Alberto Giacometti: The art of Relation 9780755603633, 9781780767864, 9781780767871

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Illustrations

1 Alberto Giacometti, La Cage, c.1949–50 18 2 Alberto Giacometti, Femme debout, c.1952 20 3 Alberto Giacometti, Cube, 1934 21 4 Alberto Giacometti, La Cage, 1930–1 24 5 Édouard Manet, The Dead Toreador, 1864 36 6 The Seated Scribe, 2620–2500 BCE 38 7 Alberto Giacometti, Le Palais à quatre heures du matin, 1932–3 43 8 Alberto Giacometti, Boule suspendue, 1931 (1965 version) 48 9 Alberto Giacometti, Objet désagréable à jeter, 1931 51 10 Salvador Dalí, The Bather, 1928 60 11 Alberto Giacometti, Pointe à l’oeil, 1932 71 12 Alberto Giacometti, Femme égorgée, 1932 76 13 Alberto Giacometti, La Main, 1947 90 14 Rembrandt, Noli me tangere, 1651 91 15 Alberto Giacometti, Le Nez, 1947 101 16 Édouard Manet, The Execution of Maximilian, 1868–9 102 17 Alberto Giacometti, Trois hommes qui marchent, 1948 104 18 Alberto Giacometti, Quatre figurines sur base, 1950 108 19 Alberto Giacometti, Tête sur tige, 1947 114 20 Alberto Giacometti, Petit buste de femme sur socle (Marie-Laure de Noailles), c.1946, cast 1973, 4/8 120 21 Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920 126 22 Alberto Giacometti, L’Homme qui marche, 1947 130 23 Alberto Giacometti, Homme qui marche I, 1960 131 24 Teasmade (Image from W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants) 136 25 Carl Gotthard Langhans, The Brandenburg Gate, 1788 and 1791 152 26 The Charioteer of Delphi, 474 BC 153 27 Pablo Picasso, Figure (proposée comme projet pour un monument à Guillaume Apollinaire) autumn, 1928 153 vii

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28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Georges Braque, Woman Reading, 1911 154 Pablo Picasso, Tête de femme, 1929–30 156 Alberto Giacometti, Le Chariot, 1950 158 Alberto Giacometti, Le Couple, 1927 162 Alberto Giacometti, Femme cuillère, 1927 (1953 version) 167 Alberto Giacometti, Femme qui marche I, c.1932–6 170 Alberto Giacometti, L’Objet invisible (mains tenant le vide), 1934 174 Alberto Giacometti, Tête qui regarde, 1929 177 Alberto Giacometti, Grande Tête de Diego, 1954 181 Alberto Giacometti, La Cage, 1950 189 Alberto Giacometti, Figurine dans une boîte entre deux maisons, 1950 191 Alberto Giacometti, La Clairière (composition avec neuf figures), 1950 192 Alberto Giacometti, Grand nu, c.1961 196 Alberto Giacometti, La Forêt, 1950 198 Max Ernst, Nageur aveugle, effet d’attouchement, 1934 204 Max Ernst, La Grande Forêt, 1927 209 Alberto Giacometti, La Place II, 1948–9 220 Alberto Giacometti, Femmes de Venise, 1963 or 1964 233 Alberto Giacometti, Homme assis [Lotar III], 1965 237

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Acknowledgements

Writing this book involved me in re-thinking and re-learning critical writing as I am given to understand it. An experience like that cannot develop without numerous acts of kindness and inspiration – some passing, some very long-standing, all of them crucial – of many people, and I hope none will mind that I simply list some of them here: Charlotte Arnold, Richard Aronowitz-Mercer, Brett de Bary, Helena Buescu, Simon Cooke, Jacqueline Chénieux Gendron, Martin Crowley, Theo D’haen, César Domínguez, Jane Fenoulhet, Patrick ffrench, Claude Frontisi, Marisa Galvez, Jane Gilbert, Roland Greene, Sudeshna Guha, Nicholas Hammond, Stephen Hart, Eivind Kahrs, Sarah Kay, Dilwyn Knox, Lucy Dawe Lane, Svend Erik Larsen, Rod Mengham, Michael Moriarty, Sharon Morris, Florian Mussgnug, Patrick O’Donovan, Richard Parish, Jan Parker, Peg Rawes, Jane Rendell, Ellen Sapega, Elinor Shaffer, Morag Shiach, Judith Still, Nicholas White, Nikola White, Emma Wilson, and the undergraduates, MA, and PhD students in French and in Comparative Literature at UCL, from whose energy and commitment to art I have learnt so much. This book is dedicated to the living memory of Malcolm Bowie, and the grace of his critical writing; and to my wife, Patti White, who gives my life its purpose. I would like to thank the following individuals and organizations for publishing earlier versions of my writing as it developed into chapters in this book: the editors of French Studies, ‘Touch, Translation Witness Alberto Giacometti, La Main, Le Nez’, French Studies (2007); Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins, eds, ‘Trauma, Witness, Form: Thinking Walter Benjamin with Alberto Giacometti’, Guilt and Shame: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Visual Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010); Martin Crowley, ed, ‘Walking with Angels in Giacometti and Beckett’, Contact!, special issue of L’Ésprit Créateur (2007); Helena Buescu et al, ‘Reading W. G. Sebald with Alberto Giacometti’, Stories and Portraits of the Self (Rodopi: Amsterdam and New York, ix

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2007); Jan Parker and Timothy Mathews, eds, ‘Reading the Invisible with Cees Nooteboom, Walter Benjamin and Alberto Giacometti’, Tradition, Translation, Trauma, in Classical Presences (Oxford: OUP, 2011). I am extremely grateful to the following for the financial support which made it possible to illustrate the book: the UCL Faculty of Arts & Humanities, the UCL Graduate School, the UCL School of European Languages Culture and Society. I would like to thank the following with special warmness for their many and varied types of support: Liza Thompson, for her consistent enthusiasm for the book; Anna Coatman, Lisa Goodrum and everyone at I.B.Tauris for seeing it through; Elly Thomas for her invaluable work in negotiating rights and permissions; Steve Williamson and everyone at JCS Publishing Services Limited; Georgia Panteli.

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Prologue: Closer, Bigger, Further Away I Vous ici et vous à trois mètres, vous êtes irréductible. Vous n’êtes plus le même.1 Alberto Giacometti You’re here, you’re three metres from here, you’re irreducible. You’re no longer the same. Le devenir-temps de l’espace.2 Georges Didi-Huberman The becoming-time of space.

This book is driven by the desire to respond to the forms of art, and by the conviction that artforms have the capacity to speak of life. Art asks what the relation is of form to content. Questions about art are questions about life: about the point at which things begin to mean. Where is the line crossed from a transient perception to a moment of wonder or wound? It is a question asked by Alberto Giacometti consistently, vulnerably, patiently, openly: what is the responsibility of an artist for the ways in which art speaks of life? In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates makes celebrated fun of the poet, the one who cannot speak the truth unless his voice is not his own; unless it is inspired and taken over by the voice of the gods. For Socrates, the truth to which a rational being can aspire comes from reasoned dialogue with another rational being; truth takes an essentially indexical form, rooted to the moment in which a meeting of ‘souls’ can take place. Writing cannot recreate the truth of the mind, only provide an image of the true knowledge which one soul strives to reach in dialogue with another. And being silent as well as immobile, visual art is a step further removed from the revelation of that truth known only to the gods. In The Republic Plato suggests that craftsmen making beds, over time and in a community of other craftsmen, take part in the continued understanding of the ideal form, the idea itself of the bed. Through this ‘infinite regress of forms’, a relation of continuity and contiguity is maintained between the mere 1

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representation of an ideal form and its living revelation. But still, revelation of any form or any idea can only be partial, only an instance of its eternal form, removed from its true knowledge. Many have questioned an idea of knowledge restricted to an idea of truth; questioned an idea of truth abstracted from the ways of knowing it, and from the values it represents – values of continuity itself, for example, of permanence, rationality; and the policing of their boundaries. But to point to these values and in that way to place them is not the same as stepping out from under their influence. Roland Barthes thinks of the realism in all art from the classical to the modern as the symbolism in which core values are represented and recognized. He alludes in S/Z to the chorus in classical tragedy and describes it as pointing to its own masks, to the fact the chorus wears masks, the masks of its seeing and responding; the masks of pity and fear, if you like, but also heroism, passion, transgression, guile and pragmatism, loyalty and betrayal, orthodoxy. Spectators will recognize these masks, but not the way they themselves are wearing them; recognize others wearing them, but still not recognize the way each one of us wears them like our own skin, and ours alone.3 Perhaps the mixture of wonder and wound in the effects of art arises in this confusion of private and public, of affective and social attachments. Sophocles’s Oedipus points to his masks of honourable ruler and father, he basks in that self-image, only to find another imposed, already lurking implacably: the mask of the traitor, the one who cannot be trusted to safeguard the principles of honour and social living. He agonizes under the skin of this newly discovered and shocking image, coming onto him from a time never his own, and suffers as only he can: as only he could feel proud of his loyalty before, and of his achievements as ruler and peace-maker. Aeschylus’s Cassandra, singing in front of the house of Atreus into which she will never be admitted, suffers from exclusion from the company of those who hear, who hear only the noises in their own heads, just as Cassandra herself hears only the poetry she hears of inevitable suffering: the intimacy of immemorial pain, and a society torn apart in amongst conflicting images of itself – carnal images and political ones. Oedipus and Cassandra are unique, uniquely placed in moments and sensations experienced only by them, but uniquely displaced too, without place, chastized and unheard, their lives unique to them but also implacably determined, beyond the reach of their own understanding. Pointing at the indeterminacy of masks dramatizes the idea of pointing. If dramatic characters point at their own masks, as people do in their gestures and ways of living; if people point without knowing at the masks of their own response, and without being able to see them for the pointing, then what is our understanding of pointing? In the point of view, in perspective, sight and 2

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prologue: closer, bigger, further away

affect intertwine, they make and disassemble each other; each is placed in the other and displaced there, always somewhere else. Giacometti’s aspiration as a human being is to learn the ways of this partial knowing; but to do so without adjusting in favour of optical assumptions or the vanishing point of eternal forms. His writing as much as his visual art explores this unmeasured partiality of knowing. It is agile, responsive and intuitive writing, diverse and complex in range, simple in approach; it lives and breathes transience and the uncertainty of relation. His piece ‘Mai 1920’, published in 1952, is an autobiographical reminiscence of his journeys through art. Everything is in a state of change, even the dramatic moment he describes of abandoning his fidelity to Tintoretto, and turning instead to Egyptian busts, the Cimabue portraits in Assisi and the cut of the jib of three young women walking ahead of him in the streets of Padua. The piece is classically framed, a theme is introduced at the start and returned to at the end, but the theme is the loss of theme, of place, and of understanding: Ce soir en reprenant l’article que j’avais commencé à écrire l’autre jour, je ne me trouve plus dans la même relation avec ce que je voulais dire. Il y a comme un décalage, les faits n’ont plus pour moi la même importance ou plutôt ils ont glissé sur un autre plan, à une autre place et moi je ne suis plus tout à fait le même, je ne suis plus placé au même point par rapport aux choses, leur sens a une autre couleur, tout est passé sous une autre lumière, mais ce sont surtout les distances entre moi et les choses qui ont changé, le temps n’est plus le même. Picking up the article this evening I started on the other day, I find I’m no longer in the same relation to what I was going to say. There’s something like a gap, the facts don’t have the same importance for me or rather they have slipped onto another plane, into a different distance and I’m not quite the same either, I’m not standing in the same place in relation to things, their meaning has a different colour, everything has moved into a different light, but it’s especially the distances between me and things that have changed, time is no longer the same.

And then at the end: Toutes ces œuvres m’apparaissent un peu comme les doubles recréés des trois jeunes filles de Padoue. C’est la même qualité qui m’a envoûté depuis dans Cézanne, c’est elle qui lui donne pour moi une position unique dans toute la peinture des derniers siècles. Mais tout ceci a subi un décalage ces derniers jours: il y a autre chose, mais là je ne sais pas exactement où j’en suis.4 3

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All these works look to me a bit like doubles, recreations of the three young women in Padua. Since then I’ve been spellbound by the same quality in Cézanne, for me it puts him in a unique position in all the painting of the last centuries. But all that has been shifted in these last days: there’s something else now, but I don’t exactly know where I am with it.

With a sensitivity to lived thinking characteristic of all his writing, Giacometti is driven by sensations of the ground shifting beneath him as he attempts an account of his unfixed, lived and subjective relation to Egyptian, Renaissance, and modern art. With the mobility of implicitness, of lived association on the point of emergence, he resorts to the basic elements of visual experience and representation: distance and proximity, surfaces and planes, different kinds of light. In a notebook entry of 1952, he writes about his enthusiasm for landscapes and landscape painting, and the need he feels to paint every landscape he might ever set eyes on, including all the ones which might materialize at his window or in front of the door.5 That intimate sense of how the world looks to one person and not another, combined with the paradoxical need to communicate that uniqueness to others, is translated into the sliding spaces of Giacometti’s experience of art, and especially his experience of Cézanne. All of Cézanne’s landscapes seem to have these questions spread over them everywhere, both thinly and massively: who is seen? Who or what is being framed? How do the different parts of the picture interact? As I look, stand here in relation to one of these pictures, here and not there, what is disclosed and what is lost to me? I think this brings Giacometti to the question at the core of his art, perhaps of any art: the question at the core of the relation of form to content. Mais, de nouveau, il y avait là une espèce de confusion; était-ce les choses que je voyais que je voulais reproduire, ou était-ce une chose affective? 6 Once again, though, there was a kind of confusion: did I want to reproduce the things I saw, or was it an affective thing?

What is the relation of seeing, of knowing what I am looking at and trying to communicate, to knowing what I am feeling as I look? Or rather, can I know the generation of my affective embrace of the world as I look at it and understand it? In another interview, Giacometti famously and inevitably allows the entanglement of vision and affect to lead him into the narrative of narratives: Et moi, j’ai dessiné une fois dans son atelier [l’atelier de son père] – j’avais 18–19 ans – des poires qui étaient sur une table – à distance normale d’une nature morte. 4

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prologue: closer, bigger, further away

Et les poires devenaient toujours minuscules. Je recommençais, elles redevenaient toujours exactement de la même taille. Mon père, agacé, a dit: ‘Mais commence à les faire comme elles sont, comme tu les vois!’ Et il les a corrigées. J’ai essayé de les faire comme ça et puis, malgré moi, j’ai gommé et elles sont redevenues une demi-heure après, exactement au millimètre, de la même taille que les premières.7 And once in my father’s studio – I was 18 or 19 years old – I drew some pears that were on the table – from the usual distance for a still life. And the pears would always come out tiny. I’d start again, they came out in exactly the same size every time. It began to irritate my father. ‘Oh do make them as they are, as you see them!’ And he corrected them. I tried to do it like that, and then in spite of myself I rubbed it out, and half an hour later they came out again to a millimetre exactly the same size as the first ones.

Will this back-and-forth Oedipal story of generational competition ever end, this struggle for power, for banishment and autonomy, for voice and freedom? The complicity of optical and affective could not be more starkly drawn than in Giacometti’s accomplished oral story-telling. Seeing, and being told how to see and what to see, are locked in combat and cannot be separated. And yet complicity itself is incomplete; there is always more to come, it cannot be transcended, but this partialness itself means that one point of view cannot be absorbed in the other. The very inseparability of optical and affective vision means that Alberto Giacometti cannot but return to his own way of seeing and of measuring dimensions. And still the optical and the affective come together in Giacometti’s emphatic crescendo, his affirmation of his own seeing. His pears come out to the millimetre as he had them originally, he claims, even though he tells us all previous versions, his own as well as the enforced adjustments, have been rubbed out. These measurements, even at the time, are already a matter of memory, then a memory told much later to David Sylvester, and now to you and me. Giacometti’s affirmation leaves him suspended, alone with what he sees, all point of comparison removed. In telling the story of the point of view implacably stamped onto seeing, Giacometti tells the story too of the displacement of the point of view, its absorption in its own affective spill. ‘His’ seeing, ‘his’ perception of dimension and ‘his’ understanding of measurement are a matter of crisis. This crisis has been pored over by many people, people wishing to follow Giacometti himself in trying to make sense of his art as it developed throughout his life, how its development was interrupted, how it is made in interruption, how it bears witness to interruption and catastrophe. Georges Didi-Huberman 5

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gives it contour by weaving around his reading of Giacometti’s narrative of 1946, Le Rêve, le sphinx et la mort de T, a web of thinking on death, the relation of death to meaning and the collapse of meaning, and the relation of blindness to an understanding of anthropological depth.8 Giacometti’s crisis involves meaning and catastrophe because it is a crisis of distance, of measurement, of size, of relation and the possibility of relation. Cinema and photography claim to capture reality, sculpture and painting show the reality that escapes each one of us individually: that realization creates the desire in Giacometti to make art in response to the world out there of things and especially people. Au fond, j’ai commencé très nettement à vouloir travailler enfin d’après nature vers 1945. Il y a eu pour moi une scission totale entre la vue photographique du monde et ma propre vision que j’ai acceptée. C’est le moment où la réalité m’a étonné comme jamais. Avant, quand je sortais du cinéma, il ne se passait jamais rien, c’est-à-dire que l’habitude de l’écran se projetait sur la vision courante de la réalité. [. . .] Tout à coup il y a eu une rupture [. . .] et je regardais les gens [. . .] comme si je ne les avais jamais vues.9 Really it was in about 1945 when I started quite clearly wanting to work from life. For me there had been a total cleft between the photographic view of the world and my own vision which I’d accepted. At that point reality began to astound me like never before. Before when I came out of the cinema nothing would ever happen, the way of looking at the screen would just go on projecting itself onto the general way of seeing reality. [. . .] Suddenly there had been a rift [. . .] and I was looking at people [. . .] as though I’d never seen them before.

The date may be approximate, but the desire – both sudden and temporal – to show the despair and the power of reality lived in the out-of-reach could not be more palpable, or more life-changing and life-affirming. Lived reality is full, to copy it is to understand our capacity for exploration and self-exploration, vitality and humility: for what can be copied other than the ability to see our own seeing and to account for it? But how? And how far does that ability stretch? On peut considérez que le réalisme consiste à copier [. . .] un verre tel qu’il est sur la table. En fait, on ne copie jamais que la vision qu’il en reste à chaque instant, l’image qui devient consciente [. . .] Vous ne copiez jamais le verre sur la table; vous copiez le résidu d’une vision.10 6

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prologue: closer, bigger, further away

You could say that realism consists of copying [. . .] that glass, just as it is on the table. But in fact you only ever copy the vision of the glass that remains at any moment, the image that becomes conscious [. . .] You never copy the glass on the table; you’re copying the residue of seeing something.

To see is to mourn the passing of what can be understood and grasped in what is seen. The indeterminacy of distance passes into the indeterminacy of time, enclosing the moment of living in its own efforts to reach beyond. Les signes, même les signes du passé, ne se stabilisent jamais. Ils surgissent, ils disparaissent. On croit qu’il y a des œuvres d’art qui ont acquis une stabilité; ce n’est pas vrai.11 Signs, even signs from the past, are never stable. They erupt, they disappear. People think there are works of art that have acquired some stability; it isn’t true.

To see is to see partially, and to see the residue of past sightings accu­mulating. This residue replicates, repeats and confirms the partiality of the present moment of seeing, its positions bathed in time, its spaces lived in the loss of their own place. To see the past is to see residue, and to see the instability of the past made in the present moment passing. The relations from which the signs are made are themselves unstable, unfixed and vulnerable. Signs are living acts of communication, lived experiences of the collapse of understanding; and the emergence of the understanding known to us. The beauty of art and the power of monuments honour the past in mourning its banishment, the incompleteness of its present understanding – and of witness, tolerance and love. Optical habits and affective attachments spill implacably and irreversibly over everything we see, making the present moments of seeing and living. And yet with equal intensity, and self-evidence, but still with no hope of reversal or even resistance, those adjustments in seeing may also simply fall away: Quand je parlais du contour qui va de l’oreille au menton, l’impossible c’était que cette ligne qui a l’air extrêmement longue devrait occuper sur la toile un espace très court. Donc, il est impossible de mettre sur une toile une ligne qui a l’air d’avoir 20 cm de long sur une distance de 3 cm. Ça, c’est totalement impossible: vous ne pouvez pas faire une ligne trois fois plus longue que l’espace sur lequel vous pouvez la dessiner étant donné que c’est une toile plate.12 7

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When I was talking about the contour running from the ear to the chin, the impossible thing I meant is that that line which looks extremely long ought to take up a space on the canvas which is very short. So, it’s impossible to put a line which looks 20 cm long onto a distance of 3 cm on a canvas. That’s something completely impossible: you can’t make a line that’s three times as long as the space you have to draw it on, given that the canvas is flat.

In addressing the conditions of drawing or painting what he sees, Giacometti comes up against the self-evident inadequacy and the dishonesty of perspective, the mission given it to make over there compatible with over here. In accounting for what he sees in drawing or painting Giacometti, simply and inevitably, comes up against a sensation, a lived reality: something looks like it is over there, but the way it looks to be over there cannot be translated into the way that appearance is accounted for over here. For the translation has already been made. An effort of composition, perhaps compassion, an effort of transposition and renewed translation has to be imagined: Représentation plastique des corps vivants de la nature mais composés et transposés. Copie exacte ou recherche de copie.13 Plastic representation of the living bodies of nature but composed and transposed. Exact copy or the search for a copy.

