Looking At Giacometti, by David Sylvester (1994), Random House Publishing, Vauxhall, London.

Looking At Giacometti, by David Sylvester (1994), Random House Publishing, Vauxhall, London.

3. A Time-Space Disk

…..Giacometti’s sculptures are objects that do not merely crystallise transient sensations but show the conditions in which transient sensations happen. Their content is not only the what but also the how of visual experience: their subject is not only what is seen, but also the act of seeing. In representing what he has seen, Giacometti objectifies the conditions under which he has seen it – the fact that it is seen in space, the fact that it is uncertain where the boundary is between solid forms and space, the fact that it is no sooner seen than it becomes a memory, the fact that it was seen from a certain distance.

But Giacometti has not only seen the figure, he has tried to re-create seeing it. His experience of seeing it is inseparable from his desire to trap that experience in a work of art, just as, in The Dream, The Sphinx and the death of T., his obsession with the events and their connection is inseparable from his obsession with expressing their relationship in an intelligible form. So the conditions of seeing objectified in his sculptures are not merely those of seeing but of seeing with a view to representing: people are not much concerned with the distance from them and the elusiveness of the contours of the thing they are looking at unless they are trying to represent it, or have the habit of trying to represent things.  

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Giacometti’s sculptures, the, don’t merely convey the conditions of seeing but the conditions of trapping what he sees. They render visible the process of translating reality into art, and we go through that process in reverse. In looking at the sculpture we experience the problem of trying to define the contour, of finding what cannot be defined, and what can, and to what point.

What is there can only be stated tentatively. And the greatness of Giacometti’s art is that it is tentative but is not vague. What this art does is to convey precisely why our sensations of reality cannot be conveyed precisely. (this will seem an admission of weakness only to those who even now believe that the representation of reality in art is, though difficult, a straightforward affair open to all artists of good will.)

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The world of art is solipsistic in a special sense: a tree functions as a tree regardless of whether it is observed, but a work of art is merely a piece of stone or bronze, or a flat piece of canvas covered with paint, until it is seen by a human observer who interprets it as a work of art. The fact about the nature of all works of art is made explicit by Giacometti’s sculpture through the special demands it makes upon the spectator. Several of the surrealist objects were designed….to engage the active participation of the spectator, in reality or in imagination.

The only life-size or near life-size sculptures by Giacometti which make dramatic gestures are the male figure called Man Pointing of 1947, whose outstretched hand makes sense as a gesture only when we see him as pointing to ourselves or to someone or to something in out world, and the female figure of The invisible object, 1934, who seems to be offering us the invisible object held between her hands. And the later sculptures, being seen at a distance, imply the observer at the other end of that distance. In one way or another the work involves the spectator directly, and this involvement is a comment on the dual nature of a work of art as object and as image.

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The sculpture is object, here, image of a figure, over there. The sculpture is an enduring object and its forms symbolise that endurance, but they are also traps for what does not endure, indeed has no extension at all in time. The time between the instant when the artist looks at the model he is copying and the instant later when he looks at the work to add what he has just seen might as well be an eternity, because he is not copying what he is seeing now, but only what he is remembering. And perhaps one implication is that if we never tried to copy what we see, we could go on seeing it, could be lost in it. Nevertheless the work is there, a trap for the untrappable, and this has an enduring form. Art in general has tended to disguise this paradox. Giacometti’s is a meditation upon it.  

In 1935 Giacometti started to work from life with the intention of doing so for a few weeks before making some figure compositions. He went on doing so for five years. Since he began to work from memory again, his work has been a meditation upon what it means to represent reality in art. His obsession is what happens when a human being is seen by another who is obsessed with representing what he sees.

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5. The Residue of a Vision

“I have often felt in front of living beings, above all in front of human heads, the sense of a space-atmosphere which immediately surrounds these beings, penetrates them, is already the being itself: the exact limits, the dimensions of this being become indefinable. An arm is as vast as the Milky Way, and this phrase has nothing mystical about it.” There is either no outline or a multiplicity of outlines in the paintings to mark the transitions of mass to space. In the drawings, besides the same use of multiple outlines, an indiarubber is often used across a form rather as if its traces were brushstrokes made against the form; the traces suggest that the mass has been as it were smeared by space. When such traces cross the edge of a form, the elusiveness of the contour in implied more emphatically than by a simple gap left in the outline, for here it is evident that the artist committed himself to a contour only to find that it was not to be fixed.

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The space in the paintings is not only given a visible, even tangible, presence, but also very definite dimensions. The interval between two forms or two points in a form, or the observer’s eye up to a form, is often traversed by a line indicating the distance in space traversed by vision in bringing something into focus. The distance between the observer and what is observed is again sometimes indicated with great emphasis by the use of an optical perspective which enlarges the near extremities of the subject as in snapshots. Often the whole space has the steep, narrow, hallucinatory perspective characteristic of Tintoretto, Beccafumi and other Mannerists, and found again in certain Vuillard interiors of the first decade of the century. It is a perspective which elongates the space rather as if it were seen through the wrong end of a telescope, and in it distances are so intensified that a figure seated on the far side of a room is separated from one by a chasm, a figure in the foreground is almost on top of one. The effect of this steep perspective is heightened by the painted border, like a mount, which occurs in most of Giacometti’s paintings, defining the limits of the image somewhere inside those of the canvas.

