks, the rough, black herbs, the greasy streaks, the lunar orography in its entirety simply can not be the smooth, fresh skin I was admiring from a distance. Is that what the sculptor should imitate? There would be no end to his task, and besides, no matter how close he came to her face, he could always narrow the gap still further.
It follows that a statue truly resembles neither what the model is nor what the sculptor sees. It is constructed according to certain contradictory conventions, for the sculptor represents certain details not visible from so far away under the pretext that they exist and neglects certain others that do exist under the pretext that they are unseen. What does this mean other than that he takes the viewpoint of the spectator in order to reconstruct an acceptable figure? But if so, my relation to Ganymede varies with my position; if near, I will discover details which escaped me at a distance. And this brings us to the paradox: I have real relations with an illusion; or, if you prefer, my true distance from the block of marble has been confused with my imaginary distance from Ganymede.
The result of all this is that the properties of true space overlay and mask those of imaginary space. Specifically, the real divisibility of marble destroys the indivisibility of the person. Stone and Zeno are the victors. Thus the classical sculptor flirts with dogmatism because he thinks that he can eliminate his own look and imbue something other than man with human nature; but the truth is that he does not know what he is doing since he does not reproduce what he sees. In his search for truth he encounters convention. And since the net result is to shift to the visitor the responsibility for breathing life into his inert images, his quest for the absolute finally makes his work depend on the relativity of the angles from which it is viewed. As for the spectator, he takes the imaginary for the real and the real for the imaginary; he searches for indivisibility and everywhere finds divisibility.
By reversing classicism, Giacometti has restored to statues an imaginary, indivisible space. His unequivocal acceptance of relativity has revealed the absolute. The fact is that he was the first to sculpture man as he is seen—from a distance. He confers absolute distance on his images just as the painter confers absolute distance on the inhabitants of his canvas. He creates a figure “ten steps away” or “twenty steps away,” and do what you will, it remains there. The result is a leap into the realm of the unreal since its relation to you no longer depends on your relation to the block of plaster—the liberation of Art.
A classical statue must be studied or approached if it is continuously to reveal new details; first, parts are singled out, then parts of parts, etc. with no end in sight. You can’t approach one of Giacometti’s sculptures. Don’t expect a belly to expand as you draw near it; it will not change and you on moving away will have the strange impression of marking time. We have a vague feeling, we conjecture, we are on the point of seeing nipples on the breasts; one or two steps closer and we are still expectant; one more step and everything vanishes. All that remains are plaits of plaster. His statues can be viewed only from a respectful distance. Still, everything is there: whiteness, roundness, the elastic sagging of a beautiful ripe belly. Everything except matter. From twenty steps we only think we see the wearisome desert of adipose tissue; it is suggested, outlined, indicated, but not given.
Now we know what press Giacometti used to condense space. There could be but one—distance. He placed distance within our reach by showing us a distant woman who keeps her distance even when we touch her with our fingertips. The breasts that we envisioned and anticipated will never be exposed, for they are but expectancy; the bodies that he creates have only enough substance to hold forth a promise.
“That’s impossible,” someone might say. “The same object can’t be viewed from close range and from afar.” But we are not speaking of the same object; the block of plaster is near, the imaginary person far away.
“Even so, distance would still have to compress all three dimensions, and here length and depth are affected while height remains intact.” True. But it is also true that each man in the eyes of other men possesses absolute dimensions. As a man walks away from me, he does not seem to grow smaller; his qualities seem rather to condense while his “figure” remains intact. As he draws near me, he does not grow larger but his qualities expand.
Admittedly, however, Giacometti’s men and women are closer to us in height than in width—as if they are projecting their stature. But Giacometti purposely elongated them. We must understand that his creatures, which are wholly and immediately what they are, can neither be studied nor observed. As soon as I see them, I know them; they flood my field of vision as an idea floods my mind; the idea has the same immediate translucidity and is instantaneously wholly what it is. Thus Giacometti has found a unique solution to the problem of unity within multiplicity by simply suppressing multiplicity.
Plaster and bronze are divisible, but a woman in motion has the indivisibility of an idea or an emotion; she has no parts because she surrenders herself simultaneously. To give perceptible expression to pure presence, to surrender of self, to instantaneous emergence, Giacometti has recourse to elongation.
The original movement of creation—the timeless, indivisible movement so beautifully epitomized by long, gracile legs—shoots through his Greco-like bodies and lifts them toward the heavens. In them even more than in one of Praxiteles’ athletes I recognize man, the first cause, the absolute source of movement. Giacometti succeeded in giving to his substance the only truly human unity—unity of action.