This is one of the jottings Giacometti made at the time of another moment of awareness, in 1925, that making an artwork showing reality as he saw it in his mind’s eye was impossible for him. To show or to copy passes into the search for an ability to show, and to compose. The composition of a work able to represent, to transpose and translate the living look over here of living things over there will remain incomplete. One place of looking can not be translated into the other; or one place, or one time of viewing into another. It already has been. Relation itself is suspended, interrupted, and people stand and wait for its renewal, or observe its collapse, or stand immersed in its oblivion. Distances are neither small nor large, but tend instead towards the unmeasured and the unfathomable: Vous ici et vous à trois mètres, vous êtes irréductible. Vous n’êtes plus le même.14 You’re here, you’re three metres from here, it’s irreducible, you’re not the same. 8

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prologue: closer, bigger, further away

Approached with the honesty of no perspective, the experience of distance calls to question the ability of human beings to imagine each other, and each other’s positions: affective ones, cultural and historical ones. Is there a relation possible without the assumption of common dimension, its spontaneous and invisible imposition? Vous agrandissez mentalement. Parce que vous savez que ma tête a une certaine dimension objective. Et vous imaginez cette dimension. Mais vous ne la voyez pas. Vous me voyez petit et vous agrandissez.15 You’re enlarging mentally. Because you know that my head has a certain objective dimension. And you imagine that dimension. But you don’t see it. You’re seeing me small and enlarging.

For Giacometti, if someone appears small because they are at a distance then they are small. We see what we see, and we need the freedom to see what we see and not what we do not. The tyranny of the point of view collapses in its own incompleteness. I see what I see, and not what I do not: but what I see is still not mine. For Giacometti, ‘ma’ dimension, ‘his’ experience of dimension arises from objects and art to which he is attached emerging in an indeterminate focus, in a collapsing fixity, in a cultural space without place.16 If I am looking from the front, I cannot look from the other side – ‘quand je vois la face, je ne vois pas la nuque.’17 In that generalized optical history accumulating in each one of us singly, people may discover the ability to allow others the not-mine distances, the unenclosed places of life.

II Je ne puis parler qu’indirectement de mes sculptures et espérer dire que partiellement ce qui les a motivées.18 Alberto Giacometti I can only talk indirectly about my sculptures and my hope can only ever be to say partially what has motivated them.

I began by saying that in writing this book I have been driven by the desire to respond to the forms of art; and to follow Giacometti in his tireless questioning of how art speaks of life. But the paradoxical quality of such a desire emerges all the time. Giacometti’s objects and figures seem to 9

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demand discussion of everything other than his work, his style, his self-inwork. And yet how powerfully they impose themselves. Not only because of Giacometti’s obstinate dedication to an idea of life-in-form: what am I seeing? how can I make what I see in a sculpture, in a painting, in a drawing? how is what I see seen? But also because of the poetry, the vocabularies of complex sensation and simple impact which writers have developed in response: Yves Bonnefoy, Georges Didi-Huberman, Jacques Dupin, André du Bouchet, Jean Genet, Rosalind Krauss, Michel Leiris, James Lord, Michael Peppiatt, Jean-Paul Sartre, David Sylvester – the range of lived experience expressed is overwhelming, depriving me of a place to start and the confidence to continue. It comprises, at the very least, an existential sense of weight, the endless commonality of life: the intimate and transient – mess and bits of plaster; the dreamy anecdote; the metaphysical indicator; the fragment – of an argument disintegrating, of a figure emerging. Any of this and more produces its own cumulative pressure, a pressure to see, and to see Giacometti’s work not only whole, but interrupted, indefinitely suspended. How shall I respond to the compelling uniqueness of Giacometti’s visual signs, his unrepeatable and yet endlessly renewed visual invitations? How shall I respond to his paradoxical invitations to see what can be seen, and only that, without any position from which to see? Stand in front of any piece by Giacometti: it calls on others but remains incomparable to them. The same is true of the media Giacometti uses: sculpting, painting, drawing and writing. This complicates still more my attempts here to say how this book began. I often thought I might be better off simply translating into English some of the absorbing, intimately signifying slices of French writing on Giacometti’s art, including Giacometti’s own. I thought that the process of translating would bring me as close as I can get to the sensuous, crumbling edifices of Giacometti’s works and their own special diaspora. But I wanted to rise to whatever I am able to see in these works, and hear in his writing, not just by testifying to the loss of a place from which to begin, but also to the search for one. That is how I have responded to Giacometti’s forms and to the writing about them which has fascinated me; I wanted to rise to the aura of Giacometti’s art – the making as well as the loss of understanding, experienced singly as well as communally. In 1933 Giacometti wrote a piece which he called ‘Je ne puis parler qu’indirectement de mes sculptures’ – I can only talk indirectly about my sculptures. I have tried to explore this indirectness, the way of reading art and texts it suggests; and its way of reading affective and social relations to others. Relation itself is a themeless theme, the form of the indirect content in Giacometti’s works. Some of the pages which follow indicate ways in which Giacometti can be 10

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prologue: closer, bigger, further away

placed in relation to other figures in modern art: Cézanne, Braque, Breton, Bataille, Ernst, Brancusi, Fautrier. But in thinking about this book and writing it, the aim has been to follow, mentally to mime, the indirectness of Giacometti’s placings: his art of the place and the no place through which he approaches his viewers and, perhaps, draws them in. Approaching Giacometti’s invitations to look through the writings which they have attracted is one way of trying to learn the ways of the indirect. Although that approach was one of the starting-points in my journey with Giacometti, it gave me to understand, in itself, that his questions of relation, and place, are not questions of about, but where. Constantly, existentially, Giacometti discovers questions of relation in questions of form. I have found that this questioning illuminates a range of texts uniquely, which then illuminates Giacometti’s pieces in return. To compare on a basis other than content, and even on the basis of the collapsing spaces of form, might well have been to manufacture comparisons which are purely arbitrary, subjective, without general meaning or importance at all. But it is the approach itself that builds commonality: that is the suggestion and the offering of this book. An understanding of the relations of understanding itself, and of community, emerges in the moments in which, as readers and viewers, we may wonder about the how, and not just the what, of emergence and disappearance. But I want to pay tribute here to some of the writing specifically on Giacometti’s work which launched me on my own journey of discovery. This cannot be an exhaustive tribute, and I will have to restrict myself here to the writing on Giacometti of Jean-Paul Sartre, David Sylvester and Georges Didi-Huberman. David Sylvester tells us about the different ways the various chapters of his book came into being, the different encounters with Alberto and his work they each represent, all linked to the varying degrees of confidence Sylvester had in his ability to write the book at all. These doubts and deflections provide the basis on which Sylvester is able, I think, to transport his readers into imagining the lived experience of making visual things, and to feed his readers’ imaginations on watching visual things in writing. Nonetheless, Sylvester like Sartre or Genet is able to begin with an intimate knowledge of Giacometti the living being, of Giacometti as he works and speaks; whereas others like I do have to begin from a position removed. And yet for Giacometti himself, this removed quality of human relation is part of sculpture and painting, as much as it is of writing: Si l’on veut, entre l’écriture et la peinture, il me semble qu’il n’y a pas un gouffre. Les signes de l’écriture ne sont les signes que de ce qu’ils ne sont pas. En peinture, c’est la même chose.19 11

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If you like, for me I don’t think there’s much of a gulf between writing and painting. Signs in writing are only signs of what they are not. In painting, it’s the same.

III L’homme est l’être dont l’essence est d’exister pour autrui.20 Jean-Paul Sartre Man is the being whose essence is to exist for others.

Sartre sees that Giacometti’s sculptures face what is now not seen – not seen in the now of lived time. But his response is an inverse and dramatic affirmation: what is lost to the human eye is what is made visible to it. The darkness of human understanding casts its own light over the immensity of its own past: Il n’est pas besoin de regarder longtemps le visage antédiluvien de Giacometti pour deviner son orgueil et sa volonté de se situer au commencement du monde.21 Looking at Giacometti’s antediluvian face it does not take long to sense his pride and his will to situate himself at the start of the world.

‘La Recherche de l’absolu’, 1948: Sartre’s title encapsulates the tensions in his approach to Giacometti’s post-war sculpture in human form. A search is announced, a lengthy, perhaps unending internal process, or a struggle with external pressures; but an absolute at the end of it, a truth – implacable, but certain. But what is an absolute? Sartre draws on the metaphor of the antediluvian to describe a particular human being, Giacometti himself, who seems to be bursting with memory: but with so much memory, and from so far away, that he is also devoid of any particular memory, overcome and overwhelmed by memory, even from within the contours given to this vast anteriority by the metaphor itself of the antideluvian. This paradox of the overwhelming and the unique, the placed and the confident provides Sartre with the basis for his wild assertion of the capacity, incarnated in Giacometti, of a human being to account for her or his own life, not only its generation but also its beginning. This wildness proffered in Sartre’s opening sentence pushes out to the fore the brutality of memory, its system of total recall 12

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operating through total wipe-out. It pushes to the fore the capacity of human beings to acclimatize to the oblivion growing in their psyche, and to build dramatic metaphors out of it. With whatever blind robustness and complacent proactiveness, Sartre is dramatizing the atrophy of memory, but also the movement of ideas in the various property and resources wars of a perpetual present. But because of the dramatic power of Sartre’s writing as well as in spite of it, something emerges of the questioning in Giacometti’s figures in human form. Where are Giacometti’s people? Whom do they address? En cette extrême jeunesse de la nature et les hommes, ni le beau ni le laid n’existent encore, ne le goût, ni la critique: tout est à faire, pour la première fois l’idée vient à un homme de tailler un homme dans un bloc de pierre. Voilà donc le modèle: l’homme. In this, the earliest youth of nature and mankind, neither beauty nor the ugly yet exists, or taste, or criticism; everything is still to be done, for the first time man has the idea of cutting a man out of a block of stone. That is the model, then: man.

In Sartre’s account Giacometti’s figures erupt from the void, in the ex nihilo as opposed to the Darwinian model of creation. Lacan also proposes the ex nihilo model of creation as paradoxically the more likely to confront human beings with the reality of their lot: the implacable absence of originary meaning and the equally implacable absence of fulfilment in desire. But for Sartre the ex nihilo model of creation, still the quintessentially human one, provides humankind with a model of itself in which it occupies the entire frame of its own awareness and knowing. Giacometti’s figures in this light emerge like so many totems, which in themselves, for Sartre, reveal the reasons for making them, adoring them. They reveal the generation of reverence itself, and give birth to the capacity to see through restrictions of thought. In the very power of Sartre’s investment in his notion of the human model, its unnecessary relation to Giacometti’s figures emerges; and the dynamics of signs, of human communication, are further dramatized. I am reminded of Jacques Dupin’s remark on the importance of Giacometti’s mother in his psycho-biography, how much Dupin feels he would have needed to talk to her to understand Giacometti, but he never met her. A sense of understanding without knowing emerges, a pressure to respond in a certain way, and to speak without understanding where the pressure comes from. Such a without allows communication, it seems, as well as exceeding it. 13

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Here are some of Giacometti’s own remarks about the model. Like Sartre does, Giacometti sees his art as an attempt to reach the essential properties of life, of living it and making it happen: C’est comme si la réalité était continuellement derrière les rideaux qu’on arrache … Il y en a encore une autre … toujours une autre. Mais j’ai l’impression, ou l’illusion, que je fais des progrès tous les jours. C’est cela qui me fait agir, comme si on devait bel et bien arriver à comprendre le noyau de la vie. Et on continue, sachant que plus on s’approche de la ‘chose’, plus elle s’éloigne. La distance entre moi et le modèle a tendance à augmenter sans cesse: plus on s’approche, plus la chose s’éloigne.22 It’s as though reality were always behind a curtain that you pull away . . . There’s always another . . . and another. But I have the impression, or perhaps it’s an illusion that I’m making some progress every day. That’s what makes me take action, as though you had well and truly to succeed in understanding the core of life. And you go on, knowing the closer you get to the ‘thing’, the further it moves away. The distance between me and the model has a tendency to increase all the time: the closer you get to the thing, the further it moves away.

Reality is made in the attempts to disclose it, which itself makes the reality which Giacometti tries to disclose. There is always another reality, and each one is made in pulling back a curtain of someone’s own making. Both creator and spectator of her own life and her own viewing, each person is at an indeterminate distance from the stages of her own understanding: understanding itself is suspended, stops, starts, stops again; placed, and displaced. This unfixed distance between man and his creations extends even to the model as Sartre imagines it. There the model is man’s creation, it occupies the entire frame of vision of man himself; his seeing is also locked into it, and the fantasy of the ex nihilo model can begin in this suppression of distance between man and his model – the models of his own seeing and knowing. The difference between proximity and distance is nowhere to be seen – in Sartre’s metaphor Giacometti incarnates the antediluvian; its then is as now, its there is as here. An image of the generation of man ex nihilo is a heuristic ploy for Lacan in the continual effort to dismantle the immense legions of Narcissism. But in Sartre, it feeds the Narcissism of the Beginning, the model made now for the observation of man now, of his own thinking and his own power. For Sartre the power to make now is the power of taking as well as making, which in response to Giacometti emerges as the beginning not only of the model but of a community of human beings: an odd generosity of 14

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belonging to. Relations between incommensurable elements will be resolved in the process itself of understanding and making meaning: Kafka, au moment de sa mort, voulait qu’on brulât ses livres et Dostoïevsky, dans les tous derniers temps de sa vie, rêvait de donner une suite aux Karamozov. Peut-être moururent-ils l’un et l’autre avec mauvaise humeur, celui-ci pensant qu’il n’avait encore rien fait de bon, celui-là qu’il glisserait hors du monde sans même l’avoir égratigné. Et pourtant ces deux-là ont gagné, quoi qu’ils aient pu penser. Giacometti aussi et il le sait bien. C’est en vain qu’il s’accroche à ses statues comme un avare à son magot; en vain qu’il atermoie, temporise, trouve cent ruses pour voler un peu de temps: des hommes vont entrer chez lui, l’écarter, emporter toutes ses œuvres jusqu’au plâtre qui couvre son plancher. Il le sait; son air traqué le trahit; il sait qu’il a gagné, en dépit de lui-même, et qu’il nous appartient. Just before he died Kafka wanted all his books to be burnt and Dostoevsky, right up to the very last moments, was dreaming of writing another volume of The Brothers Karamazov. Perhaps each one died in a bad temper, Kafka thinking he still hadn’t done anything good, Dostoevsky that he would slip away from the world without even having scratched its surface. And yet both are winners, whatever they may have thought. Giacometti too, and he knows it. He can cling all he likes to his statues like a miser to his stash, linger and temporize all he likes too, find a hundred ploys to steal a bit of time: in the end men will barge in, push him aside, take all his works and even the plaster dust all over the floor. He knows it; his hounded look gives him away; he knows he’s won, in spite of himself, and that he belongs to us.

For Sartre here, understanding is born in appropriation and take-over. Standing and looking in one place wipes out another. So it does for Giacometti, as each one of us finds a new reality to understand in drawing away the veils of our own seeing and our own making. But that not-knowing is the language of Giacometti’s art: his art of the place gives form to everything, which obliterates the place of others and makes it understood. Loss is not transformed into a gain, as it is for Sartre, but is the model of what is obliterated in knowing. What for Sartre looking at Giacometti is the gain of content, the confidence of thought to assimilate everything in the name of reaching beyond, for Giacometti himself is the gain of form, its power to show that we see in notseeing; and that we know in forgetting. Loser wins, Sartre remarks, here as elsewhere. But in responding here to Sartre through Giacometti, it seems to me that the place of winning, in its all-exclusive glory, shows relation to others in a state of suspension. It provides a platform, 15

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perhaps, of an art able to show the sacrifice not only of points of view, but the people behind them on the altar of the ever-more, the ever more-owned and the ever better-applied. Both Sartre and Giacometti confront the violence of seeing and knowing encouraged by rampant consumerism. But in that proximity their approaches to failure show divergent approaches to resistance and freedom. For Giacometti, failure shows not what, in content, we do not know, but that we do not know, from our spatial positions and in our affective places. Le raté m’intéresse autant que le réussi. Et il faudrait plutôt exposer les choses les moins bonnes que choisir les meilleures. Parce que si les moins bonnes tiennent, les bonnes, elles, tiennent sûrement. Si par contre vous choisissez celles qui paraissent les meilleures, c’est une illusion. Parce que s’il y en a d’autres qui sont moins bonnes et ne tiennent pas, cachées quelque part, même si vous ne les faîtes pas voir, elles existent. Et si quelqu’un regarde très attentivement, il voit la faiblesse, même dans les meilleures. Donc il faudrait commencer par le plus bas.23 Failure interests me as much as success. And it’s better to exhibit the less good things than pick the best. Because if the less good ones work, the good ones certainly will. If on the other hand you choose the ones that seem the best, it’s always an illusion. Because if there are others that are less good and don’t work, hidden away somewhere, even if you don’t exhibit them they still exist. And if someone looks very carefully, he’ll see the weakness even in the best. So it’s best to start at the bottom.

But where might that lowest point be, or the highest? Where is that human distance which for Sartre is the absolute truth which Giacometti shows, and which is the absolute guarantee of mankind’s relation to others, the guarantee that it exists at all?24

IV A dramatic gesture is used to establish a relationship between the figure and the spectator.25 David Sylvester

My most vivid memories of being in rooms and spaces with sculptures by Giacometti are those of the exhibition Alberto Giacometti, sculptures, peintures, dessins at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1991–2; the exhibtion Alberto Giacometti in Postwar Paris at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in 2001; the 16

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exhibition L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2007; and various visits to Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the courtyards of the Fondation Maeght at Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Of the first of those occasions my memory is of a rather relieved joy. Rather than exposure to a dour set of themes that might have had to do with anonymity, solitude, perhaps disease and suffering, and certainly martyrdom, which is probably what I was expecting, I found instead a bright space full of movement and variety. The cadaverous combined with the balletic. I found individual figures shown as though locked in their own intimacy; but also small groups of figures in open-ended relation to one another, or was it an enclosed one after all? I found different indications of space and spatial context, including boxes with thick edges, and transparent cages or cubes; space constructed and space volatized; plinths overpowering from beneath, but also plinths supporting and setting free. I found stationary figures and moving figures. I have also discovered that for Giacometti, the appearance of variety and movement also expresses the opposite; and that one of his ways of responding is to separate, from 1951 onwards, the women who appear to stand still and the men who appear to move. And I found urban associations as well as associations of something quite different, which in reading David Sylvester I can think of as mountainous. Sensations of immediacy and ephemera combined with a longer sense of personal memory, although none of them ever seemed quite to belong to me. And I was struck as well by a sense of many hidden signs, Western contemporary ones, oriental ones ancient and contemporary, which were then added to the ancient Egyptian, Byzantine and Cycladic ones that I read about later. I felt I was breathing in signs hidden everywhere. What am I to make of this signifying mobility? Was I simply experiencing the cultural breathing spaces in any spontaneous unawareness of the point of view? The seductive effects of a frantic, globalized and easy manipulation of the point of view? What is the nature, then, of reciprocity and of an interactive cultural space? I went on one occasion to Alberto Giacometti in Postwar Paris with my youngest son, aged six at the time. As he and I went around the exhibition I was looking for some spark to re-illuminate the bits of time I had spent up to that point thinking about Giacometti, or alluding to his work in my mind; and he was wondering how long the visit was going to last. He returned at one point to La Cage and began to pose in front of it, and to its sides, imitating the figure’s gesture of outstretched arms from everywhere around it, making it into movement, an artless, consumer-resistant ballet of his own, a graceful, private offering.26 How many unfathomable boundaries, micro-initiations and negotiations, tiny imaginary embraces are there, I wondered, on the 17

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alberto giacometti: the art of relation 1. Alberto Giacometti, La Cage, c.1949–50. Bronze, 90.5 x 36.5 x 34 cm. Susse Foundry, number of edition 7/8, N°AGD 1908. Collection Fondation Alberto & Annette Giacometti/© The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Collection Fondation Alberto & Annette Giacometti.

way to identifying with something? And in what combination of adoration, boredom and generosity? David Sylvester writes that ‘face to face with a Giacometti image, the spectator finds himself as if involved in a reciprocal relationship.’ How deft his inclusion of the crucial as if.27 He goes on: ‘Giacometti has made a life-size sculpture of a girl with hands held out offering an invisible object to the beholder.’ He is referring to L’objet invisible (mains tenant le vide), of 1934.28 (See Figure 34, page 174.) He goes on: ‘He also made a life-size sculpture of man extending his arm and pointing – and the gesture only makes sense when we confront the figure and see him indicating ourselves or something in our world.’ This time he is referring to Man Pointing, of 1947. What a beautiful comparison it is – pieces from before and after the trauma of World War II, one showing a woman, the other a man, one holding an invisible offering, one pointing to 18

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one; each offers a shared understanding, perhaps, of love or grace; or loss and pain. But what if we cannot imagine this comparison, nonetheless? What if we cannot imagine the figures showing us something of ourselves? The poetic and subjective qualities of Sylvester’s thought-in-writing, his willingness to develop a language from within his own experience for the sensations and invitations of this art, offer these questions to his readers. And a different question, too: what if we are able to imagine the male figure pointing at something which is not ours to understand, outside the world of any one of us? Would Sylvester’s sensuous evocation of viewers ‘confronting’ something of themselves in these pieces turn out to be constricting, even lacking something of the spirituality he finds there? Or perhaps another meaning of ‘confront’ emerges, in the indefinite pointing and offering of this man, and of this woman: what if, after all, we cannot see past what we see? In these two works a dramatic gesture is used to establish a relationship between the figure and the spectator. In the standing woman no gesture is used, or needed. I feel within my muscles the stance of the figure, feel I am adopting the same stance, feel this so strongly that sometimes I find myself doing so in reality – holding myself more taut and upright, placing my hands straight down my sides. But, however strongly I feel the figure’s action within myself, I never feel identified with the figure, never have the sensation of losing myself in it, out there. With what disconcerting ease Sylvester draws us into a dialogue of two sculptures only to move, in writing oiled like a hinge, to the others he wants to draw attention to here: Femme debout, of 1952, or the graphite drawing Femme debout, of 1946. But is identification so easily established, broken off, re-attached? What is identification? Here, it is something Sylvester is drawn into, he senses it bodily as he looks at these figures, even miming their effects as a way of thinking about their power; yet still that power withdraws from him. These figures invite in, but at the same time have no place into which people may step or wander. The receptiveness each offers takes form in its own interruptions: hospitality proffered and withdrawn. David Sylvester shows he is not a woman in miming the poses of Alberto’s women; and my son was not an adult in miming the angel in a cage, nor was I a child in being mesmerized by it. And yet . . . in modelling his work on the incompleteness of seeing, Giacometti’s art reaches out an embrace that eludes embrace – a constructed, principled embrace built in the gaps between what is seen and made, seen and imagined, here and there, mine and yours. As Sylvester gives his readers to imagine, spectators of Giacometti are drawn into spaces they may never occupy, blindly and sensually entering places of the not-I. 19

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alberto giacometti: the art of relation 2. Alberto Giacometti, Femme debout, c.1952. Bronze, 59.9 x 10.3 x 18.6 cm. AGD 315, Vers 1952, N° d'édition HC 2/2 1969, fondeur Susse Fondeur Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti 1994-0131 © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Collection Fondation Alberto & Annette Giacometti.

