21st century man
GIACOMETTI: A LINE IN THE WILDERNESS
by
ROBERT J. LEWIS
___________________________________
We
who draw do so not only to make something received visible
to others
but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable
destination.
John Berger
To
have courage for the most strange, the most singular
and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.
Rilke
His
bleached out, monochromatic backgrounds echo the depthless grey
matter of space. The astrophysicist, to better grasp the notion
of the boundless, extends an imperfect numerical function to
infinity; the painter drains the colour out of his pigment for
the same effect. Each is asking how brief is a human life that
is bound on all sides by the infinite.
To
draw attention to the largest questions posed by existence,
the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) decided that
the portrait would be the optimal place for his inquiry to
take 
shape
and find its proper expression. And even though in his life
time he would come to be regarded by his peers as a portrait
master, he always insisted (in his interviews) that the moment
the sitter took his place he became a mystery.
Giacometti’s
special relationship with his amorphous muse was a constant
source of angst and exultation, one which he refused to terminate
or resolve to his satisfaction. His combined obsession and determination
– pace Sisyphus -- to confront the ineffable on its own
terms has resulted in some of the most compelling portraiture
in the history of painting. Both Jean Paul Sartre and Simone
de Beauvoir were fascinated by their painter friend, who was
never satisfied with his work and claimed he was a better writer
than painter.
As
much as any artist in the 20th century Giacometti is its designated
metaphysician, in large part because he is not interested
in the flesh qua flesh but in the manner in which the bone
structure and skeleton relate to and anchor the spirit, and
call into question the mostly inscrutable and fugitive aspects
of existence.
Why
the line, the gallery of his portraits asks, and not the infinite
possibilities inherent in colour?
A
line can mark off what is inside or outside, as in a territory.
It is where inclusion and exclusion
meet, and existence and non-existence are meshed together
and reflected back. Giacometti’s line, which is a profusion
of lines, is less interested in capturing the likeness of
the person than the essence he embodies, which accounts for
the haunting, disembodied feel to his portraits.
The
line, unlike a volume of colour, invites us to look past or
beyond it, into the dark matter of infinity, into the nothingness
that shadows and animates the subject. Every time the sitter
sits he is confessing that his temporality is not a choice
but a destiny that cannot be double crossed. Where Giacometti’s
restless, nervy lines meet and conflict, man’s essential
humanity is revealed, but we’re not sure if it is consequent
to the sitter’s momentary expression or his slippery,
ambiguous relationship to the infinite. Giacometti’s
portraits continue the silence that begins with the “Mona
Lisa” and implodes into Edward Munch’s “The
Scream:” they can winnow like the wind blowing through
a hollowed out rib cage or sigh like driftwood that is no
longer a tree but whose treeness is indestructible.
.
Year after year, it is the same sitter, his brother Diego,
whom the artist claims he doesn’t recognize. By entering
this confession into the public domain, is Giacometti striking
a pose, bringing attention to his art through the cult of
personality, or is he proposing that in order to know anything
at all it has to be stripped of everything that is familiar
at which point it can be meaningfully encountered?
When
the sitter arrives he brings with him vanity, conceit and
swagger, and the body with which he negotiates the world,
all of which, under Giacometti’s incisive gaze, are
illusory, as short-lived as a lifetime dropped into the abyss
of eternity. Giacometti’s portraits singlehandedly open
up a realm in the history of art where the artist and his
materials convene in order to reveal man’s essential
fragility and apprehensiveness before the fact of his finitude.
And even though he is uniquely able to draw out and isolate
the metaphysical dimension of existence, paradoxically no
artist has captured appearances more emphatically, more robustly
-- and this holds true for his fleshless, mummy-like sculptures.
If
we gravitate to Proust because he demonstrates that every life
can be rendered meaningful as the first effect of intentionally
reflecting on the past, Giacometti’s oeuvre invites us
to reflect on the possibility of meaningful existence by rendering
strange and foreboding that which is most near -- the person
sitting opposite us. Giacometti makes it his essential task
to strip the sitter of all his daily entanglements, which conspire
to protect him from his manifest perishability, in order to
not humiliate but free him.
Since
Giacometti is also a sculptor who must work with solid materials
that withhold transparency and refuse disembodiment, how is
he to make bronze reveal the human condition? How can tempered
bulky matter be converted into a medium that speaks to man’s
existential predicament?
Giacometti
ingeniously solves the problem by creating quasi 2-dimensional
figures, many of them drastically reduced in scale. His roughly
hewed, match-stick like figures, such as “Walking Man,”
almost have no breadth, and the heads are shrunk as if the artist
doesn't quite recognize who is before him, while the withering
legs disappear into disproportionately large feet firmly fixed
(nailed) to the ground -- clinging to dubious epistemological
certainties? So delicate and insubstantial are Giacometti’s
sculptures, that like a fledging bird for the first time airborne,
we want to take them in our hands and reassure them that they
are here and now and not alone.
By
depriving his bronze figures of their physical human dimension,
he lays bear their (man’s) frailty and resolute humanity.
In their attenuated but dignified bearing, he both honours
and defends their terrifying silence as well as their majesty.
And as we stand before them, sometimes towering over them,
we may come to discover our own (diminished) sense of proportion
and the unexpected consolation an encounter with an artwork
can provide.
It
requires repeated acts of courage to make the human condition
serve as one’s lifelong muse, which is why Alberto Giacometti’s
portraits and sculpture rank among the 20th century’s
most significant art.
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