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Experiments in perception show that in normal vision the mind corrects the retinal image so that distant things are not perceived small but life-size and distant. Giacometti’s peculiar tendency is to see in a way that is free of the normal conceptual adjustments and reacts to what is strictly visible.

This is not, however, an impartial, unselective way of seeing. On the contrary, it singles out things with great emphasis, and even its very positive awareness of the presence of the space surrounding any solid body does not lessen the intensity of its focus upon the body around which that space circulates. This narrowing focus upon a compact form out there in space, this attentiveness to apparent size at a given distance, produce the hallucinatory sense of nearness and farness which is probably the most characteristic feature of Giacometti’s work.

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….these tiny figures and heads are intensely alive and rich, with the life and richness that can only come when the mind is concentrated on reality, not on a formal device.

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The roughness of the sculpture’s surface contributes by having the same sort of effect as loose free brushstrokes which from a few inches away are seen as no more than marks on the canvas. The slenderness contributes, in that the sculpture as an object doesn’t get in the way, is insubstantial enough not to fill the field of vision as one gets near, continues to have space around it. And the proportions of the parts around its height contribute. The elongation is not consistent, but increases in degree from head to feet. Consequently, when one stands at the distance from the sculpture at which the artist stood working on it, and has it at the height it must have been at, it becomes foreshortened in such a way that the proportions actually seen are near enough those of a model seen standing some distance away. The figure usually has greatly enlarged feet and often a base whose top plane is sloping, rising from front to back. And as one looks down on the feet and the base from where the artist would have seen them while working, they reproduce the appearance of the feet of a model standing over there and of the floor she is standing on, the instep apparently extended, the floor apparently an inclined plane rising away. The proportions, then, are somewhat anamorphic, in that there is a viewpoint where they become foreshortened in such a way that they resemble the proportions of a thing seen in reality. Except that these sculptures do not only make sense from where the distortion is rectified. There is some complex of distortions in them – clearly arrived at empirically, not through the conscious exercise of optical devices – which modifies the normal functioning of ocular disparity and convergence. The illusory effects do not occur when the sculptures are looked at one-eyed. Giacometti’s sculptural language takes account of the fact that vision is stereoscopic.

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There is one constant.  Figures and busts look straight out in front of them, straight back at the beholder. And not with unseeing eyes. When sitting to Giacometti, one has the feeling that he wants one to be looking back at him as hard as he is looking at one: ‘he demands an attentive presence’, Annette said to me wryly. For Giacometti, it seems, looking id the quintessential human act.

He was talking about the contrast between drawing a living head and drawing a skull. He described how, when at art school in the early 1920s, he had stopped going there one winter which he spent in an hotel room painting and drawing a skull. Then he went on: ‘One day, when I wanted to draw a girl, something struck me, which was that I suddenly saw that the only that stayed alive was her gaze. Everything else – the head turning into a skull – came to more or less the same thing as a dead man’s skull. What made the difference between a dead man and the person was her gaze…New Hebrides sculpture is true, and more than true, because it has a gaze. Its not the imitation of an eye, its purely and simply a gaze. All the rest is a prop for a gaze.

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It is clear in all his work that when Giacometti talks about the gaze as the very sign of life he is talking about a gaze directed straight back at the beholder, mirroring his own gaze.

(mirror masks?)

It was Cézanne (according to Gasquet) who said: ‘Everything we see disperses and vanishes, doesn’t it? Nature is always the same, but nothing remains of it, of what we see. Out art has to inspire a feeling of its permanence while still showing the elements of all its changes. It has to make us sense it as eternal’. Something that is looked at for any length of time is as elusive as if seen for an instant. ‘It might be supposed that realism consists in copying a glass as it is on the table. In fact, one never copies anything but the vision that remains of it at each moment, the image that becomes conscious. You never copy the glass on the table; you copy the residue of a vision…Each time I look at the glass, it seems to be remaking itself, that is to say, its reality becomes uncertain, because its projection in my head is uncertain, or partial. You see it as if it were disappearing, coming into view again, disappearing, coming into view again – that’s to say, it really always is between being and not being, and that is what one wants to copy’.

Working from life is working from memory: the artist can only put down what remains in his head after looking. And the time between the instant when he looks at the model and the instant later when he looks at the paper or canvas or clay to copy what he has just seen might as well be an eternity. The model can go on standing still for ever, but the work will nonetheless be an accumulation of memories none of which is quite the same as any other, because each of them is affected by what has gone before, by the continually changing relation between all that has already been put down and the next glance at the model. ….The artist can never get there, whether he works from nature and builds and builds up an accumulation of memories modifying and contradicting one another, or whether he works from memory and constructs a synthesis of what he remembers having seen. Giacometti’s work lays naked the despair known to every artist who has tried to copy what he sees. At the same time it is an affirmation that there is a hard core which remains from all that has been seen and that this can be stabilised, this can be saved, this can be rendered as if indestructible.

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