Only, I feel I have the bronze’s stance, here, where I am, not out there. And the more I feel with it, the more do I feel my apartness from it confirmed, the more do I recognise its otherness. I am what the figure is, out there, and in being like it I am separated from it.29

What keeps us together, as viewers, is that we cannot share the same space; we cannot be in the same spaces as each other or see the same spaces; our sense of community is made of such broken analogy.

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V C’est là le paradoxal rite de passage du Cube, qui nous oblige à tourner et retourner autour de lui sans jamais nous sentir entrer nulle part.30 Georges Didi-Huberman That is the paradoxical rite of passage offered by Cube, which makes us walk around it again and again without us ever feeling we are entering anywhere.

Georges Didi-Huberman’s whole manner of approaching Giacometti bears witness to relation made, broken, made again in Giacometti’s life-in-work. Le Cube et le visage: autour d’une sculpture d’Alberto Giacometti is a spiral-shaped investigation of Giacometti’s works revolving around various readings of one of his sculptures, Cube of 1934. Didi-Huberman exploits the formal presence of Cube, its polyhedral shape, to construct a metaphoric and polyphonic interplay of critical facets which allows him to engage with a range of Giacometti’s aesthetic investigations. He develops his own critical, theoretical way of rising 3. Alberto Giacometti, Cube, 1934. Bronze, 95 x 54 x 59 cm. Alberto Giacometti Foundation, Kunsthaus Zürich, © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Kunsthaus Zürich.

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to the invitations Giacometti extends to see in his pieces everything that is not in them, not there. What is being offered by the hands giving contours to emptiness? Where is the human relation pointed to in the distance? Formal and critical investigations combine in Didi-Huberman’s starting-point: the fundamental property of the cube, the optical and geometric conditions of its visibility, intensified indefinitely in the polyhedron. Each of its facets, each interplay between them is concentrated in the one on which it stands, the one face down, facing the ground beneath, ­facing the unseen and the unknown, facing what has dropped beyond and comes back as signs of its own decay and of our own time as viewers. Didi-Huberman draws on Yves Bonnefoy’s seminal engagement with Giacometti’s life-in-work to point at this continuous tension between pointing itself and dissolution, there and not there. Plus près de nous, Yves Bonnefoy, dans sa monumentale monographie, emploie aussi le mot de présence, pour en suggérer même un moment de synthèse. Mais le mouvement intime de ses analyses nous dévoile une inquiétude théorique plus profonde, donc plus juste, qui souvent fait trembler le mot jusqu’à ce que seul son contraire puisse l’étayer: ‘cette présence, ou absence,’ dit-il, à propos – déjà – du Cube. Que nous enseigne ce paradoxe, avant même que nous ayons à l’expliciter? Que le statut de l’œuvre, ainsi que sa détermination temporelle (le moment particulier où elle vit le jour), doivent être envisagés comme relevant d’une pliure et non plus d’une mise-entre-parenthèses: moment où deux choses contradictoires se rabattent l’une sur l’autre – face contre face ou dans le pli d’une angulation plus ou moins large, plus ou moins serrée – se cristallisent avant de se séparer peut-être à nouveau. Moment qui obéirait à la logique plus intéressante, plus productive, du et . . . et . . .: non pas un épisode plus ou moins creux dans l’histoire d’une œuvre, mais le cristal à facettes, le prisme de tout un destin artistique.31 More recently, in his monumental monograph, Yves Bonnefoy also uses the word presence and even draws a moment of synthesis from it. But the intimate unfurling of his analyses reveals a more profound, and therefore a truer, theoretical anxiety which often makes the word tremble so much that only its opposite can shore it up: ‘the presence, or absence,’ he already says of Cube itself. What does this paradox teach us, even before we start examining it? That the status of the work and its determining features in time (the particular moment when it was born) need to be approached as a kind of folding and not bracketed off from each other: a moment where two contradictory things fall back on each other – either face to face or in the fold of an angle, whether tight or large – and where they crystalize 22

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before perhaps separating again. A moment that is part of the far more interesting, far more productive logic of the and . . . and . . .: not a more or less hollow episode in the history of a body of work, but a many-faceted crystal, the prism of an entire artistic destiny.

Giacometti’s works are not each a stage in the development of his own perfection. On the contrary, each deflects and infects the understanding offered by the others, in a refraction which will never come together again as pure white light. Presence: the phenomenological there-ness of you in the sensations of my own living thought, now. Presence is also the Socratic indexical thereness of dialogue, of understanding in the making, in its limited, authentically human form. Presence is not to be distinguished from absence. Absence here is the absence of place, where all relation is suspended, and we are left poised between dissolution and oppression: between not-I, or not-you, and all-I, or you-mine. Synthesis – the abstraction, the bracketing off of the lived in the metaphysical – gives way to the liberty of contradiction. Contradictory ideas interact, each arising from within the other – parasitically, perhaps, but in an open-ended series, nonetheless; a series of snaking angulations, articulating the indeterminacy of distance, of the relations of one sculpture to another, one facet of the ‘cube’ to all the others. Still, for me in these pages, the optimism of the ‘and .  .  . and .  .  .’ gives way to the continuous, imploding interrogation of the ‘neither .  .  . nor’. In Giacometti, I see neither frames nor the freedom from them; neither models imposed nor models reinvented; neither restriction nor generosity; nor both. Visualization is neither affirmed nor denied, nor both. Affirmation and denial both threaten, and both reach out, in a gesture of . . .? Giving, or taking? Does vision impose or empty itself of blindness? Writing on La Cage of 1930–1 rather than La Cage of 1949–50, or indeed Le Nez of 1947 or any of the many pictures and sculptures of the post-war period showing the human form in a box with transparent walls, Didi-Huberman muses: Comme si la cage était là en même temps pour protéger et pour dépérir ce pauvre corps humain.32 As though the cage were there to protect our poor human body and let it waste away at the same time.

The cube explodes into the polyhedron: it can never be seen in the round, the ground of any one of its sightings is lost from view. The facets of the cube must multiply, not because of all the possible facets of seeing anything, but because 23

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alberto giacometti: the art of relation 4. Alberto Giacometti, La Cage, 1930–1. Wood, 49.8 x 27 x 27 cm. Photo: Moderna Museet/ Stockholm Giacometti – © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/ The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Moderna Museet.

these points of view do not and cannot add up to seeing in the round: any one sighting is far from, close to, far from the others, its own ground made absent and absorbed, even colonized, made invisible in the very moment of seeing. The logic of Cubist simultaneity, as Apollinaire saw too, is not one of indefinite de-framing but indefinite blindness to the frame, created over time and in the spontaneity of the moment. The explosion of the cube into a polyhedron, this one or further ones, may also be the form taken by the implosion of the polyhedron into a cube. The distinction collapses, anything seen may be getting smaller or larger, darkness and light each impose their own absent ground. Perhaps that is the disturbing destiny of dialogue. The elements involved do not meet, they may meet; and each possibility both allows for openness to the other and suppresses it. In placing whole or partial figurations of the human form in a cage with transparent walls, is Giacometti projecting the confidence to step outside, to step past seeing the cage, or showing the 24

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invisibility of being imprisoned in a point of view, my own or yours? As the cube and the polyhedron assume each other’s forms, is the ability to find and to relate placed, or displaced? Didi-Huberman’s own language and theory of seeing, and of seeing Giacometti’s Cube, draws on his lived experience of holding contradictory ideas in his mind, and of thinking with the indeterminate distances between them. If synthesis there is, it is not the resolution of thesis and antithesis, here and there, now and then, his and hers, but the absorption of one in the other, which is as much a mark of openness to another as blindness to her. The place where we stand and look confirms the inability to keep those two destinies apart, openness and blindness. We stand on the place from which we see and we make it invisible to us as we look, for we cannot look from two places or in two directions at once. A dilemma. La forme ‘abstraite’ que le Cube revêt recevra peut-être un éclairage latéralisé, par différence avec les deux hypothèses contradictoires – prenant forme de dilemme, et non de dialectique – que sont ‘stylisation’ figurative d’une part, et la ‘formalité spécifique’ insignifiante d’autre part.33 Perhaps the ‘abstract’ form which seems to characterize Cube will be illuminated laterally, in the form of a dilemma and not a dialectic, and by contrast with the functioning of the other two contradictory hypotheses, figurative ‘stylization’ on the one hand, and the redundant ‘specific form’ on the other.

Style means something; but form is the manifestation of an optical necessity. Style provides a way of figuring what we see of the world; but on the other hand, perhaps style is without content, purely decorative and a slave to contemporary taste. In the light of Cube, form for its part is the representation of volume and distance; it is without meaning. Specific to a point of view, a formal figuration of a sighting is the same for anyone and not specific to anyone. But on the other hand, that lack of specificity is also the result of the blindness to a point of view created in occupying it. Stylistic and formal features each lack meaning; stylistic and formal features each produce meaning: a dilemma. Cube faces as much towards the polyhedron as towards the cube; looking at any one of its faces places us in the space without place of the same indecision: how may faces are there to a volume we are unable to see in the round? Moreover, Cube may as well be empty as solid: the piece is not on the way from one to the other, and does not usher in the regime of the ‘and . . . and . . .’, but rather the ‘neither . . . nor . . .’. For me, that is the lesson of incompleteness Didi25

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Huberman learns from Cube, and from Giacometti’s situation without site of seeing and sighting. Incompletion is not simply a matter of proliferation, and its facets cannot be enumerated, nor is their number simply indefinite. The suffering of incompletion accumulates in the disappearance of any one of its moments in others. And the dead are taken by the living. Didi-Huberman is struck by the meaning of grief in learning to think without resolution, and draws on Jean Genet’s sensation of the separateness of human beings reawakened in him looking at Giacometti’s figures, and watching Giacometti modelling.34 And yet even grief is not only a matter of separation, a state of solitude that might descend on any one of us, implacably. Separateness, aloneness – there is always further to go, until total loss and wholesale oblivion is arrived at, which still will carry only my name for it, or yours. In the beginning there was the word, and it was not mine or anyone’s; and the dead have no voice. Oblivion itself will be known to any one of us in the spontaneity of our own thoughts and gestures; in whatever occurs to us, whatever we recognize in the simple improvisation of a beginning, spontaneous and unknowing. Oblivion is freeing, then, but at the same time it drills grief down into the known, into what might be known to anyone: it is amorphous, separate from nothing, slicking over everything. Giacometti, as an artist, sees this drama of grief and the known played out in art; and the drama of the unknown and of panic: Il m’est arrivé, au Louvre, une histoire monstrueuse. Autrefois, je trouvais, au Louvre, les choses que j’aimais plus belles que la réalité. Comme si elles étaient une exaltation de la réalité. Aujourd’hui, les gens qui regardent les tableaux m’étonnent beaucoup plus que les tableaux. Ils m’épouvantent. Parce que le tableau est un ‘connu’ total. Tandis que la personne qui regarde le tableau, maintenant que je ne vois plus les gens ‘grandeur nature’ m’est totalement inconnue. Affolant.35 Something monstrous happened to me once, in the Louvre. Before, in the Louvre, I used to find things that I loved for being more beautiful than reality. As though they were an exaltation of reality. Now people looking at paintings astonish me much more than the paintings. They horrify me. Because the painting is a complete ‘known’. Whereas the person looking at it, now that I only see people ‘life size’, is completely unknown to me. Panic.

The glorious exaltation of reality that is art, life and love, is wiped out in any moment of knowing; and forgetting; and in the spontaneous impulses, gestures and poises of anyone looking at the icons of their lives. Exaltation of life and love occurs in its passing; but also in the style of response of anyone, each one 26

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of us remaining in that sense separate from each other after all, locked into a style visible to anyone, but gestating within one person alone. In our own style of reading and responding, each one of us is responsible, is not responsible, for exaltation; and for the diminishing anxiety as well that Giacometti senses in himself: Je sais qu’une certaine sculpture peut inquiéter. Mais je deviens d’une certaine manière complice – c’est un peu prétentieux, mais il y a de ça – c’est-à-dire qu’aucune sculpture ne m’inquiète plus.36 I know that a given sculpture can create anxiety. But I’m in collusion now, in a way – it’s a bit pretentious, but there’s something of that – in other words, no sculpture gives me any anxiety any more.

Giacometti’s style of figuration meets his style of response – does not; it meets others’ style of recognizing, does not. Form extends beyond optics to affect, does not; extends past arbitrariness to meaning, does not. All these proximities and distances are sensed optically, and in that way bodily; they are sensed affectively, and in that way bodily too. But the optical and the affective do not meet, the analogy is not completed. Emptiness shifts to solidity in Cube, it loses caged-in-ness but gains it as well – and with ever greater intensity, as the cube’s facets multiply invisibly in viewing, in a point of view. Formal life reaches out to affective life, perhaps pain and horror; still the two do not meet. The incompleteness of the relation of form to content appears in a style – visible to anyone, invisible to a person in his complicity with his own not-seeing and his own style. A style is poised between including, between showing the elements which allow a person to find meaning, and displaying a person’s own blindness to them. These elements of meaning and making sense are unique to anyone; the blindness which they build and of which they are built is common to everyone. In looking at the pieces grouped in and around the Tête qui regarde motif, which I turn to in the last chapter of this book, Didi-Huberman becomes involved in the relation between anthropomorphism and formalism.37 And what a meaningladen choice of pieces in terms of which to discuss this relation Tête qui regarde is, along with the others in the group called Têtes-plaques: ‘Plaque-Heads’.38 The multiplication in a sighting of the cube’s facets into the facets of a polyhedron has turned towards to the flat, as a consequence of the same volition, energy and violence of the point of view. The viewing surface excludes others, whether or not there is anything on the reverse of these sculptures, always seen from one point and not the other. Formalism seems to enclose people in the rules of 27

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optical representation, however understood. The anthropomorphic attribution of human characteristics to any kind of form encloses differently – in a point of view and a style. The ability of the two to enter into critical dialogue with each other, as suggested for a moment by Didi-Huberman, collapses in the disjunctions of the relation between them: each is absorbed in the other, in parallel with the collapse in one another of distance and proximity.

VI L’art et la science c’est tâcher de comprendre. L’échec et la réussite sont tout à fait secondaires. L’homme enfin livré à lui-même! 39 Alberto Giacometti Art and science, it’s all trying to understand. Success and failure are completely secondary. Man come to grips with himself, at last!

Style allows blind recognition. Form and formal figuration display their own drive to the opaque, as Didi-Huberman suggests elsewhere.40 So what can we say about the forms of our knowing, and about how they reach out; about our own relations developed in blindness to whatever we understand of the world? I have tried in this book to respond to Giacometti’s invitation to look at artforms, to respond to what the language of art offers in its own forms, and through an engagement with forms. I have tried to resist making an abstraction of forms, conceptualizing them, bracketing them off or seeking to transcend them. This message of non-transcendence heard in the engagement with forms, and in the indeterminate distances between form and content, is not just a message of limitation but renewal. Giacometti builds his art of the human form on the crisis he continually undergoes of sight and sighting, of space and place. But the struggle with the adjustments of seeing, with the ballet of material seeing on the one hand and affective seeing on the other, is not inaugurated in that crisis but is active in different forms before, in the non-human objects Giacometti was concerned with making in the inter-war period. I have tried to respond in the first chapter of this book to the paradoxical mobility at the heart of this crisis, perhaps of any crisis. The adjustments of which supervised perspective is capable, just like the awareness of them, have no beginning, resistance to them and immersion in them cannot be separated either. Inauguration collapses in continuum. I have tried to respond to the panic as well as the liberation of Giacometti’s offerings, and his invitations to see what we see and not what we cannot. 28

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This approach does not have the pretension to step outside overarching themes, ideologies and their applications; for, as Giacometti shows, standing within and standing without is a distinction we are not given to see. It has struck me that writers engaging with Giacometti’s art have needed to open their writing out to this art, open themselves out in writing to the experiences they uncover in Giacometti’s art. Once again opening out may also involve confirmation of a position still unseen in writing, its unseen-ness now dramatized. I have tried to respond in my writing to this said or unsaid responsibility for the unseen. For me, this has involved the tentativeness and provisionality which go with a kind of knowing turned towards the unknown, towards the oblivion made in the lived moment. If we cannot determine whether, as we look, what we see is revealed to us or hidden from us, we cannot know either whether the relations we establish are open or appropriative. Relation is made in that uncertainty. But equally, perhaps, relation need not be restricted to an anticipated manner of relation. The unknown will always give way to the known, such is survival; but the manner of surviving may also be illuminated, and we may learn to relate to each other by understanding more of the oblivion in which our understanding is made. I have tried to respond to this invitation to explore the kind of relating that emerges from its collapse. I began by addressing Giacometti’s work directly, at least through his writing, and then opened out to writing that is illuminated by his work indirectly, in relations whose apparent fragility adds to my sense of their expressive power. Issues of touch and beyond touch have emerged, of reaching out and the out of reach. Notions of style too have arisen, withdrawn, emerged again in considering the ability to relate, to understand the language of anyone from another time, each one of us secluded as we are in our own efforts to reach out. This has transported me by the interrupted analogies of form and content into issues of witness, its inherent unreliability, its griefstricken complicity with the amorphous audiences of the present. What understanding of history is possible in remaining suspended in an indefinite and indefinitely appropriative present? The question of finding the places from which an understanding is made has emerged in the interrogation of flatness and depth in the dialogues between Brecht and Benjamin; and in the troubling account of a miniature in W. G. Sebald’s Max Ferber. In a different story from The Emigrants, Uncle A surveys Jerusalem, and the reader is given a photo of the cityscape of the period to glance at as well, helping or hindering the intensity of the moment (who can tell?), and soon afterwards, his companion who is also the narrator tells us, Uncle A suffers the first stages of his unstoppable psychic collapse. Sebald’s writing turns here to a list of the outlines seen from the balcony, in a series of evident perspectives evidently confused, each building named after a Catholic 29

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saint. In the narratively created silence of Uncle A, who can tell the effect produced on him of this wiping out, in the midst of Jewishness, of all traces of Jewishness? The trauma of Jewish history and perhaps all history is replicated in this absence of reference and trace. Optics and affect stab each other in the heart: panic. Seeing is made of oblivion. But even in stepping down on the dead, and away, there is an effort to honour them at the same time. Destruction and creativity cannot be kept apart: the destruction and the creativity we know. Trauma and translation seem to invite each other in. The unrepeatable moment of suffering begs for translation; translation replies, but repeats the oblivion of suffering; the there-ness of suffering is forever not here. What ethics do we need to understand the repetition of what we do not understand? And what art? The book is framed by a chapter on Giacometti’s writing, his way of writing art, and a chapter of writing on his art. In between come chapters on different writers, and they make up my way of learning from Giacometti how to rebuild relation on the ground of its collapse. They form my apprenticeship, perhaps, allowing me at the end to engage directly with the indirectness of Giacometti’s forms; to show the manner of my engagement, writing as a literary critic, with the distances and proximities alive in Giacometti’s art, and which have illuminated those other works for me. Each one of us might sense the need, and the responsibility, to rebuild relation, different as that need will be in any one of us; and different as the meaning of relation will be too. As Baudelaire knew, correspondence can appear and collapse at any one time, in one and the same moment. I hope that readers will find something to energize or even move them in the various engagements with artforms in this book – and in the experiments in comparison, in art-relation, in writing joy as well as grief prompted in my life by the question: where is Alberto Giacometti? In inviting us to live in the where, Giacometti asks where are the distances between us allowing us to live together and breathe.