Such is the type of Copernican revolution that Giacometti has attempted to introduce into sculpture. Before him men thought that they were sculpturing being, and this absolute dissolved into an infinite number of appearances. He chose to sculpture situated appearance and discovered that this was the path to the absolute. He exposes to us men and women as already seen but not as already seen by himself alone. His figures are already seen just as a foreign language that we are trying to learn is already spoken. Each of them reveals to us man as he is seen, as he is for other men, as he emerges in interhuman surroundings—not, as I said earlier for the sake of simplification, ten or twenty steps away, but at a man’s distance. Each of them offers proof that man is not at first in order to be seen afterwards but that he is the being whose essence is in his existence for others. When I perceive the statue of a woman, I find that my congealed look is drawn to it, producing in me a pleasing uneasiness. I feel constrained, yet know neither why nor by whom until I discover that I am constrained to see and constrained by myself.
Furthermore, Giacometti often takes pleasure in adding to our perplexity—for example by placing a distant head on a nearby body so that we no longer know where to begin or exactly how to behave. But even without such complications his ambiguous images are disconcerting, for they upset our most cherished visual habits. We have long been accustomed to smooth, mute creatures fashioned for the purpose of curing us of the sickness of having a body; these guardian spirits have watched over the games of our child-hood and bear witness in our gardens to the notion that the world is without risks, that nothing ever happens to anyone and, consequently, that the only thing that ever happened to them was death at birth.
Against this, something obviously has happened to Giacometti’s bodies. Are they emerging from a concave mirror, from a fountain of youth or from a deportation camp? We seem at first glance to be confronted by the emaciated martyrs of Buchenwald. But almost immediately we realize our mistake. His thin, gracile creatures rise toward the heavens and we discover a host of Ascensions and Assumptions; they dance, they are dances, made of the same rarefied substance as the glorious bodies promised us. And while we are still contemplating the mystical upsurge, the emaciated bodies blossom and we see only terrestrial flowers.
The martyred creature was only a woman but she was all woman—glimpsed, furtively desired, retreating in the distance with the comic dignity of fragile, gangling girls walking lazily from bed to bathroom in their high-heeled shoes and with the tragic horror of scarred victims of a holocaust or famine; all woman—exposed, rejected, near, remote; all woman—with traces of hidden leanness showing through alluring plumpness and hideous leanness mollified by suave plumpness; all woman—in danger here on earth but no longer entirely on earth, living and relating to us the astounding adventure of flesh, our adventure. For she chanced to be born, like us.
Nevertheless, Giacometti is dissatisfied. He could win the match promptly simply by deciding that he has won. But he can’t make up his mind and keeps putting off his decision from hour to hour, from day to day. Sometimes, during the course of a night’s work, he is ready to acknowledge his victory; by morning everything has been shattered. Is he afraid of the boredom that lurks beyond his triumph, the boredom that beset Hegel after he had imprudently stapled together his system? Or perhaps matter seeks revenge. Perhaps the infinite divisibility that he eliminated from his work keeps cropping up between him and his goal. The end is in sight, but to reach it he must improve.
Much has been done but now he must do a little better. And then just a little better still. The new Achilles will never catch the tortoise; a sculptor must in some way be the chosen victim of space—if not in his work, then in his life. But between him and us, there must always be a difference of position. He knows what he wanted to do and we don’t; but we know what he has done and he doesn’t. His statues are still largely incorporated in his flesh; he is unable to see them. Almost as soon as they are produced he goes on to dream of women that are thinner, taller, lighter, and it is through his work that he envisions the ideal by virtue of which he judges it imperfect. He will never finish simply because a man always transcends what he does.
“When I finish,” he says, “I’ll write, I’ll paint, I’ll have fun.” But he will die before finishing. Are we right or is he right? He is right because, as Da Vinci said, it is not good for an artist to be happy. But we are also right—and ours is the last word. Kafka as he lay dying asked to have his books burned and Dostoevski, during the very last moments of his life, dreamed of writing a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov. Both may have died dissatisfied, the former thinking that he would depart from the world without even making a mark on it and the latter that he had not produced anything good. And yet both were victors, regardless of what they might have thought.
Giacometti is also a victor, and he is well aware of this fact. It is futile for him to hoard his statues like a miser and to procrastinate, temporize and find a hundred excuses for borrowing more time. People will come into his studio, brush him aside, Carry away all his works, including the plaster that covers his floor. He knows this; his cowed manner betrays him. He knows that he has won in spite of himself, and that he belongs to us.
* That the paleolithic hunters of southern France and Northern Spain had a keenly developed aesthetic sense is attested by many artifacts preserved in limestone caves near Eyzies-de-Tayac and Altamira.