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Seeing, Feeling, Knowing: Living with the Writings of Alberto Giacometti

1 I

In introducing the volume of Giacometti’s Écrits, Jacques Dupin reminisces that Giacometti was a constant writer. Himself dividing his life between writing poetry and writing on art, Dupin paints Giacometti’s writing as an accompaniment, perhaps a counterpoint to his art, in any case integral to it, part and parcel of the man, his relation to the world of objects and to making objects, and the dimensions and materials involved. In the Écrits, with the help of Annette Giacometti, Michel Leiris and Dupin himself, Mary Lisa Palmer and François Chaussende brought together Giacometti’s published and unpublished writings, articles, brief essays, jottings and interviews. The volume appeared in 1990, the year before Yves Bonnefoy’s seminal Alberto Giacometti: biographie d’une œuvre, together with the re-publication of Dupin’s own Alberto Giacometti: textes pour une approche. These books heralded the major exhibition of Giacometti’s works at the Musée d’Art Moderne which also took place in 1991. In the same year André du Bouchet published his Alberto Giacometti, dessin, a visual-poetic tribute-in-progress to looking at Giacometti. A major confluence of events and writing was created in that year, reflecting Dupin’s remark about writing and sculpture developing together in Giacometti’s life and work.1 So it is always with some anticipation, even after the time that has passed, that I open and re-open the Écrits, and I have never been disappointed. The book comes apart as much as it comes together, and is filled with the approaches and affinities of Giacometti as a writer. There is the essay; the dream description; autobiographical narrative; cultural commentary; com­ mentary on the history of art; a kind of Dada-ist poetry; the interview; and the intimate diary entry – especially moving are the brief lines jotted down at the time of the diagnosis of Giacometti’s terminal illness. Asking the question how to write seems to be the only way available to Giacometti of answering that other question, what to write. In the same way, the mysteries 31

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and obscurities of showing what he sees can only be approached, it seems, in terms of styles of showing. As a whole, Écrits draws the reader into its world of thought, practice, reminiscence and intellectual adventure – into its own language world. But the voice insinuating itself into our own silent voice of reading is itself made up of many voices, difficult to find or place, their place in our imagination constantly on the move, on the cusp of brilliance and darkness. And also on the cusp of the public and the private, just like his sculptures appear part of a public history, and part also of his private practice and self-questioning. This is reflected in the organization of the book, taking us in sequence through the published pieces, and then starting again to take us through the unpublished ones. Nothing is more stark in Giacometti’s life-in-art than his turning away from making variously expressive material objects and towards making objects in human form. One way of reading the Écrits is to read them retrospectively as a mapping of that trajectory. But that would be a flimsy, multi-directional map, coming apart as much as coming together. A written map of something other than it shows, the book reaches out ever tentatively towards the feelings and people shown as much as un-shown in art, and ever tentatively towards people looking too.

II Mais, de nouveau, il y avait là une espèce de confusion; était-ce les choses que je voyais que je voulais reproduire, ou était-ce une chose affective? 2 Alberto Giacometti Once again, though, there was a kind of confusion: did I want to reproduce the things I saw, or was it an affective thing?

Giacometti puts this question to himself and the experience of his work during his interview with Georges Charbonnier in 1951. A glance at the sculptures from that year shows Giacometti embarked in his indefinite exploration of the human form, of its two- and three-dimensional representation. Between 1947 and 1951, parts of the body have emerged in frames, cubes or their remnants. As the frames disappear, busts begin to emerge, and from a variety of plinths, each suggesting a different sensation of emergence and submergence, birth or burial. Full bodies are also beginning to emerge, mostly solitary figures, but at the very least we are there looking, someone is, and so solitariness itself suggests dialogue, or community. But the interlocutors are not there, or even if they are, they do not share the same space, even if sometimes they share 32

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the same transparent box. And so community remains embryonic, incipient, vulnerable. Such is the question then: are these sculptures and drawings formal or affective in content? What is the formal content of a frame? Or the affective content of its absence? Or of its substitution by a plinth? Or of the variety of depths and densities in a plinth? What is the relation itself of form to affect? The procedures of representation to an affective response to them? What is the relation of form to content? Such questions are fundamental to any art. The attempt to communicate through the forms of art rather than other forms suggests a choice of some kind. But choice suggests relation; which itself suggests thoughts about the origins of form, the origins of their expressiveness, the sense of that expressiveness in any individual, any individual in relation to her or his community, its generation, its history, its temporality. In the case of artistic form, thought on the distinctiveness of a form and of an expressive relation to it seems to undermine the distinctiveness of form itself. This is almost a commonplace. How would Montaigne have made the essay into an investigation of culture, memory and the body; Velázquez the portrait into a staging of myth absorbed in gesture and eye; Baudelaire the prose poem into an incarnation of the fits and starts of associative thought; Proust the novel and indeed the sentence into the stylus of self-analysis and social observation; Mahler the symphony into a huge transition from cacophony to the power of voice; Ernst the collage into a display of psycho-social violence; Plath metre into the broken tramlines of a duel with depression – were it not for an acute sense in all of them of the mobility at the heart of expressive form, the way artistic forms of all kinds seem to belong to a moment while not being fixed there. What is the relation of an object to its formal representation, and between that form and its affective content? How is such a question unique in the experience of Giacometti? How can it be unique? The question itself is an engagement with art as a whole. As if to emphasize that point, Giacometti seems to focus on situations and objects that challenge uniqueness, defy the idea of it; he seems to induce himself to confront situations that apply to all and not just to him. But what kind of ‘all’ is this? Another example, from the same interview: En tout cas, c’est la sculpture où je ressens comme une violence contenue qui me touche le plus. La violence me touche dans la sculpture. Cette violence contenue, la trouvez-vous dans la réalité? Je crois, oui. Dans tout. Et au-delà. C’est même ce qui m’étonne: même dans la tête la plus insignifiante, la moins violente, dans la tête du personnage le plus flou, le plus mou, en état déficient, si je commence à vouloir dessiner cette tête, à la peindre 33

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ou plutôt à la sculpter, tout cela se transforme en une forme tendue, et, toujours me semble-t-il, d’une violence extrêmement contenue, comme si la forme même du personnage dépassait toujours ce que le personnage est. Mais il est cela aussi: il est surtout une espèce de noyau de violence. C’est probable d’ailleurs. Il me semble assez plausible qu’il en soit ainsi du fait même qu’il puisse exister . . . du fait même qu’il existe, qu’il n’est pas broyé, écrasé, il me semble qu’il faut qu’il y ait une force qui le maintienne!3 In any case, it’s in sculpture that I feel a kind of contained violence which touches me the most. Violence touches me in sculpture. Do you find that violence in reality? I think so, yes. Everywhere. And beyond. In fact that’s what astonishes me: even the most insignificant head, the least violent one, in the head of the flabbiest person, the saggiest, deficient, if I start to try and draw that head, or paint it or sculpt it, the whole thing is transformed, becomes a tense form, and, it always seems to me, one with the most highly contained violence, as though the form itself of the person always exceeded what the person is. It seems rather plausible to me that the reason is the person’s very ability to exist . . . the very fact that he does exist, that he isn’t ground up, crushed, to me it seems there has to be a force to keep him together!

There is sustained ambiguity in Giacometti’s way of talking here, and he seeks definition in the places which seem to obscure it. Why should decay be more or less violent than solidity and immobility? Why is Alberto surprised to find violence in decay and deficiency? Decay does violence to the body, and with especial emotiveness in the case of the head; but there is violence also in the unresponsiveness of the perfect form, the unresponsively eternal and marble-like as Baudelaire imagines it. But Giacometti’s violence is not in the argument, not in the content alone of the experience, but in its forms. He says that the violence he is overtaken by arises from the attempt to portray decay, to draw or sculpt the floating-away quality of the head he is evoking – not from thought on decay or deficiency or collapse or death. Thought simply protects us from those things, it appears, and thinking clearly can be defensive. But why specifically does representation of death make it that much more violent? Why does sculpture press hard on that sensation of violence? Is painting different in that regard or not? What kind of affective response does representation of decay produce to make us all the more aware of violence? What kind of thought is involved now? What is the meaning of the sense of containment that Giacometti with Charbonnier is probing away at here? 34

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Let me return to what Giacometti says: comme si la forme même du personnage dépassait toujours ce que le personnage est. as though the form itself of the person always exceeded what the person is.

The other way around might have been what you would expect to hear: the person always exceeds the forms used to try and express her or him, his inner soul, the essence of her being, etc. But pathos is not what Giacometti has in mind, plainly. The form passes by and leaves the person behind. But the form is all we have to represent the person, to show our attempts to engage with him. Equally, the form casts the person as out of reach, that is the violence of form. The person cannot be contained in the form. The form outmanoeuvres the person, out-places her, takes his place. Structurally, the form silences the person, in that way contributes to his deficiency, his falling apart, his passing: a process that for Giacometti is existential, it seems, as he shapes or draws. The violence he encounters here cannot be escaped. It arises from the forms available to him. As he sculpts or draws, the head that once was falling apart now is concentrated in a tense space of violence, or concentrated in its own kernel of violence, the violence that gives it form, and that makes its formal representation possible. Representation overtakes the person, formally, materially, existentially, and also temporally, for its effects cannot be contained or placed. Violence erupts from the form, not the person, and from the attempt itself to give the person form in a sculpture or painting. That attempt imposes violence, discovers violence, for the person will not be there, despite all the evidence of eye and touch; and the violence in the eye of the artist is revealed. But this is not simply a return to the ‘I’ of the viewer or speaker. For that violence of viewing is not absorbed in his viewing and making by Giacometti. Later in the interview he does recount a sense of following the line of a nose right into the centre of a living head; as though the violence of making a figure modelled on a living person were appeased. But the violence does not come exclusively from representing, it is not experienced purely affectively by Giacometti himself or by the viewer, and the interlocutor he tries to draw into his position. It is not purely projected violence but one that comes from within the object, emanates centrifugally from there. Giacometti goes to some lengths to imagine how this might be, in fact can only be: resorting to a kind of physics, or perhaps some idea of molecular biology to give an idea of how such violence turned into energy is needed to keep the person and the figure from falling apart. So the violence he sees is not only in the seeing. This is the message that comes from the ambiguity of Giacometti’s discourse here, from 35

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5. Édouard Manet, The Dead Toreador, 1864. Oil on canvas, 75.9 x 153.3 cm. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Location: The National Gallery of Art, Washington.

its form. In terms of content purely, it is easy to hold these ideas together, to ignore the explosive tension of subject and object. But in Giacometti’s language they refuse to share the same space. He systematically maintains the inability to translate one position into another; neither dominates. Further in the interview, Giacometti begins to distinguish between an object and a person, simply by saying the human figure involves looking – ‘le regard’; which then also allows him to distinguish the living from the dead. In a corpse the eye is dead; perhaps the rest is just sleeping or motionless. The painting of Manet provides Giacometti with one his abiding sources of self-questioning and speculation; interestingly, Manet’s Le Toréador mort shows the corpse of the fighter with his eyes closed, and the indeterminacy of the impression created is sustained throughout the picture, in the axes of its composition, the restrained contrasts of its colouring and the evenness of its lighting. This indeterminacy cannot be redeemed, seemingly. For Giacometti, speaking in this interview, the seeing eye which, he says, distinguishes the living from the dead, also fails precisely to make that distinction – or only succeeds through an intricate, ever-growing network of historical, cultural and stylistic distinctions. In discussing the living eye in the representation 36

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of a figure, Giacometti locates it somewhere between the imaginary spaces occupied in his mind by Egyptian and Oceanic art. He is uncomfortable with the fact that the stones or glass have been inserted in the eye sockets of the Egyptian figure of The Scribe. The seeing and living eye has been imitated rather reproduced. ‘Mais le Scribe ne vous regarde pas. Il a un œil de verre, n’est-ce pas. Cela me gêne, malgré l’admiration que j’ai pour le scribe. Cela me gêne’: ‘but the Scribe doesn’t look at you. He’s got a glass eye, hasn’t he. That disturbs me, in spite of how much I admire the Scribe. It disturbs me.’4 While emphasizing here as elsewhere his life-long fascination with Egyptian art of various epochs, which he regularly pondered on in the Louvre, he finds the glass eye naïve and foolish. He is not concerned for the moment with the when or the how of its insertion. His concern is with the transmission of the living impression of looking; but he finds the immediate is articulated and shrouded in the mediated, and presents this in the form of the positions and spaces of looking. Cultural association, the sense of cultural and historical difference, come alive in the present point of viewing. Or seul le regard compte. Le sculpteur des Nouvelles-Hébrides est beaucoup plus près de la réalité, de ce qu’il s’agit de faire. En cela il est plus efficace que l’Égyptien. Je pourrais même dire qu’il y a une contradiction entre les connaissances que démontre le Scribe et l’espèce de naïveté – ou de bêtise – que révèle l’œil de verre. Chez le sculpteur des Nouvelles-Hébrides il n’y en a pas de traces; il n’y a que la sensibilité, ou l’intelligence, dans le fait qu’il ait fait un regard. Même si la sculpture – qui est l’aspect physique du personnage – a un côté naïf et pas dominé.5 And yet only the look itself counts. The sculptor from the New Hebrides has got far closer to reality, to the point. In that, he’s more efficient than the Egyptian. I could even say that there’s a contradiction between the knowledge of which the Scribe is proof and the naïvety – or the stupidity – of the glass eye. There’s no trace of that in the sculptor from the New Hebrides, there’s only the sensitivity, or the intelligence, in the fact of his having made a look. Even if his sculpture – which is the physical appearance of the person – has a naïve side to it without much control.

Giacometti’s visual sense of the knowledge and civilization of the Egyptian sculpture has been displaced, is now as nothing compared to his appreciation of the living eye made in Oceania. The immediacy of its impact, the fact of it, displaces all other impressions, the relation between impressions is fragmented. The last sentence, the last in this reply, shows this, paradoxically, in Giacometti’s sudden re-engagement with the Egyptian piece that just now 37

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disappointed him, evoking the skill and the knowledge of movement displayed there for him and lacking in the Oceanic one. For those qualities concern representing the body of the person, not the eye. The two seem not to come together in Giacometti’s comparison of the two pieces; nor do the Egyptian and Oceanic cultures. Where then is the sense of the living eye that Giacometti admires so much in the Oceanic piece, now that it has become potentially disembodied? At the time of this interview, Giacometti says about his own sculpture that ‘non, elle ne m’inquiète pas’, ‘no, it doesn’t worry me’, which is precisely what is disappointing him about it at the time – regardless, it seems, of the affective impact of many of the pieces he had made since the end of World War II.6 Perhaps he feels already too settled in his own art and style, as though he were losing his eye for the discontinuities that allow the eye itself to breathe. Perhaps he is using this interview to rediscover them, to remind himself of 6. The Seated Scribe, 2620–2500 BCE. Painted limestone statue, inlaid eyes: rock crystal, magnesite (magnesium carbonate), copper– arsenic alloy, nipples made of wood, height: 53.7 cm; width: 44 cm; depth: 35 cm. (C) RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/ Franck Raux. Location: Louvre.

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their living inevitability. On the other hand, those discontinuities are expressed with a kind of seamless ease and grace in this piece, which is then confirmed but also deadened in the inevitable passage from the spoken dialogue to its textual form. But that ease, whether passive or active, signals a capacity to work critically with the elements involved in things not coming together, as opposed to relying on their cohesion. Giacometti’s exhortation to live with the difference between representing an object and representing a human being has not come off in the way we might have expected. Giacometti has not been able to bring together representing the living eye and representing the living body in a description of any single sculpture. Frustrating, on the one hand; but on the other, a kind of resistance emerges. For nothing, it seems, no experience or approach is a guarantee against the flattening and de-energizing appeal of the known. As already mentioned, in a later interview in 1963 with Pierre Dumayet, Giacometti talks of his despair and panic at the thought of viewers and visitors to galleries: Aujourd’hui, les gens qui regardent les tableaux m’étonnent beaucoup plus que les tableaux. Ils m’épouvantent. Parce que le tableau est un connu total. Now people looking at paintings astonish me much more than the paintings. They horrify me. Because the painting is a completely known thing.

One way to counter that drift from astonishment to stifling repetition is not to look at art at all, but at the people looking at art: Tandis que la personne qui regarde le tableau, maintenant que je ne vois plus les gens ‘grandeur nature’ m’est totalement inconnue. Affolant.7 Whereas the person looking at it, now that I only see people ‘life size’, is completely unknown to me. Panic.

Rather than with a countering device, Giacometti provides himself with a double bind: shock or panic; looking at people looking at pictures, and seeing all the dimensions fixed in relation to each other, or looking at people simply looking, struggling to see them life-size, seeing them only without secure place or dimension. Complacency or terror, each soliciting the other, each repelling the other, without prospect of resolution. If we come back now to the 1951 interview with Georges Charbonnier, Giacometti steers it in an equally inconclusive direction, which arises again 39

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from the formal and spatial constraints in Giacometti’s own experience of representation. The interruptions in his attempts to transpose his speculation about representing an object, into speculation about representing a human being, are carried through consistently to the end. They emerge with increasing starkness, despite their implicitness. And the paradoxical site of this divergence is the material itself of art, either painting or sculpture, or indeed writing: La réalité de la peinture, c’est la toile. Il y a une toile, qui est une réalité. Mais une peinture ne peut représenter que ce qu’elle n’est pas, c’est-à-dire l’illusion d’autre chose. Si l’on veut, entre l’écriture et la peinture, il me semble qu’il n’y a pas un gouffre. Les signes de l’écriture ne sont que les signes que de ce qu’ils ne sont pas. En peinture, c’est la même chose.8 The canvas is the reality of painting. There is a canvas, which is a reality. But a painting can only represent what it is not, in other words the illusion of something else. If you like, for me I don’t think there’s much of a gulf between writing and painting. Signs in writing are only signs of what they are not. In painting, it’s the same.

From his own experience of visual sign making, and the existential quality of his relation with its materials, Giacometti arrives at his own understanding of the deferral at the heart of any signification. But his own theory is a practice, and his practice in spoken and written essays involves reading other art for signs of this drama of reality and illusion – the reality of form and the illusion of content. Where is affective content to be found? Talking about his position in depicting the object did not illuminate; neither did talking about the human look. Still the question remains: where? Perhaps the answer lies in non-figurative art after all, from which Giacometti had clearly and so definitively turned away after World War II. Talking of Mondrian, and his Bauhaus-inspired modernism of the period, Giacometti sees the science of geometry and colour as an attempt not only to see objects as they are, finally, not only to make the painting objective, but to become an object and be an object. But there is no way out for Giacometti there either; unless Mondrian can be thought of as transposing himself into another domain altogether, where painting no longer counts, nor its relation to sculpture, nor yet to writing. The particular importance of those relations fades for Giacometti as well, not least in response to Charbonnier’s own insistence on them here. To cease to think about them, though, would also be to cease to think about relation at large, and for Giacometti, apparently, 40

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that would also take him out of the domain of the affective altogether: out of the drama of seeing, locating, showing, being in relations ranging from embrace to loss. In a final twist, precisely because abstract art turns away from relation, Giacometti can again find the pursuit of the affective there, of affective relation, its place, its meaning, its power, its collapse, its re-ignition . . . Abstract art is neither with nor without affective content, and that indeterminacy is the paradoxical source of its remaining interest for Giacometti. The relation to objects is still lost, out of sight, to be found, discovered, allowed to re-emerge, recognized in its decay. Cette sculpture [abstraite] n’est ni des Nouvelles-Hébrides, ni la sculpture égyptienne. Ces sculptures sont des doubles.9 This [abstract] sculpture is neither from the New Hebrides, nor from Egypt. These sculptures are doubles.

These abstract sculptures are like ghosts. They shadow an affective content that is displaced by their own presence; they give the impression of seeking the affectivity they disguise: Mais ces doubles, on a l’impression qu’ils ne veulent représenter que leur affectivité. Il y a là quelque chose qui m’inquiète, qui me semble très étrange. C’est en cela que la sculpture est effrayante.10 But looking at these doubles, you have the impression they’re trying only to represent their affectivity. There’s something in that that makes me anxious, that seems very strange to me. That’s the reason why the sculpture is frightening.

Sculpture has become troubling and frightening again. It cannot find what moves it; what moves us in it cannot be found there; nor how we relate, nor why. This sculpture is strange, foreign, and yet imbued in relatedness – but one so indefinite that it hovers over its own loss. Related to what? How? This sculpture, this approach to representing, allows those questions not only to be asked, but to be given life-in-form. The procedures of representing, the process of making an object which represents – both together meet affectiveness in a place we cannot see, even in the figures standing there in front of us.

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III In the issue of Minotaure, a Surrealist work in progress edited by André Breton and Pierre Mabille, of 12 December 1933, Giacometti published a piece called ‘Je ne puis parler qu’indirectment de mes sculptures’ – I can only talk indirectly about my sculptures.11 The date is especially interesting, at that time Giacometti had not yet been overtaken by his pre-occupation with the human form, its expressiveness, and his unending attempts to represent it. That was to come in the war years, as he recounts in a letter to Pierre Matisse.12 Even so, the indirectness he needs to describe his work is paramount for him, just as it is later when he begins to make human figures and write about the experiences involved. This short essay shows indirectness at work through what is in many ways an engagement with a broadly Surrealist form of narrative, one that proceeds through an investigative account of the personal associations of the narrator – at least, the voice of a narrator in the text. ‘Giacometti’ starts off by saying that up to this point, 1933, he has made sculptures that have appeared to him fully formed in his mind; he has then simply reproduced them: Depuis des années je n’ai réalisé que des sculptures qui se sont offertes tout achevées à mon esprit, je me suis borné à les reproduire dans l’espace sans rien y changer, sans me demander ce qu’elles pouvaient signifier (il suffit que j’entreprenne d’en modifier une partie ou que j’aie à chercher une dimension pour que je sois complètement perdu et que tout l’objet se détruise). Rien ne m’est jamais apparu sous la forme de tableau, je vois rarement sous la forme de dessein. Les tentatives, auxquelles je me suis livré quelquefois, de réalisation consciente d’un tableau ou même d’une sculpture ont toujours échoué.13 For years I’ve only ever made sculptures that have come into my mind in their finished state, I’ve done nothing more than reproduce them in space without changing anything, without wondering what they might mean (I just have to start changing a part of it, or if I need a dimension for it, I’m completely lost and the whole object is destroyed). Nothing has ever appeared to me in the form of a painting, and I rarely see anything in the form of a drawing. The attempts which I’ve sometimes made at consciously realizing a painting, or even a sculpture, have always failed.

From there, and in this short piece taken as a whole, Giacometti proceeds in much the same way that André Breton does in his own Surrealist accounts, 42

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and in his multi-modal trilogy Nadja, Les Vases communicants and L’Amour fou, published in 1928, 1932 and 1937. The narrator’s voice is paramount, but the subjectivity of that position is not, it is the object of an investigation. This itself takes place through an object chosen for the strong or troubling affinity to it felt by the narrator. In Breton’s Nadja, this might be the statue in Paris of Étienne Dolet, the Renaissance scholar, translator and printer; or it might be the strange mask in L’Amour fou found in the flea market.14 For Giacometti, this troubling affinity comes from one of his own sculptures, Le Palais à quatre heures du matin, completed just before the writing of this piece. He keeps the same method, the object he ‘finds’ is still a ‘found object’,

7. Alberto Giacometti, Le Palais à quatre heures du matin, 1932–3. Construction in wood, glass, wire, and string, 63.5 x 71.8 x 40 cm. DIGITAL IMAGE © 2013, The Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence Giacometti – © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: MOMA. 43

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even though he has made it himself. He feeds on but develops the Surrealist fascination with the objects found by accident, and their uncanny capacity to reconfigure the perceptible world and what can be known there. In a kind of textually constructed partnership of subjectivities, narrator and reader are led to discover the generation of unconscious thoughts, or at least the nonrationalist energy embedded not just in a found object, but in discovering it collaboratively. The relations of the object to its context are suspended and reformed; discovery retains its surprise, resists its transposition to the known, and maintains its self-renewing dynamism.15 This emphasis on process is nurtured in the narrative modes of the piece. Giacometti adopts some of the narrative procedures of Breton but models them to his own subjectivity. Like Breton, once the object can be made to appear ex nihilo, Giacometti accounts for that cause-less appearance as part of the psycho-pathology of every day life – in this case, as often elsewhere, an amorous relationship: Cet objet se rapporte sans aucun doute à l’époque de ma vie qui prit fin un an plus tôt, à la période de six mois passée heure par heure auprès d’une femme qui, concentrant en elle toute la vie, portait chaque instant sur un plan d’émerveillement pour moi.16 This object relates back without any doubt to a period in my life that ended a year before, a period of six months when I spent every single hour with a woman who concentrated the whole of life in herself, and took every moment onto a plane of wonder for me.

The deification of womanhood and Eros, as well as their unexplained and affirmed creative importance, all lock Giacometti’s writing here into that of Breton, or Aragon, and also the themes of Dalí’s painting.17 Each part of Le Palais à quatre heures du matin has emerged in Giacometti’s mind fully formed, he tells us, leaving him only with the job of making them and assembling the whole: Cet objet s’est formé peu à peu à la fin de l’été 1932, il s’est éclairé lentement pour moi, les diverses parties prenant leurs formes exactes et leur place précise dans l’ensemble. L’automne venu, il présenta une telle réalité que son exécution dans l’espace ne me demanda pas plus d’une journée.18 This object took form bit by bit at the end of 1932, it became slowly clearer to me, the various parts getting their exact form and their precise place in the whole. By the autumn, it presented such a reality that working it out in space took me no longer than a day. 44

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The relation of the parts to known reality is suspended, and of the whole piece as well; so is the relation of the piece, of its emergence, to its catalyst – the unnamed woman with whom Giacometti spent every living second for six months. The ambition in Breton’s accounts is to lead from the detached standpoint to the points of catalyst themselves: to a point where the apparent meets the unique subjectivity of each one of us. On this basis he offers a community of revelation, resistance, and revolt. Giacometti on the other hand offers community on the basis of a sustained indirectness. Like Breton, he proceeds by describing the object he sees; like Breton also, his writing has the capacity to move from description to the revelation of a genealogy. But unlike Breton, the process ends in silence; or it is open-ended. The process itself is sustained. Je ne puis rien dire de l’objet sur une planchette qui est rouge; je m’identifie avec lui.19 I can say nothing about the object on a little plank in red; I identify with it.

These are his final words. But he begins the description of his Palais on an anecdotal level. Speaking of the time spent with his lover, he writes: Nous construisions un fantastique palais dans la nuit (les jours et les nuits avaient la même couleur comme si tout se fût passé juste avant le petit matin; je n’ai pas vu le soleil durant tout ce temps), un très fragile palais d’allumettes: au moindre mouvement toute une partie de la minuscule construction s’écroulait; nous la recommencions toujours.20 We were building a fantasy castle in the night (the days and the nights had the same colour as though everything were happening in the early hours of the morning; I didn’t see the sun in all this time), a very fragile castle made of matchsticks: at the slightest movement a whole section of the tiny construction would collapse; we always started again.

This anecdote casts the remainder of the piece in a narrative mode. But even though the emergence of each object in the palace is clothed in a narrative circumstance, these are part of a partial sequence which lacks source or a conclusion. Giacometti continues: ‘je ne sais pourquoi elle [la construction] s’est peuplée de l’épine dorsale dans un cage’: ‘I don’t know why the construction became inhabited by a spinal column in a cage.’ Having emphasized again the way the whole piece as well as its parts have emerged fully formed in his mind, without provenance, he then provides a 45

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provenance after all, in the form of a further circumstantial occurrence. However, that also lacks context: the place or platform of its relation to anything – other objects in the piece, either one of the lovers making the object – dissolves in an increasing drift into the oneiric or the hallucinatory: je ne sais pourquoi elle [la construction] s’est peuplée de l’épine dorsale dans une cage – l’épine dorsale que cette femme me vendit une des toutes premières nuits que je la rencontrai dans la rue – et d’un des oiseaux squelettes qu’elle vit la nuit même qui précéda le matin où notre vie commune s’écroula – les oiseaux squelettes qui voltigeaient très haut au-dessus du bassin à l’eau claire et verte où nageaient les squelettes très fins et très blancs des poissons, dans la grande salle découverte parmi les exclamations d’émerveillement à quatre heures du matin.21 I don’t know why the construction became populated by a spinal column in a cage – the spinal column this woman sold me on one of the first nights I met her in the street – and by one of the skeleton-birds she saw on the very night before our life together collapsed – the skeleton-birds that fluttered high above the bowl of clear green water with the very fine and very white skeletons of fishes, in the large room we discovered with cries of wonder at four in the morning.

The more each object is described and located in its cage, the more the narrative dissolves the contours of the cage in further biographical, circumstantial, associative, and other mnemonic triggers, whose appearance of randomness Giacometti at once suspends and maintains, explains and allows to seep over everything. Narratively, Giacometti has created the effect of the transparent cages and boxes of the Palais itself: each can be seen through into any of the others, and yet the ease of passage isolates each object still further within itself, claiming relation, incapable of discovering it. The syntax of the narrative, and its sequences, simulate without imitating or defining the movement of the eye in and out of the cages and frames. There is no moment of revelation, no meeting of associative patterns from different subjective or objective places and contexts. Instead, there is a build-up of mystery. An element in the title of the sculpture is echoed in an element in the narrative – ‘à quatre heures du matin’ – but which is the quotation and which the original? Which is the memory and which the event? Which is quoting the past, which is giving voice to a subjective history? What is the meaning of ‘à quatre heures du matin’? Moreover, what is the meaning here of the symbolism of the house or the palace? What Giacometti appears to discover in his dialogue with Surrealist practice is an anticipation of the unanswered 46

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questions he raises in the 1951 interview with Charbonnier: what is our relation to objects? What is our relation to other human beings? What is the affective content of our relations? What is its history? Space and affect, form and content: Giacometti recognizes that we live by their relation, recognizes also his inability to unravel those relations, the forms they settle into or which they move on from and past. He ends his account of this sculpture with a statement of silent, uncomprehending attachment: Je ne puis rien dire de l’objet sur une planchette qui est rouge: je m’identifie avec lui.22 I can say nothing about the object on a little plank in red: I identify with it.

The narrative has led knowingly to an impasse; it has ended where it started. Far from re-orientating affective attachments, Giacometti finds that his experience of Surrealist practice exposes his own blindness to the effects of attachments and their workings. The liberation offered him by re-telling the genealogy of an artefact that has formed independently in his mind has turned in on itself, re-produced the questions it sought to answer. What do we adore? Why, how, and where?

IV The letter Giacometti wrote to Pierre Matisse in 1948 is a communication about an exhibition of his work the two were planning for Pierre Matisse’s gallery in New York.23 It is a seminal document for anyone interested in Giacometti, and particularly the defining transition in his art from the late 1930s to the late 1940s. It is remarkable for the writerly ease Giacometti displays in moving between autobiographical, descriptive and speculative ways of presenting his art and the issues it grapples with materially, immediately, and at the formal level, literally. It is produced in facsimile in the Écrits, and one of the striking effects of that is to allow you to see the small drawings Giacometti made of the pieces to be shown in the exhibition. These appear in the midst of Giacometti’s typescript and his hand-written comments and corrections. They punctuate his thought, and indicate the stages in the experience of visual representation that he is trying to communicate. At the end of the letter Giacometti makes a sequence of these small sketches, apparently as a kind of running order for the exhibition. They have every appearance of having been drawn rapidly, and you can visually peruse them, engage quickly and imaginatively with them, 47

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whether or not as mnemonics of pieces you have seen or remembered. This perusing accompanies Giacometti’s written narrative in the letter as a whole, and the synchronic continuity between the visual and verbal lends support to the diachronic continuity, or coherence of affective capturing, Giacometti seems to need at this point for the purpose of exhibiting his work. The list of drawings is divided into five groups – or chapters, almost – and we can follow visually Giacometti’s reconstruction from memory of the pieces he wants to show, the order he has in mind, the significance to himself and to art which he sees emerging from his sculptures over time.24 We can see in the first chapter works from 1925 to 1929, each has a title evoking a man or a woman, singly or in combination; or if not, then a part of the human body. And yet each piece has the character of an object, whether in the shape of a material block, or a shape reminiscent of some anthropological dimension or

8. Alberto Giacometti, Boule suspendue, 1931 (1965 version). Plaster and metal, 60.6 x 35.6 x 36.1 cm. AGD 339 1931 (version de 1965) Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti 1994-0250 © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Collection Fondation Alberto & Annette Giacometti.

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function. That indeterminacy is enough to question the humanity of the forms, and the nature of the viewer’s relation to these objects. The second, third and fourth of these visual chapters seen as a whole drift further towards the objectlike rather than the human-like, but also insinuate the reminder that a human viewer is not capable of making that distinction. Still, the indeterminacy of the distinction takes increasingly disturbing and violent forms in these pieces from 1929 to 1934, especially Boule suspendue or Femme égorgée. (See Figure 12, page 76.) These have attracted much comment for their mechanistic, dehumanizing and aggressive portrayal of heterosexuality. The fifth section and the sixth, which is the final one, together comprise a return to more evidently human forms, mostly but not always reflected in the titles. These are works from 1932 to 1936. Interestingly, in comparison to the plaster and bronze sculptures themselves, Femme qui marche seems to emphasize the ease and grace of walking, and the troubling effect of the absent head and arms slides away in a generalized impression of spontaneity and dexterity. Mains tenant le vide (objet invisible) is simply called Le Vide here. Le Vide is shown with the hands pointing upwards, which Yves Bonnefoy interprets in terms of fertility, and which, seen from the side, as here, might equally trigger thoughts of adoration.25 In addition, the plaster and then metal plank hemming her in at the shins is not shown. There is a mother and daughter – Mère et fille nues, which in its scuptural form of 1935 is called Mère et fille and involves a more complex interplay of dress and un-dress; two heads on plinths, each seen from the side – Tête de femme, Petite tête; and as a kind of postscript, Femme grande, which is a sketch of Femme cuillère of 1927 drawn face on and simplified, hiding from view with ease the fact that in the sculpture the torso is concave and not flat. (See Figure 32, page 167.) Overall, a story of passages is being told: passages from an anthropological past to the present, and back – which present, then? Passages from material to human and back – where is the human, then? Passages from violence to community, or at least to family. Passages from aggression to generosity. Passages between cultures – European and African. Or rather, passages between cultural definition and its dissolution, for the cultural markers in these pieces are indeterminate, depending as much on the subjective association – prompting the Surrealist état sauvage, the ‘uncivilized state’ of free seeing performed by Breton in his writing – as on the voices of context.26 In fact, these are passages between contexts. They show the ease of passage itself, facilitated by the sketch form in which they appear. Contextual points of view are evoked and erased in a small festival of improvisation and allusion, the viewer is given momentary sweeps of perception comprising Giacometti’s story of art, re-told according to the viewer’s own experience, in the here and now of crossing the cultural and affective borders of now and then, me and you. 49

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At the same time, such an ease cannot fail to display the interruptions it covers over. In his sketches Giacometti shows his objects from one point of view, each making a tiny springboard to other sketches in this mnemonic sequence: the hands seen from the side pointing upwards; the flattened torso . . . To make the perceptual leap from one to the other involves fixing each in a single point of view or line in perspective. The titles Giacometti gives to his objects without a human form reflect this. La Cage, Boule suspendue dans une cage et qui peut glisser sur un croissant – each uses words to reveal what is in the piece. But in addition to fixing a meaning, as titles will, Giacometti also seems to make fun of that function in the emphatic descriptiveness of these particular titles: one is laconic, and the other comes over in a flutter of mock exhaustiveness. Witty the titles may be, but the effect is to leave things, and to leave these objects, as they are and where they are. The ease of movement between them seems to depend on this. And so for all the perceptual and narrative mobility within this sketched menagerie of his pieces, Giacometti leaves himself with the same question as in the story of the Palais à quatre heures du matin: what is the relation of himself as a viewer to an object? The aggressively sexual or sadistic content of some of the pieces – Boule suspendue, Femme égorgée – emphasizes the ever-presence of the question and confirms its urgency. If we cannot define a relation, what is to prevent it turning to violence? Two further pieces and their titles express that anxiety, and the frustration involved in not knowing the relations involved in viewing, alluding, leaping in and out of the gestures and meanings emanating from its invisible contexts: Objet désagréable, and Objet désagréable à jeter. If we cannot know an effect, it disturbs and invades. The Object désagréable might look like an erect penis and a scrotum, but it has spikes on the end. The Objet désagréable à jeter might look like a wonky chair, but looks just as much like an impaling instrument. Wit, pleasure, mobility, also the anthropomorphic impulse, all end up repelling, for the viewing and the human relation to them is open, uncomfortable, not to be accepted or tolerated – hateful. The ease of perceptual passage and of present seeing forms also the disquieting ease of collapsing relation. Giacometti’s objects in this sequence and from this period seem to hover – paradoxically, indeterminately. In his letter and in the exhibition he is projecting, Giacometti presents the objects as there to be seen, and seen in relation to each other; they share a space, a temporal and narrative one, as well as a visual one. But there is also a tendency for them to challenge vision and even threaten injury. Nonetheless, and with equal force, they resist being ejected: ‘à jeter’ one or the other may be, something to be thrown out, but 50

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9. Alberto Giacometti, Objet désagréable à jeter, 1931. Bronze, 22 x 22 x 29 cm. Alberto Giacometti Foundation, Kunsthaus Zürich, © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Kunsthaus Zürich

each imposes itself all the more, its presence all the more evident, invasive and harmful. If the visual–verbal narrative Giacometti offers Pierre Matisse here is a story of the ease of passage itself, it is also one of repeated and aggressive interruption. These two approaches cannot easily share the same narrative space or the same time of interpretation. They repel one another, while at the same time the relation between them remains unlocated and indeterminate. That indeterminacy in the relation of the object to its originator is potentially victimizing. The uncertainty emerging from Giacometti’s narrative account of the Palais à quatre heures du matin arises again here in this later, 1948 version of his story. If he thinks of the object he makes as emerging unsolicited in his mind’s eye, even over time, what is his relation to what he makes? How can he account for it, find its generation, assume any responsibility for its life and its relation to viewers? 51

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Still, the indeterminacy of relation which concerns Giacometti can create a place for reaching out as well as victimizing. Thematically, the sadistic phallus finds a passage to the mother and child. Thematically, perhaps that passage is neither surprising, nor difficult, nor desirable either. The power relations involved remain intact, phallic and Oedipal: especially in the light of the separation in the sequence, echoing Picasso, between women and children together on the one hand, and maleness on the other. But the indeterminacy, the room for manoeuvre in either direction, is formal in character and volition, rather than generally thematic. The perspective in which Giacometti draws the figures in the letter – the hands upwards in Le Vide, the flat torso in Femme cuillère – is the element which creates the dialogues between them as well as the suspension of dialogue; it provides each figure with a place and deprives each one of a place as well. Whatever responsibility the maker and the viewer as well can take for the effects these objects produce on them will lie in an engagement with their formal features. Giacometti in his own art discovers an inefficiency in a thematic dialogue with his figures and objects, and a collapse generally in the mediation which the thematic content of his pieces might create between his experience and that of his viewer; and also between himself as maker and himself as a viewer. Where does this collapse in mediation lead him, and how will he respond? Will he withdraw into a passive obsession with his own art and its complexity? Or try and make a way to some other idea of community on the basis of the enigma of content, reference, history, symbolism – the enigma of form? If mediation is interrupted in vision and in the representation of it, what sort of dialogues with his pieces can Giacometti envisage; and what kind of responsibility for dialogue? Will viewers discover a place from which to relate to these pieces; or rather learn an idea of no place?

V An example. It involves putting the sequence, taken as a whole but perhaps particularly Palais à quatre heures du matin, in the vicinity of a particular Surrealist poem. I am thinking of Éluard’s short poem ‘L’Amoureuse’, first published in 1923.27 L’Amoureuse Elle est debout sur mes paupières Et ses cheveux sont dans les miens, 52

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Elle a la forme de mes mains, Elle a la couleur de mes yeux, Elle s’engloutit dans mon ombre Comme une pierre sur le ciel. Elle a toujours les yeux ouverts Et ne me laisse pas dormir. Ses rêves en pleine lumière Font s’évaporer les soleils, Me font rire, pleurer et rire, Parler sans avoir rien à dire. She’s in Love She’s standing on my eye-lids Her hair is in mine She has the shape of my hands She has the colour of my eyes She’s drowned in my shadow Like a stone on the sky. Her eyes are always open She doesn’t let me sleep. Her dreams in broad day Make the suns disappear, Make me laugh, cry, and laugh And talk with nothing to say. To place works by Giacometti in the vicinity of any other is in itself problematic: how do his works relate – to each other, to viewers? What idea of relation is invoked by the critical practice of comparison? Éluard’s universe, here in the early 1920s and throughout, is markedly his own. He is immersed in concerns that will remain with him throughout his life, already committed to his lived desire to marry erotic experience and behaviour to revolutionary action. His sexual involvements are open and anti-familial. His revolutionary solidarity is expressed through adherence to Communism before World War II and in the Resistance during it.28 But his action is predominantly in the poetic word. Does poetic action support or displace action in the material world? Éluard’s idealism and energy are continually directed at questioning that very distinction – ‘toutes les transformations sont possibles’,‘any transformation is 53

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possible’. Radical, life-affecting change can be made to happen not just in an imaginary space between words, nor yet between dream imagery and its conscious counterparts; but between the word and its innumerable referents, the objects, situations, relations, the people, the pangs of desire and pain, all the impulses to reach out or destroy which the word brings to life.29 And still, the space of that generosity is the silent voice of reading. Does wondering about the place of change undermine or intensify its force? Where is the space of our reading and how will we determine its effect on our approaches and actions? Where is the point of intersection between the voices of the writer and the ones we discover in ourselves? Such questions characterize an engagement with any aesthetic artefact; or they might do, if the uniqueness of a subjective engagement with any one of them is affirmed. But is this not a flimsy basis on which to compare any two aesthetic artefacts, taken in addition from the visual and verbal domains? And yet Éluard and Giacometti evidently share the same suspicion of reference, of transcendence, and of the claim to dialogue arising from the suppression of its form – the forms which make it possible. Éluard aspires to change the conditions of our interaction by harnessing the dynamism any one of us remembers from dreaming images in a constant state of transformation. But where can that commonality of such energy be found, located and redirected? Once again, where are the points of intersection? They can only be between the reader and the writer, present to each other only as one reads what the other has written, in a moment plainly common to neither one. Éluard like Giacometti finds ways of working with that constraint while also being subjected to it, perhaps transforming the constraint of non-meeting into the possibility of understanding. The contexts which specify meaning dissolve under a sustained attack on the self-perpetuating conventions which allow them to be. But that formal as well as existential revolt, rather than simply evacuating convention, exposes its vulnerability and its flimsiness; it suspends convention between the space without place of its own power to communicate. She stands on my eyelids. Perhaps I am asleep dreaming of her, and the boundary between waking and sleeping is sealed by my eyes tight shut; and between here and not here as well. As I dream, I dream she is not only here, but that we are fully enmeshed, and yet the only way I can dream of that is if she takes the forms I have myself: imagine or dream that I have – the shapes of my body and my thoughts. She stands on my eyelids – nonsensically, unless we bring some metaphorical understanding to it. But even then, the associations, the places of dreaming and thinking that it should bring together fail to meet; or if they do, one is simply absorbed in the other. She stands on my eyelids like a stone on the sky. The simile surprises, invites us 54

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to think again about the elements involved – she, eyes, sky. And yet it is not their content but their positions that invites us to think about the relations between them. Not so much ‘her standing on my eyelids reminds me of a stone in the sky’ – an invitation to connect, inviting thoughts of subjectivity in all its purity, perhaps; but rather, ‘the place where she stands on my eyes is like the place of that stone in the sky.’ My lover and this stone are each placed on a boundary that cannot be fixed or located, but which places them nonetheless. At the literal level, a person cannot stand on another person’s eyelids, and a stone cannot sit in the sky; at the metaphorical level, these symbolic relations will never come back from the arbitrary. If my lover emerges from my dreams, or is absorbed there, or if she emerges from my dreams to the living touch of my hands, those are transitions without beginnings or endings or points of arrival, even in my own fantasy. And this stone, Éluard emphasizes, is lost on the sky, ‘sur le ciel’, not in the sky, ‘dans le ciel’. On the sky: it is lost in the background of the sky rather than located in perspective against it. For her to stand on my eyes is like a stone lost in the sky it fails to stand out against, emerging in its own flatness like a trompe l’œil in a painting by Magritte, where what I can see merges with what is behind rather standing out. My lover on my eyes and the stone on the sky are related because each both evades and invites relation. Each is a transitional object, or being, which re-acquaints Éluard’s reader with the sensations of relation arising indeterminately from nothing and from habit. She stands on my eyelids like Botticelli’s Venus on her shell: firmly yet fantastically placed. Or like the female figure in Giacometti’s palace, given place and meaning by the screens behind her, which also lack any symbolic effectiveness because of the flimsiness of the frame which seems to place her, but which merges her stage with anything behind her at all. Or like Giacometti’s figures of some twenty-five years later, for example in La Forêt and La Clairière of 1950, which indeterminately emerge from the ground and recede into it, stand and walk, both reach out and withdraw from their place in time as well as space. Relation seems to emerge where it cannot and because it cannot. At the time of making his palace and also at the time of describing its making, Giacometti is still unsure – unsure of relation, his relation to his experiences, encounters, fascinations; unsure what they reveal or how; how his identifications emerge; and unsure whether they free or constrain him: ‘je ne puis rien dire de l’objet sur une planchette et qui est rouge; je m’identifie avec lui’: ‘I can say nothing about the object on a little plank in red; I identify with it.’ The potential freedom of endless, frame-defying association is simulta­ neously the potential alienation of no relation, no place for relation, even 55

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for relation with the most intimate of sensations and drives. In evoking his lover, and when he talks with the ease of having nothing to say, or fear, or be amused at, is the narrator of Éluard’s poem loosened or confirmed in the frames that give him voice? Me font rire, pleurer et rire, Parler sans avoir rien à dire. Make me laugh, cry, and laugh And talk with nothing to say.

Have we reached a place of touch, and from there, of new words to say? Or a place once again overtaken by narcissism and melancholy? Where is the new community of men and women we have been promised? Where is creativity and change, stepping cleanly away from where we already are and the inability to move beyond?

VI ‘Ça ne va pas les espèces de titres que je vous donnais hier’ – ‘those titles or whatever I sent you yesterday, that isn’t going to work.’30 In another letter to Pierre Matisse, Giacometti seems dissatisfied with any sequence of titles and sketches. The ease of visual and verbal perusal now makes him distinctly uncomfortable. It fixes artificially and fails to fix at all, posing once again the problem itself of fixing and positioning, temporally as well as spatially. His letter echoes once more the Surrealist method of using material circumstance, and the chance encounters involved, to investigate subjective revelation; but he seems to steer that method, taken almost literally, in the direction of showing the issues it raises for him rather than their resolution: Si par exemple, dans la place 9 figures une fois faite j’ai reconnu une clairière d’ici que je voulais beaucoup peindre le printemps passé, ce n’est pas pour cela que j’ai fait la sculpture [. . .] L’autre place 7 figures tête s’est faite aussi par hasard avec des études de figures, comme si involontairement je réalisais des impressions ressenties longtemps avant et que je ne reconnaissais la sculpture qu’une fois faite [. . .] La même chose pour la chambre de la cage. Cette chambre je la vois, je vois même les rideaux à côté de la femme (qui n’est pas encore exactement ce que je veux) mais faut-il le dire? Parce qu’en même temps c’est autre chose, le désir d’abolir le socle, l’essai d’avoir un espace limité pour mieux réaliser une tête et une figure, etc. 56

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Si on pense malgré soi à une forêt ou à une salle ou à du sable, etc., c’est très bien mais il ne le faut pas le dire d’avance, ça fausse et ça limite parce qu’on doit pouvoir penser à n’importe quoi. Je pourrais nommer aussi le chariot ‘pharmacie’, parce que cette sculpture vient du chariot clinquant de la pharmacie de l’hôpital Bichat qu’on promenait dans les salles et qui m’avait émerveillé (en 1938). Elle s’est réalisée par la nécessité de nouveau d’avoir la figure dans le vide pour mieux la voir et pour la situer à une distance précise du plancher.31 For example it’s true that once I’d finished making Place, 9 Figures, I saw in it the clearing hereabouts that I wanted very much to paint last spring, but that isn’t why I made the sculpture [. . .] The other Place, 7 Figures also got made by chance using studies of figures, as though I were involuntarily sculpting impressions left on me long ago and that I only recognized once the sculpture was made. I can see the room, I can even see the curtain next to the woman (which still isn’t quite what I want) but should I say that? Because at the same time this is something else, a desire to abolish the plinth, an attempt to limit a space and create a head and a human figure better. Etc. If you still find yourself thinking of a forest or a room or some sand, etc., that’s fine but you mustn’t say so in advance, it falsifies and it limits because you should be able to think of anything. I could also call the Chariot ‘The Pharmacy’, because this sculpture comes from the garish pharmacy trolley that was pushed about in the wards of the Bichat hospital and which filled me with wonder (in 1938). It came into being because of the need I felt once again to have the figure in the void so as to see it better and situate it at a precise distance from the floor.

Giacometti is talking about Le Chariot of 1950. Chance encounters with anything material reveal attachments to them which reach back to the past, to past attachments and identifications; they also point towards unpredicted lines of thought, or self-awareness. The openness of chance relations allows that. And yet the space of such encounters also needs to be limited for these illuminations to be effected. This ballet of location and de-location, context and its dissolution, the space without place of vision itself develops throughout Giacometti’s work, germinates everywhere in it, including either side of the dramatic shift in style as he begins to discover through his own fixation on the problems of representing the human form visually. The look of his objects either side of that divide could not diverge more starkly. On the one hand, his objects are of obscure appearance, in which subjective elements lie close by anthropological ones, and which share a space that divorces them from 57

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the human form. Or if vestiges of the human remain, they prompt thoughts of sado-masochistic aggression and the collapse of any other form of human relation. On the other hand, human figures find their way into Giacometti’s visual idiom, bringing with them supreme vulnerability as well as energy, as though the power of their birth in view were without any defence at all against flimsiness and disappearance. Where, then, is Alberto Giacometti? And where is the viewer in relation to the objects Giacometti makes and offers for view? And is the indeterminacy of the place where he stands creative or self-eclipsing?

VII Notions of form and trans-formation are central to the practices of l’informe as much as to those of Surrealism; notions of form and the formless, or rather the without-form, forms eluding form and resisting form. Forms give form to what we recognize; change the forms and perhaps we might change what we have known, and can know now.32 The exhibition Undercover Surrealism, curated by Dawn Ades and Simon Baker at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2006, explored the interactions and rivalries between the Surrealist group and the group centred on the review Documents.33 Whether under cover or breaking cover, each shares an idea, an ideal and a practice of changing society. Whether in the Apollonian brand built around Breton and the pursuit of new forms, or the Dionysian one built around Bataille and the freedom from any form, each group is engaged in a concentration of an energy which, however aesthetic, however aimed at the manipulation of images, is aimed at nothing less than redefining the way we allow ourselves to think, relate, classify, organize, make sense, progress. But to make the idea powerful, as well as the practice, as viewers we need to let it put us on the spot. We would need to be involved in making that project work, in asking and resolving its questions; we need to do more than observe questions being asked. But what ‘more’ is that? How should we interact now with the avant-garde project of making artforms transform the social relation? The ‘under cover’ metaphor reveals something of the tensions between Breton and Bataille, but beyond that something also of what still remains hidden to us about the way we consume. If it is naïve to imagine that artworks will change the world or rid the world of war, then it is equally naïve to assume that they will have no part in that. The part they play is to offer us a way of thinking which does not relate experience to a theme or a concept or even a programme. Artworks seem at once to invite and to resist using their contexts to make an abstraction of the moment in 58

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which we face them and experience them. The artefacts in Undercover Surrealism were arranged in such a way as to evoke the context of their making and also display its passing. In trying to understand any of them, viewers would be faced with trying to relate viewing now to viewing in situations where they do not belong. Dalí’s dreams are not any of ours, Eli Lotar’s photographs of the La Villette abattoir are not the same as pictures of the killing fields of Cambodia or the continuing wars in the Middle East. The contents of these images hit us with that self-evidence, and we are left looking at their forms again and trying to see how we make sense of them. And we do so by an effort of translation. For in battling against the organized illusion that the world is as we see it, and whether they draw on ideas of form, hallucination or sacrifice, what reason is there for any of these artists to suppose that materials taken from their original context will have no meaning? One of the paintings exhibited in Undercover Surrealism is Dalí’s The Bather of 1928. It is made of oil paint, as well as sand and gravel stuck onto a panel. These are incompatible materials both to the eye and the touch. There are also different effects in the picture within the painted parts as well as between the painted ones and the collage. Paint peeling off is painted over: in other words, paint seeming to disappear is painted on. There is an array of materials clashing, suggesting contexts clashing; as do the range of enchanting formal and oneiric transformations. But while these juxtapositions challenge form and recognizable shape, equally they are stuck or caught or suspended under the uniform flatness Dalí creates here as elsewhere. Thinking with that effect and not against it, we might start to be haunted by the spectre of presentism: the spectre of all translations from one medium as well as one context to another merely giving us – juxtaposition: a static synchronicity, the depressing if alluring now of what we feel we can know and touch. But then again, we cannot touch this piece. The interdiction on touching works of art is confirmed by Dalí’s artificial and highly crafted two-dimensionality, emphasized still more starkly by the depth-less clash of different textures. If we think with that effect as well, rather than against it, we find we cannot touch even our present-ist creations, the tyrannies of our own points of view. Perhaps we are locked into them, seeing nothing but them and therefore not seeing them at all. But equally, a sighting might emerge from within this absorption not of what we see but how. An ambient relation does seem to emerge in Dalí’s picture between mobility and immobility, as well as between dreaming and waking more particularly – if only at the conceptual level, where we think about the activity itself of looking and thinking about looking. In not knowing where those distinctions lie, in failing to locate them in time as well as in space, an unanticipated, and to that extent an unknown, capacity to change the conditions of our relating might 59

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10. Salvador Dalí, The Bather, 1928. Oil on panel, 20½ x 28¼ inches. Location: Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc., St. Petersburg, Florida. © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, DACS, London, 2013, © Salvador Dalí Museum Inc. St. Petersburg, FL 2013

emerge – relations between past and present, unconscious and conscious, one culture and another. Giacometti’s Tête qui regarde of 1929 was displayed in the exhibition alongside the Cycladic standing figures it may have been drawn from. (See Figure 35, page 177.) Certainly Giacometti writes frequently of what he learns from art, especially that of Egypt.34 How would you like to respond? Explain the new by its allusions to the old? Wouldn’t you rather respond to the evident, which is that the old has been absorbed in the new, the now of viewing and whatever responsibility we might be able to claim for that? The past may well have been absorbed, but still it lives: in signs and hints and intangible stonebound sketches of all kinds. Perhaps we will learn to recognize what we cannot know; and that we can not-know. Communication might emerge from there with anyone, even though that impulse will remain lodged in our own intimate sense of I – where else? 60

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Giacometti’s Homme et femme of 1928–9 was also on display in Undercover Surrealism; I am not able to reproduce it here. What passage could be simpler than the one here from form to content and a phallic way of looking? A spike pierces something concave, sexual touching takes the forms of rape, and gender violence at large. And yet . . . the point of impact, of piercing is not there, withdrawn from at the last moment, indeterminate for all its force and evidence. Does this indeterminacy emphasize or attenuate the aggression and tyranny? The plaster version used to cast the piece in bronze intensifies the question, seeming to break the vile now-ness of the symbolic violence in the piece, which anticipates itself. Symbolism is infected with its own temporality, reaching everywhere; equally, a ghastly equivalence of meaning and moment, with the power to stretch meaning to eternity, is broken. But then what is in the passage from plaster to bronze? Plaster seems breakable, bronze implacable? Why cast, then? To emphasize the pessimism of the piece, of phallic organization at large and its depressing predictability? But walk again around the bronze: the linearity of the plinth supporting this unhearing dialogue shifts as new lines appear in your viewing. Metallic and implacable the bronze piece may be, but equally its lines, the holes and the air between them are all interdependent. Piercing and enveloping – each loses its oppositionality and aggression. At least some kind of reversibility has been introduced, some different ways of sensing and seeing, even if not an extraction from the whole phallic organization of sensing which seems to have been imposed on viewers or to have grown around us. Still, beyond reversibility, beyond the relation of executioner and victim altogether, each partner in this dialogue re-assumes his, her own features and character as you might walk around and look at them over time. The male figure is no longer necessarily dominated by the spike through his midriff into the pelvis of the female. He is also made in a graceful arc leaning forward, as in conversation. The female figure is not just in the shape of a receptacle for whatever may invade it, but draws its own arc along a different plane and making its own grace. However flimsily, and from within the time of my looking, of looking and forgetting, my way of looking has been changed.

VIII The uncertainty of the point of view, the general inability Giacometti describes to come to terms with the origin of his own pieces and the identifications hidden there, seems in Homme et femme to have lightened the pressure of the gender and cultural conditioning, in the uniqueness it paradoxically shares 61

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with Giacometti’s others. This lightening has involved fracturing the point of view; or a rediscovery that the point of view never was whole. The two figures loosen the symbolic vice applied in interpreting them, offer a silent and motionless mime in which their own identities each emerge – different from each other and yet in dialogue: a dialogue made possible in its interruption. In fact the piece as a whole is made in this indeterminate starting and stopping, which only the title counteracts in its static conjunction of man and woman. Rather than exclusively seeing a piece made of two parts, one aggressively penetrating the other, you might see a cohesive abstract unit rising from the floor; or a piece whose two elements are in a mobile, multiform dialogue; or even as a piece whose elements are in no sort of dialogue at all. Putting the two elements together is the responsibility of the viewer. La Cage of 1930–1 seems to respond to such proliferation of possible identifications and viewpoints from the opposite direction. (See Figure 4, page 24.) Where permissible vision is loosened in Homme et femme by the indeterminacy of its forms, the transparent cube in La Cage seems not up to the task of containing the objects that look as though they have been stuffed into it. These are all reminiscent of objects or elements in Giacometti’s works of this period, some of which are illuminated by the titles of the works, some not. All these seemingly trapped objects, caught in the build-up of their own increasing obscurity, pose the same question: what do they show of their maker? What is the question being asked of the viewer? How are we to respond to the identifications of another without simply turning them into our own? Here, embryonically, the question arises in a form that will absorb Giacometti increasingly. How are objects to be placed: together, or apart? Where is the line drawn between solitude and community? Where do we pass from learning where we stand to being overrun? Where does overdetermination pass over to revelation? The passage from the plaster to the bronze casting of Femme cuillère of 1926–7 comes to life at the beginning of the period 1926 to 1933, which includes the making of both Homme et femme and the pre-war La Cage. In that time-lapse, perhaps the concave spoon shape has somehow influenced the shaping of the three-dimensional arc, which the title Homme et femme encourages us to think of as female in form, initially at least. Perhaps the bronze casting of that concave shape has in some way spawned the bronze of the Femme cuillère, now alone. Or is she? Perhaps we simply cannot see her companions – ourselves, if you like, standing next to the sculpture and watching it. What has been absorbed in this bronze? What is its capacity to show the congregation of associative shapes and beings which have produced it and which might affect viewers individually now, across an indeterminate space? 62

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This congregation also involves an intertextual allusion to the spoon-shoe, the discovery of which Breton narrates in the third part of L’Amour fou of 1937. This is also a narrative account of Breton’s encounters with Giacometti, of encounters with objects found by chance in a flea markets in Paris, including a spoon with a handle shaped like the heel of a shoe, and a mask-like object which turns out later to be an early, badly designed gas mask causing the death of anyone using it. They each share the quality of the ‘jamais vu’, ‘the never before seen’, and the power absolutely to suspend causality. Human creativity and destruction hang in the balance. The charting of these encounters involves Breton’s affective involvement with Giacometti’s piece L’Objet invisible (mains tenant le vide), the process of its creation and fashioning: a work of such strength that for Breton it can only have been created through chance, and the power of chance to free individuals from determinism.35 Once again, Breton discovers subversion – subjective revolt and communal liberation articulate each other – in such encounters with objects, and the various cultures into which these objects have the power to transport him by accident, rather than the imperialism of design. The privileged site of this anti-directional communal dynamism is clearly the city. But where would such a place of discovery be, in the case of Femme cuillère? (See Figure 32, page 167.) The combined effects of African and Oceanic art on the artistic expression of Paris avant-gardists in the first half of the twentieth century, the weight of fascination with the primitive all seems absorbed in the piece, the individual catalysts lost, smoothed over under the surfaces of the piece, resistant to rediscovery, reabsorbed in a style developed in the piece itself. Perhaps we are watching a fragile testimony to the absorption of the African and the Oceanic in the present desires of urban artists in Western inter-war Europe? Breton seeks l’œil à l’état sauvage, viewing cleansed of civilization. But Femme cuillère shows wild, uncontaminated viewing to have been lost beyond recovery. And yet reading Breton, and Bataille as well, in the company of Giacometti, we might discover each one sharing this understanding, each seeking his own subterfuges, his own negotiations with identification, each seeking his own rhetoric through which to show that novelty and freedom are intimately lost in the pursuit of them. Still, particularly the bronze cast of Femme cuillère exuberantly displays its own grace, an ease of passage between anthropological and urban styles, perhaps also between a totem being adored and an artefact with which we can improvise. Are the conditions of our sexuate being loosened in these moments of viewing? In what relation does the piece stand to the personal and cultural associations it carries from its maker in the direction of its viewers? What is its relation to other artefacts, other moments of viewing? There is nothing there to tell us the answer, Giacometti has removed all 63

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signs of an answer, he seems to be working without them. Still, like in Ernst’s sculptures of the period, hints of spontaneous gestures appear, perhaps in the shape of the head, even in the fact of the head taking the shape of – what? A hammer-head? Some other implement? Or a cypher? For a moment, anyway, we know where we are, the lines speak to us, remind us perhaps of someone moving and talking and the poses she might strike. In just such a way the lines in Homme et femme also, perhaps, just for a moment, lose their immobility, their univocally phallic character, and discover a certain ease. But perhaps this is an ease of allusion to the continuing enclosure of these lines, the intangible limits of their expressive range? For to see the spontaneity of a gesture, to participate in it, is also to know that connotations are controlled, subjected to their context and the ways of knowing embedded there. Still, in a static dance with no-one else there, in Femme cuillère Giacometti has found a style showing a tentatively improvised grace and freedom of movement. In the colours of the 1933 bronze, you might see an offering proudly made of the indefinite transitions coming in all shapes and sizes from one culture, as well as simply one person, to another. The bronze offers a colour that is at once predominantly green, and made of innumerable visual and material transitions of its own. By an effect of formal analogy, everything this object is made of, everything that has made its making possible, is carried on its surface, and equally is broken up there. What it carries at once invites visual perusal and interrupts it; suspends it. Something joyful is given to us to see, a joyful seeing: an ease of transmission between contexts that we can see absorbed in a gesture, a gesture we can understand. The decorativeness of Femme cuillère might move us – the mobility of its associations, echoes and mnemonics, as well as the snippets of fertility symbolism. How pleased should we be at such pleasure? The solitude of the figure, as well as the ambivalence of its surfaces (plaster? bronze? colour?) might make us wonder. Does its solitude leave it beyond our appropriative understanding? Or is it a flimsy defence against cultural voraciousness? Does the mobility of its surfaces question or facilitate the ease of its embrace?

IX Giacometti’s concern with identifying where his pieces have come from in his own mind spreads in the works themselves to concerns with how to locate them – spatially, culturally, affectively. In the second letter to Pierre Matisse, those various dimensions to the problems of finding, perhaps of embracing, are becoming increasingly unavoidable to Giacometti. Let me return to the passage I quoted before: 64

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Si on pense malgré soi à une forêt ou à une salle ou à du sable, etc., c’est très bien mais il ne le faut pas le dire d’avance, ça fausse et ça limite parce qu’on doit pouvoir penser à nimporte quoi. Je pourrais nommer aussi le chariot ‘pharmacie’, parce que cette sculpture vient du chariot clinquant de la pharmacie de l’hôpital Bichat qu’on promenait dans les salles et qui m’avait émerveillé (en 1938). Elle s’est réalisée par la nécessité de nouveau d’avoir la figure dans le vide pour mieux la voir et pour la situer à une distance précise du plancher.36 If you still find yourself thinking of a forest or a room or some sand, etc., that’s fine but you mustn’t say so in advance, it falsifies and it limits because you should be able to think of anything. I could also call the Chariot ‘The Pharmacy’, because this sculpture comes from the garish pharmacy trolley that was pushed about in the wards of the Bichat hospital and which filled me with wonder (in 1938). It came into being because of the need I felt once again to have the figure in the void so as to see it better and situate it at a precise distance from the floor.

Giacometti would like viewers to think about anything that occurs to them in looking at his pieces, and particularly Le Chariot which he mentions here. But rather than freeing or revealing or authenticating, the indefinite subjectivity of the responses he would like to solicit has another effect, predictable perhaps, which is one of arbitrariness. In apparent response, Giacometti presents Le Chariot in terms of a concern with place and placing, and the ‘once again’ suggests that such a response, or investigation, or obsession, is becoming a predominant feature of his visual experience and thought. ‘Le vide’, ‘the void’, as well as suggesting an anxiety arising from an overload of signification, with every distinction falling away, also suggests the collapse of perspective. Spatial and affective dimensions are converging – but where is their meeting point? In reverting to his own associations triggered by Le Chariot, the circumstances of its making and its effect on him now, Giacometti alludes to his accident in the Place des Pyramides in Paris: he was knocked over by a car there, an event which left him with the limp he walked with until his death in 1966. At the narrative and anecdotal level, Giacometti mentions the painful experience in the spirit of detached objectivity; perhaps he is nodding in the direction of the Surrealist practice of objective chance derived from Freud: the practice of respecting all chance circumstance equally for its symptomatic and censorship-busting content. The use of the word ‘émerveillé’, ‘filled with wonder’, to describe the cart with medicines being pushed around the wards by the nurses, and which Giacometti says could as easily have been the catalyst for Le Chariot as anything else, echoes Breton’s concepts of ‘le merveilleux’, ‘the marvellous’, and ‘le 65

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hasard objectif’, ‘objective chance’. Breton finds a radicalizing subjectivity in chance encounters of all kinds. Though nurtured by Freud’s notion of the talking cure and its golden rule of never excluding anything on the grounds of irrelevance, Breton’s approach seeks also to challenge the conformism of the Freudian idea of cure itself. But Giacometti’s experience of ‘merveilleux’/‘émerveillé’, ‘wonder’/‘filled with wonder’, active though it is, turns out not to have been one of indefinite radicalization and transformation but indefiniteness itself. And the idea of the impregnable validity of subjective association and thought seems here not to be the guarantor of a community of individuals, free to assert their own identities, identifications and desires, in the confident knowledge that a common, anti-egoistic ideology will be discovered. Is there place in the immobilized wheels of Le Chariot, or in the fragility of the figure on top, to show the symbolic sacrifice of the people and events and their removal from the value system of the day? Have a look at the reproduction on the cover of this book. Neither seeking to produce revelation, nor to expose ideology, Giacometti seems to abdicate from the pursuit of revelation altogether. Or does he? In the way he evokes them in his writing here, the circumstances of his accident sustain neither the idea that they unveil the significance of Le Chariot at a subjective level, nor that they do so at an ideological or cultural one. The power of association loses its mark, dissolves in its own intransitivity; and in the ‘vide’ that engulfs Le Chariot as Giacometti evokes it here. And yet this void is not simply an absence of something, or of everything, or an anxiety about the coming of absence: Giacometti seeks out absence, seeks to create it, or re-produce it. ‘La nécessité de nouveau d’avoir la figure dans le vide pour mieux la voir’ – ‘the need I felt once again to have the figure in the void so as to see it better’: this is a need internal to Giacometti, he seeks it out; but it is also a necessity which is imposed on him. And yet in being imposed, it produces the possibility of better vision and location: ‘. . . pour la situer à une distance précise du plancher’ – ‘. . . and situate it at a precise distance from the floor’. So this is Giacometti’s experience of association, and of the generation of thought: it has been reduced, in the chemical sense, to an overriding concern with the principles of perspective. But why reduce the content of his art to a concern with the representation of space? But then again, what is reduction, where does it begin and end? How small can something become, or insignificant, before we begin to wonder about size and significance? In continuing his discussion of titles with Pierre Matisse, and the confusion that they cast over the meaning of a piece – over how it was created and where it came from – Giacometti with increasing perplexity and wit offers up any 66

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number of circumstances that might have been catalysts. A man walking across a square in the sun, another walking along the road in the rain . . . Narrative place, the narration of a place, of arriving there and leaving it, none of this converges with the place of sculpture, nor its space. And more than with a particular incompatibility of word and image, more than the subservience of either to the other, Giacometti is grappling with incompatibility itself. The efforts in Le Chariot to display formally, to reveal or recover its place, seem to multiply, and still Giacometti seems to fail in his aim of locating the piece, and the figure in it, at a precise distance from the floor. There are two plinths for each of the wheels; and the woman riding the chariot has a further plinth on which to stand. And the wheels of the chariot evidently cannot move – literally, unavoidably. We cannot know, just from looking, where the figure has come from or where she is going. The provenance of the piece in Giacometti’s memory of the medicine cart at the Hôpital Bichat has been suspended; and so has Giacometti’s ways of identifying one with the other – the circumstances with the outcome. Perhaps identification at large has also been suspended, for a moment at least, in the moments of viewing?

X In describing the group of sculptures and drawings comprising La Place (trois figurines), La Forêt (sept figurines, une tête) and La Clairière (composition avec neuf figurines), all of 1950, Danielle Molinari talks of the ‘solitude humaine’ and ‘l’absence de communication’ which characterize these figures for her – ‘the human solitude’ and ‘the absence of communication’. (See Figure 39, page 192.) Also the presence of a plinth ‘[qui] déshumanise les personnages et, en les renvoyant à un état de statues, en augmente l’isolement’: ‘[which] dehumanizes the people, and by reducing them to the status of statues heightens their isolation’.37 In the case of those figures as well as the one in Le Chariot, the isolation they evoke is not only confirmed but emphasized by their status as statues, their presence before the viewer. As the viewer walks up to these pieces, and around them, the qualities of isolation and of the statuesque come together in that material experience. And being material, this experience is also temporal and subjective, subjective and cultural, subjective and public. Giacometti invites us into the problems he poses himself of locating objects and people in time and space. By suspending location, and reproducing that suspension which he experiences with his own eye and body, he engages with a time and a space that is as subjective to him as it is to us, but uniquely; also uniquely public, in those moments when 67

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the pieces loom, in the presence of a crowded or sparse gathering, in the Palais de Tokyo or the Centre Georges Pompidou or elsewhere. To appear as a statue means to loom from a place that is anonymous, arbitrary, in a gallery room displaced from the space of the statue’s making. As Molinari emphasizes, the dehumanization of which she speaks is formal; an existential dehumanization is shown materially in the conditions of viewing a statue and making one. The human in the form of a statue, and then in the form of viewing a statue, remains out of our reach. The lines of perspective going in and out of our pupils, by failing to find and identify the form we see, deprive it of its human qualities. And yet a human form emerges: in Le Chariot, a female one. But from where? Formally, we fail to recognize at the same time as recognizing; from within that situation, visual knowledge takes part in historical and cultural knowledge. Looking at Le Chariot, we see what we know and also what we do not; and that we do not. Reproduced in Écrits alongside the second letter to Pierre Matisse you will find Giacometti’s drawing Tête which he sent with the letter. A horizontal line separates the title Tête from the features of a bust sketched above it. The line might be there to indicate this distinction, or the symbolic act of drawing a line under something before giving it a name, or as part of naming it. That line might also be seen as the line of the floor Giacometti talks about in the letter, against which he is still seeking to situate a figure with any degree of accuracy or precision at all. The head barely emerges in the lines in which it is drawn. Perspective – offered by the line as a stroke, and also as a symbolic act of differentiation – works because it fails to; in failing to work, it shows how we recognize in the collapse of recognition. If the lines of perspective are movable for all their appearance of immutability, then recognition will also dissolve; there is no going back. The head, and all its human and affective content, is there to the exact extent of its imminent disappearance; its inherent loss of place. We do not see what we cannot see; but perhaps we see that we cannot. Let me return to Homme et femme. Its shape and its content transform in different perspectives, or simply over the time of different viewings. Different possible responses occur in this loosening of the point of view, and depend on it. But in that uncertainty, the dimensions of our seeing are also lost to us. We may not be able to see the possibilities of seeing that are there for us; that itself may be what we are given to see. Further possibilities of seeing and understanding may occur to us; they may also never appear. Perhaps the mimetic symbolism of Homme et femme might appear differently. Perhaps in a further moment of viewing the concave shape, now neither male nor female, suggests a retina; and the arc facing it, the cornea. The tapering shaft coming through might then look like a ray of light, bounced arbitrarily off something and then into the eye. But 68

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here, the ray of light fails at the very last to strike the retina, the two do not meet, however tantalizingly close to each other they get, and the sighting of something is not created. And yet still we see, and see something, right there in front of us: Giacometti represents seeing things rather than the absence of things seen; his art is not abstract in that sense. Nor does he simply show his viewers the indefinite plurality of ways of seeing. He shows instead the indefiniteness itself in which we see. We know not what we see. To me, thinking about that at this moment, it seems that Giacometti holds us responsible for this not knowing; and that at the same time, he offers an equally indefinite forgiveness.

XI In the first letter to Pierre Matisse of 1948, Giacometti is already announcing the shift in his personal lines of perspective. And it is a shift, rather than an abandonment. Here are some of his remarks again: J’ai travaillé avec modèle toute la journée de 1935 à 1940. Rien n’était tel que j’imaginais. Une tête (je laissai de côté très vite les figures, c’en était trop) devenait pour moi un objet totalement inconnu et sans dimensions. Deux fois par ans je commençais deux têtes, toujours les mêmes, sans jamais aboutir, et je mettais mes études de côté (donc j’ai encore les moules). Enfin, pour tâcher de les réaliser un peu, je recommençai à travailler de mémoire, mais ceci surtout pour savoir ce qui me restait de tout ce travail. (Pendant toutes ces années j’ai dessiné et fait un peu de peinture et presque toujours d’après nature.) Mais voulant faire de mémoire de ce que j’avais vu, à ma terreur, les sculptures devenaient de plus en plus petites, elles n’étaient ressemblantes que petites, et pourtant ces dimensions me révoltaient et, inlassablement, je recommençais pour aboutir, après quelques mois, au même point.38 I worked with a model the whole day from 1935 to 1940. Nothing was ever as I imagined. A head (I left the figures to one side very quickly – it was really too much) became an object that was completely unknown to me and without dimensions. Twice a year I started on two heads, always the same ones, without ever coming to an end, and I would put my studies to one side (so I still have the moulds). In the end, and to try and make something, I started to work from memory, but most of all that was to try and find out what I had left from all that work. (I drew during all these years and did a bit of painting too almost always from life.) 69

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But in trying to make from memory what I had seen, to my terror the sculptures became smaller and smaller, they were only life-like if small, and yet those dimensions revolted me, tirelessly I would begin again and, after a few months, come to the same point.

Suddenness combines with continuity in this piece of Giacometti’s auto­ biography as an artist: just as it does in Maurice Blanchot’s account in Écriture du désastre of the fragment as a philosophical mode of thought and writing. I will be coming to that in the next chapter. The change of subject matter is extreme, and two-fold: from depictions of objects drawn from the mind to depictions of the human form modelled on living beings. The change is given no more explanation than the dates in which it occurs. But the dates given here, 1935–40, cover a period, and what might have been a moment of dramatic change takes the form of a transition. But then suddenly, and as a moment of terror, Giacometti finds his sculptures becoming smaller and smaller, only looking remotely life-like if they do so, if they become less and less distinguishable. And yet once again, these are pieces he has been working on over time. Moreover, Giacometti emphasizes that he has explicitly turned to memory in his attempt to find likeness, and to find something approaching a piece looking like what he sees in front of him; or what he once saw: a piece that shows how he sees the human form. Sudden terror has turned into continuity and been absorbed in its own temporality, and terror is now still more terrifying, prowling, elusive. But there is another ambiguity in this paradoxical moment of suddenness and transition. For the shift in subject matter is not as dramatic as it appears. Some of the objects, as we have seen in the peripeteia of the letters to Pierre Matisse, if not terrifying, are certainly uncomfortable, disquieting and occasionally revolting (though of course not so revolting that viewers cannot go on looking). Moreover, just like in Giacometti’s experience of his own attempts to sculpt a head, or a head distinct from another, that disquiet comes from the eye; from thought about the eye; and about representing seeing. Think of Pointe à l’œil of 1932. The title itself suggests piercing, and the forms of the piece confirm a quasi-obsessional concern with measurement. The colours of its wood and its little metal bits might make the whole construction look like a decorative abstract object to entertain passers-by in a drawing-room or an office. Ironically, in that decorative, designer light, the concern on the base of the piece with drawing square angles looks still more aggressive, along with the smooth club tapering towards the tiny shape that looks like a chewedoff apple. In English we might say the apple of an eye; the chewed-out shape in any case looks like a retina with the transparent cornea in front. The eye is 70

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being pointed at, chewed out, victimized by the light bouncing off objects and coming into it along the lines of perspective, the one created by the eye itself. And this is all the more terrifying as the eye-apple has kicked over the traces of its other existences – the plaster and wire version I am able to show here, as well as the drawing of the piece where the apple-eye appears as a tiny head on top of an embryonic skeleton (or is it the vestige of a skeleton?). Viewing, constructing viewing, submitting also to the parameters of your understanding suddently being hidden in plain sight – all combine to produce terror. This porousness of the boundaries between different ways of seeing, and between Giacometti’s different versions of Pointe à l’œil, stretches too over the space separating this piece from others. In Homme et femme, the phallic spike also turns into a line of perspective allowing an object to be seen; there too, the point of sighting and siting is not arrived at. The uniqueness of the moment of seeing combines with the erosion of sighting. Not an erosion, more an absence from view. In response, or so it seems to me, Jean Clair sees the central questions posed with all the clarity of the points at the end of these spikes:

11. Alberto Giacometti, Pointe à l'oeil, 1932. Plaster and metal, 13.5 x 59.5 x 31 cm. Alberto Giacometti Foundation, Kunsthaus Zürich, © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Kunsthaus Zürich. 71

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La Pointe à l’œil annonçait sans doute les ‘objets à fonctionnement symbolique’ dont s’enchanteraient les Surréalistes. Mais elle anticipait surtout l’œuvre de Giacometti lui-même, et sa rupture d’avec les Surréalistes, en pointant précisément le problème qu’il allait affronter jusqu’à son dernier souffle: quand je vois la réalité, qu’est-ce que je vois exactement? Qu’est-ce que voir? Quel est le sens de mon rapport au réel? Et finalement, cette question qui allait tant faire rire André Breton: qu’est-ce qu’une tête? 39 Pointe à l’œil no doubt introduced the ‘objects with a symbolic mechanism’ which would so enchant the Surrealists. But above all it anticipated Giacometti’s own work, and his split from the Surrealists by pointing, precisely, at the problem he would face up to until his last breath: when I see reality, what exactly am I seeing? What is seeing? What is the meaning of my relation to the real? And finally the question which Breton would laugh at so much: what is a head?

Nothing could be more stark, more uncompromising than Jean Clair’s evocation of breath in describing Giacometti’s emergent, all-exclusive, enforced focus on focus itself; and on seeing. Still, this is not so much a matter of plotting a life chart, as Jean Clair seems to, of Giacometti as artist from the moment of making this piece to his dying breath. It is a matter of breath itself, and seeing: of Giacometti’s emergent awareness of seeing, an awareness as close to him as each breath he takes. Emergent – but where would it have begun? Each breath is both uniquely indispensable, and indispensably repeated. With each breath, Giacometti wonders about what he sees, about where he stands and breathes in relation to the reality that is his own and which makes his seeing. With each breath, that uniqueness is replaced by another breath. Each place of breathing is substituted by the next and is lost there. Where Jean Clair loses sight of his own insight, perhaps, as anyone might, is in posing the question ‘Where?’ as though the answer were to be revealed. We know, Jean Clair seems to say, where the question cannot be properly formulated, and where the answer cannot be found: in the Surrealist object; and in Breton’s inconsequential, if Jean Clair is to be believed, response to Giacometti’s interest in heads. Certainly there is misunderstanding, and there will be a parting of the ways between Giacometti and Breton, and that story will emerge again in the pages that follow in this book. But rather than being uninterested in questions asked by Surrealists, Giacometti finds them turning in directions of his own making. Perhaps Surrealist questions are not inauthentic, but rather confront Giacometti with the inauthenticity, or the simple inaccuracy, of any question confident of its power to discover the 72

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place of an answer: a point of view. It is not the power of Surrealist association which concerns Giacometti, but the problem of associativeness itself. It is not the answer to the question ‘What is the meaning of my relation to reality?’ which obsesses Giacometti but the experience itself of the question, and the reasons for its re-occurrence. The build-up of questions in Jean Clair’s own text is determined, focused, and unquestioning with regard to focus itself. It emphasizes the content of the questions – what do I see? what is the nature of seeing? – but has the effect of eluding the nature of the questions themselves – where would I need to be standing to find an answer? why does the place where I stand create the question of place itself? Instead Jean Clair uses the metaphor of a commitment until death to suggest an authentic question, the only one to be asked of Giacometti and the only one Giacometti asks, pure and uncompromising, pushing aside the obfuscation of others, making the question and the answer one. But the place of the question and the place of the answer are never one. What comes out from Jean Clair’s words nonetheless, in conjunction with Giacometti’s objects and pieces, with their uniqueness as well as their inter-connectedness, is the implication of Giacometti himself, the breathing and thinking Giacometti, in the experience of indefinite questioning: where is Alberto Giacometti? But confusion there certainly is – ‘de nouveau il y avait confusion’ Giac­ ometti writes, as I mentioned earlier – ‘once again there was a confusion’; and Breton does part company with Giacometti. As Jean Clair as well as Yves Bonnefoy suggest, perhaps this matters differently to Breton than to Giacometti. Hal Foster too shows the affective importance to Breton of his encounters with Giacometti, their part in the drama of Breton’s artistic ambition and depression which Foster sees unfolding in the associative narratives of L’Amour fou.40 But it is the heat of the debate that matters: can the generosity of creation be uncoupled from the violence of determinism? Both Breton and Giacometti agree, from an experience unique to each one, and fundamental to both, that the proper subject of art is: what is the subject of art? Without such a question art can have no purpose, nor artists have any engagement with it, nor can they have any criticism to make of a modernity, the causality of which is marked by the twin violences of war and censorship. And they share the broad outlines of an answer: be neither seduced nor inhibited by the way the world appears, and the objects in it. Rather ask the question, what do we see, each one of us individually? And what are the terms of our seeing? Why do we see only what we see? The question is common to Breton and Giacometti, and equally urgent to both. Ask not who you are, Breton urges at the very opening of Nadja, but who it is you haunt: find the 73

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voices, all the verbal–visual or other sensual bits and associations that make the speaking ‘I’, the one we thought we knew, but whose dimensions we still fail to consider, each one of us individually.41 Why we should be in one place rather than another, stand, look, and relate from one point of view rather than another, is a question both fascinating and radically restricting to Breton – restricting in the fascination it exerts. As individuals, can we break the fascination we undergo, as a community, with what we are given to see and how we are encouraged to see it? Putting it in the way Éluard does, all transformations are possible in the way that each one of us thinks, and in the extraordinary power of images to reconfigure our vision of the world. Breton urges us to imagine that we can. ‘L’œuvre plastique [. . .] se référera donc à un modèle purement intérieur, ou ne sera pas’, he famously writes – ‘plastic art [. . .] will refer to a purely internal model, or it shall not be.’ He is building on the equally renowned and polemical remark at the end of Nadja, and anticipating a further epigrammatic call to arms in L’Amour fou.42 The purity of that internal model lies not in an ability to withdraw from its relation with the exterior world, but to re-form it; to allow subjective association its power of resistance against the values of the status quo and the ambitions they permit. Art must free itself of imitation, not in pursuit of an ultimately melancholic self-regard, but of what Breton calls a real ‘insulation’, as Simon Watson Taylor translates it: un véritable isolant grâce auquel cet esprit, se trouvant idéalement abstrait de tout, commence à s’éprendre de sa vie propre où l’atteint et le désirable ne s’excluent plus [. . .] 43 a real insulation thanks to which the mind, now ideally abstracted from everything, begins to fall in love with its own life, where the achieved and the desired no longer exclude each other [. . .]

The mind can be abstracted from the reality which oppresses it; once thought, in however idealized an environment, that freedom can be realized. Take no liberties with your liberty, Breton enjoins his readers earlier.44 For insulating and isolating the mind from its inhibitions, from the dimensions imposed on it by the values of empire and family, is the responsibility of everyone. The power of thought-in-image shows the power of each of us to change how we think of the relations between objects and between people. This is a ‘real’ isolation, not an isolation from reality but an interaction with it. It creates ease of movement within reality; that is its resistance to censorship. This notion of an isolating but active agent leads Breton to his concluding affirmation in 74

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this seminal essay on vision and imagery; it is the point at which Jean Clair separates him so radically from Giacometti: En réalité [. . .] un nez est parfaitement à sa place à côté d’un fauteuil. [. . .] Quelle différence y-a-t-il foncièrement entre un couple de danseurs et le couvercle d’une ruche? Les oiseaux n’ont jamais mieux chanté que dans cet aquarium.45 In reality [. . .], a nose is perfectly in place next to an armchair. [. . .] What difference is there fundamentally between a pair of dancers and the cover of a hive? The birds have never sung more beautifully than in this aquarium.

This startling aquarium makes its appearance here in the last lines of Breton’s plea for the revolutionary power of art, visual art in particular. It arises like so many of Breton’s other metaphors as an ex nihilo moment, but still part of the complex ebb and flow of his rhetoric, his narrative-by-association, moving all the while from chance to a sense of responsibility for chance. This glorious explosion of light, sound, mobility and refraction incarnates in itself the spaces that separate Breton’s journey from Giacometti’s. For this is not the place Giacometti occupies in his accounts of looking and seeing. Where for Breton the power of association makes objects for which artists and individuals may take responsibility, Giacometti discovers the collapse of relation to objects. Where Breton sees a power to abstract from the effects of appearance, to insulate himself from them, to exploit discontinuity in the pursuit of a living, dynamic interaction, Giacometti rediscovers discontinuity, interruption, intervals, proximities, in the form of indeterminate distances. Where Breton, both in the instant of metaphoric novelty and in the immanence of its unveiling, discovers the ability to reach across unseen distances, across the known itself and the empires of memory, Giacometti still asks, but where? Where is the point of seeing, of interaction, of generosity, and of its distinction from violence? Who sees this aquarium, who hears the birdsong coming from its semantic kaleidoscope? For Breton, seeing is the placenta of an impregnable novelty and freedom. For Giacometti, seeing is a witness to invisibility and, ultimately, oblivion. Still, the difference, the space between these two approaches, desires and experiences, is not here either. Certainly, it would be confusing to imagine that Breton and Giacometti shared the same suspicion of imitation in art; but to stress that is still not to see the nature of what separates them, or the point of their parting, or the dialogue needed to understand it, or the passage from Giacometti’s objects to his figures. ‘Pour moi’, Breton writes, ‘les seuls tableaux 75

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que j’aime [. . .] sont ceux qui tiennent devant la famine’ – ‘for me, the only paintings I like [. . .] are the ones that hold up in the face of famine.’46 Looking at Giacometti’s pre-war pieces made in the years after the publication of Breton’s essay, such as Femme égorgée, made from 1932 to 1933, or at the post-war pieces such as La Main and the two formulations of Le Nez, or the Femme debout of 1952, or the Grande Tête de Diego of 1954 – in their intimations of emaciation and violence they all seem to share Breton’s conviction that art is worthless if it is incapable of responding to human suffering. (See Figures 13 and 15, pages 90 and 101.) Both Breton and Giacometti are equally committed, it seems, to the idea that the imitation of appearance – ‘une conception très étroite de l’imitation’, as Breton puts it: ‘a very narrow conception of imitation’ – cannot challenge the power of official, permitted viewing to hide the reality of experience and the violence of exploitation.47 The responsibility they both seek is a responsibility of

12. Alberto Giacometti, Femme égorgée, 1932. Bronze, 22 x 75 x 58 cm. Alberto Giacometti Foundation, Kunsthaus Zürich, © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Kunsthaus Zürich. 76

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form. The responsibility of artists, as a set of individuals, is not to show how the world appears but what appearance hides from view: events and the capacity to intervene in them. But how can we know what we cannot see in front of us? As viewers, do we have the power to step outside the habits and models of our seeing? For Breton, the answer is an emphatic ‘yes’ to a question common to Romantic and Hegelian aesthetics and which Breton also rediscovers in mediums and their trances, all of which affected him. For an artwork to hold its own against the reality of famine, it needs to confront the power of the seen with the power in seeing. For Breton, seeing can affirm its power to de-civilize: ‘l’œil existe à l’état sauvage’ – ‘the eye exists in a wild state’, or simply ‘the eye is wild’. And the seeing ‘I’ can ‘dispose d’une puissance d’illusion dont [. . .] je cesse d’apercevoir les limites’: it does ‘have the power of illusion at its command [. . .] and I no longer see any limits to it’.48 To see is to see through the limits of what we as viewers have accepted as the limits of seeing. And Breton goes on to affirm that the seeing ‘I’ has the power to obliterate even oppression he has not witnessed; the power to achieve freedom from within his own ability, shared with anyone, to see differently the forms taken by appearance: ‘la guillotine même, puisque je ne l’ai jamais vue, n’a peut-être jamais fonctionné’ – ‘maybe even the guillotine, since I have never seen it, has never worked.’49 The deathpenalty hovering not just over the body but over creativity in its purest form can be set aside, in vision, and in favour of life. So ideas of place, for Breton, have no purpose other than to question and reform the terms of placing itself: ‘en réalité [. . .] un nez est parfaitement à sa place à côté d’un fauteuil, il épouse même la forme du fauteuil’ – ‘in reality [. . .] a nose is perfectly in place next to an armchair, it even marries the shape of the armchair.’50 The forms apparent in one perspective can assume the forms of another: for does not solidarity depend on affirming the ability to see another’s point of view from within one’s own? Going back to the guillotine: un chapeau n’est pas l’enveloppe définitive d’une tête. Pour me faire plus sinistre, j’ajouterai qu’une tête ne tient aux épaules que par le retrait du couteau de la guillotine.51 A hat is not what gives a head its definitive shape. I will make myself sound even more sinister and add that a head is connected to the shoulders only by taking away the blade of the guillotine.

Think the blade away from the guillotine, for shared reality, cast in the image and its metamorphic energy, is within reach. Such is the power Breton sees 77

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in perspectives and contexts. Each is a place for embracing what might never have been seen: the explosive meeting of ‘l’atteint et le désiré’, the known and the free. Returning to Jean Clair’s way looking at Giacometti’s art, and especially at Pointe à l’œil, as I mentioned his questions of place and relation seem to assert their own metaphysical clarity. In this dimension, the question ‘qu’est-ce qu’une tête?’, ‘what is a head?’, will not, need not remain unanswered: Ce que l’œil pointe en effet, et ce qui le menace en retour, c’est la mort. Dans son rapport au réel, ce que le regard envisage c’est le visage de son propre néant. Et la Pointe à l’œil n’est autre à cet égard que l’articulation l’une à l’autre d’une tête de mort et de sa propre anamorphose. What the eye points to, and what threatens it in return, is death. In its relation to the real, what looking looks towards is the face of its own void. And in this regard Pointe à l’œil is nothing other than the pivot joining the head of a dead man with its own anamorphosis.

Move to one side, mortality itself will become visible. Move to one side, and the death mask hovering over the face of everyone will appear. But however stern the implied admonition of ineffectual fancifulness addressed at Breton, Jean Clair shares with him a fundamental belief in the power of art to reveal. Breton writes: La Révolution [. . .] nous la verrons et elle aura raison de nos scrupules. [. . .] La responsabilité des peintres comme de tous ceux à qui est échu en redoutable partage d’empêcher, dans le mode d’expression qu’ils servent, la survivance du signe à la chose signifiée, à l’heure actuelle cette responsabilité me paraît assez lourde et en général assez mal supportée. L’éternité est pourtant à ce prix.52 Revolution [. . .] – we shall see it happen and it will get the better of our scruples. [. . .] The responsibility of painters and of everyone to whom it has fallen in a formidable distribution to prevent, through the form of expression they serve, the sign from surviving the thing it signifies – at the present time this responsibility seems rather heavy to me and in general rather badly shouldered. But it is the price of eternity.

For Breton, liberation and even eternity itself are at stake. In placing the two in the same frame of thought, Breton brings material, ideological, affective transformation impregnably to its goal. Where Jean Clair discovers an essential 78

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truth, Breton discovers a revolutionary one. In each case, arrival, conclusion, realization are all affirmed: ‘c’est . . . c’est . . . ce n’est que . . .’, for Jean Clair – ‘it is . . . it is . . . it is only . . .’; and ‘nous la verrons’, for Breton – ‘we shall see it’. For Breton and his artists, revolution faces its own eternity; for Jean Clair, art faces mortality. The analogy that emerges here is one of desire: a desire to conceive artistic revelation. Different aesthetic philosophies, perhaps one predominantly materialist, the other predominantly phenomenological, converge and meet in an understanding of the artist’s responsibility of form: to reach for the signified thing as it strides past the signs of its expression. But to reach past the sign – to prevent the sign dominating, and from surviving what the sign means, as Breton puts it – does not involve the same step in each case. In Pointe à l’œil it is anamorphic, Jean Clair says. Whereas Breton’s sense of a nose belonging as well next to an armchair as anywhere is metaphoric. Etymologically speaking, for Breton vision carries the viewer over from one perspective into another, one way of seeing things together into another.53 Conversely, perhaps anamorphosis is metonymic in nature, surprising with its transformations, but offering transformations which nonetheless germinate in what is already being seen: an artefact in front of a viewer. In finding anamorphosis in Pointe à l’œil, perhaps Jean Clair is thinking of the celebrated anamorphosis in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors since that painting too involves the revelation of a skull. In this painting of 1533, which hangs in the National Gallery in London, there is a distorted shape standing diagonally at the bottom of the painting, which seen from the front might look like a geometric diagram of a disc. Humanist perspectival optics and the rationalist self-confidence it supports would be exemplified in that representation. However, viewed from the most acute of angles – and the viewer would need to stand almost next to the wall on which the painting is hung – the disc comes into view in a different perspective and a skull appears. Coupled with Humanist self-confidence, the Humanist understanding of all knowledge as rooted in mortality also re-emerges. Moving from side to side, one line of viewing to another, allows the essential features of a knowledge to be grasped – the knowledge, that is, in which this viewing is built and in which it is integrated. Perhaps in seeing the head in Pointe à l’œil through a silent allusion to the anamorphic revelation of a skull in The Ambassadors, Jean Clair appeals to the Platonic idea of the ‘infinite regress of forms’. A community of artisans making beds over the time of generations communicates an idea of what the bed is; an idea which while remaining forever beyond any manifestation of it, any representation, is nonetheless communicated in the lived experience of 79

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generations of artisans and those they serve. In Jean Clair’s engagement with it here, anamorphosis itself confirms the power of a community to remember the essential truths of living, and to live with them. ‘Et la Pointe à l’œil n’est autre à cet égard que l’articulation l’une à l’autre d’une tête de mort et de sa propre anamorphose’: ‘and in this regard Pointe à l’œil is nothing other than the pivot joining the head of a dead man with its own anamorphosis’. The moment of looking ignites the power to see beyond it; just as each illusion bears witness to the human capacity to see the truth, even the truth of death Jean Clair evokes again here, bright and sharp. Each standing to one side of the other, each changing and rediscovering the perspective of the other, artist and viewer re-discover the inherently human truths which bind them together, and which each one knows uniquely, imperfectly, individually: the vibrant features of the void known to each one alone. Such might be Jean Clair’s anamorphic, metonymic revelation: truth formed again, each time living.54 Breton’s impulse to reach through metaphor beyond the sign to the thing signified, also reveals a truth beyond convention. But it involves moments of immobility, or the suspension of movement, rather than movement from side to side, from one line of view to the other and back, different and renewed. His remarkable aquarium full of birdsong asserts its own power to mean, to make sense and change the terms of making sense forever, exactly in so far as it remains almost tautologically immobile. Readers can imagine seeing through the walls of the aquarium: to see is constantly conjoined with seeing through. And the terms of seeing need to be imagined differently for readers to engage with the image, as at the literal level sound is muffled in water, and birds would asphyxiate in an airless aquarium. More optimistically than Baudelaire, Breton reconfigures the working relation of the senses of sight and sound to allow them to reconfigure perception. This reconfiguration is held in one place, and yet beyond location – beyond touch, beyond the reach of the past and its uncanny ability to foretell the future in its own image; and to translate what we see into the permissible, the knowable, the repressible. The image almost sabotages its own functioning in Breton’s effort to sabotage the terms of understanding and reading. Almost – for although readers are prevented from consuming or applying the thought captured in the image, they are enjoined to create others like it: to think by homology rather than emulation. Images such as this express the desire for an impregnable novelty of thought. Some six years after writing Le Surréalisme et la peinture, in imaging himself as Theseus trapped in a crystal maze, Breton imagines his readers there too: illuminated by the indefinite refractions of our own time, all within reach, but beyond capture.55 80

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Metonymic and metaphoric revelation are each grounded in moments of not meeting. For Jean Clair, for Breton, existential truth and revolutionary energy each depend on a dynamism of not reaching. Still, neither shows the not touching of Giacometti’s Pointe à l’œil or Homme et femme; for both Jean Clair and Breton seek the non-meeting in which pure revelation is created, and the transcendence of the sign recognized. In neither of those readings is Giacometti an abstract artist interested purely in concepts or theories. Both approaches seek to address the humanity of Giacometti’s art of noli me tangere. But it is still something different. For Breton, just as committed to breaking free from the regime of Narcissus as Jean Clair, revolutionary relations are in a state of suspension – within our reach, but beyond the reaches of our knowing. The aquarium of our perceptions, made of refractions and sounds, has the potential to self-renew in so far as it is both out of sight as well as in sight, there to be read, re-fashioned, re-imagined. For Jean Clair, the anamorphic understanding of the revelation of truth over time, different in the time of each viewer, is made also in the non-meeting of lines of perspective in the mind’s eye. For him La Pointe à l’œil offers not a dead image of death itself, implacable, immobilizing, but a living understanding of mortality, drawing individuals into a community of understanding which exists in the present, but which is also temporal, eternal, eternally renewed. But Giacometti’s spaces without place of non-meeting are different again, along with the community in the making to be imagined there. In the contiguities of inventing non-mimetic, symbolic objects and fashioning pieces in the human form, Giacometti’s collapsing meeting points show the collapse of revelation itself. For him, it seems, to see is not to distinguish light from dark, truth from illusion, or even the power of illusion from the paucity of realism – but to see the darkness with which we see. Breton’s mission is to prevent the paths of desire from being entangled and obscured: ‘il s’agit de ne pas laisser, derrière soi, s’embroussailler les chemins du désir’, he writes in those same pages of L’Amour fou in which Giacometti figures so largely – ‘it is vital not to let the paths of desire get tangled up in the bushes behind us.’56 For Jean Clair, the purpose of Giacometti’s art seems also to be illumination, though of a metaphysically based truth. But without any resignation to repression on the one hand or the collapse of the social on the other, Giacometti’s art is a response to the collapse of knowing what he sees. His art is not blind, but made in the collapse of knowing, of being able to unearth his identifications, his attachments, what attracts his eye. In describing drawing from life he tells us what he was doing even when making his symbolic objects: he finds with increasing unease that how he sees is made unavailable to him in what he sees. The people he draws from life are drawn 81

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increasingly small, and in that way seem increasingly life-like, barely emerging from the blackness in which the affective attachments of his seeing appear to him. For they do appear, yet still in a light which darkens his way of seeing; just as people appear to him in dimensions he fails to grasp. Light and dark are not resolved, nor do they diverge; the distinction is suspended – and alive. In any congregation of Giacometti’s pieces – perhaps the one he was preparing in 1948 for Pierre Matisse, or the tiny bodies and parts of bodies he was already working on – each one reaches out to others along lines that might as easily be submerged as appear. For those lines of contact and understanding are made in the living seeing of viewers, whose way of seeing is not apparent either, submerged too in what Giacometti gives them to see. Seeing something substitutes itself for understanding the lines of our own vision, as viewers, in the ballet of no context and no place set in motion by these pieces on their own, as much as in the attempt to think of them together. This is the ballet Giacometti sets in motion in trying to expose the birth of a different style; and of a formal language. One breath takes the place of the last, one perception, one memory: life goes on. Perhaps the transformation of Homme et femme into an evocation of an eye will not be seen by anyone – on that possibility rests its emergence at all. Seeing is made in its own interruptions, it seems, and not in its power to reveal. There is no other way to see, Giacometti seems to suggest: the shaft (of light?) does not reach (the retina?). In the gendered dimensions of our seeing stretching from body to history to existence at large, we see only that we cannot. For we stand on the ground and press down on the ground in which our attachments lie buried, visible to anyone but this one viewer.

XII In the light of Giacometti’s life-changing concerns with attachment and perspective, and of the slow and unfinished movement in his life-as-work from affect to form and back, his grief at the death of Georges Braque in 1963 carries its own poignancy.57 At first, he writes, the news has no effect on him at all; he carries on thinking of Braque and talking to him in his head as though he were still there. Georges Braque vient de mourir. Cette nouvelle ne provoque, pour le moment, aucune resonance dans mon esprit. Georges Braque reste à cet instant aussi vivant que dans le passé, plus vivant peut-être que jamais, quelque part dans sa maison, 82

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dans son atelier, ici à Paris, ou au bord de la mer, allant, venant, d’un tableau à l’autre, fumant sa cigarette. Je me vois chez lui, l’écoutant, parlant, une tasse de café devant nous sur la petite table comme ce fut le cas de nombreuses fois depuis 1930.58 Georges Braque has just died. For the moment the news doesn’t strike any resonance in me. Right now Georges Braque is just as living as he was in the past, perhaps even more living than ever, somewhere in his house, in his studio, here in Paris, or by the sea, coming and going, from one painting to the other, smoking his cigarette. I can see myself over at his place, listening to him, talking, a cup of coffee in front of us on the little table, as would happen many times from 1930 on.

Next to this piece of writing the editors of Écrits have placed Giacometti’s drawing of 1963 simply entitled Braque. Braque sleeping? The death mask of Braque? In Pointe à l’œil and Homme et femme, looking at is shown, and being looked at. Here there is no viewer. No-one to tell of the loss, or of the simple act of looking. Or is there? As in so many drawings of someone or something, the person drawing and the person looking are not there. Nor is Braque, as he lies there sleeping or dying. The simple reality of looking at a drawing of something, of someone, dramatizes the indeterminacy of there and not there. From where do we stand and look? Where is Braque? And the simplicity of the drawing itself, its lines, its appeal, its lament, its reach, is not somewhere different from the chaos in his mind Giacometti describes in another piece, written in 1964. This time he describes putting together his book of lithographs to be called Paris sans fin, published in 1969 after his death, and writing the text go with it.58 How is he to write about the production of these images of Paris? There is nothing left to say, only the memory of images, the lithos right in front of him, which in seeing are consigned to memory: the manner of their making and the place of their making is lost, lost in looking at them again. Je pensais d’abord dire comment ce livre s’est fait mais cela, me semble-t-il n’a plus aucun sens, je suis ici maintenant, je pense comme avec nostalgie à ce livre qui se trouve depuis ce soir composé dans un carton sur la table du bureau de Verve, rue Férou, moi ici avec tout ce qu’il me reste à faire en dehors de ce livre et le sommeil [. . .] Le silence, je suis seul ici, dehors la nuit, tout est immobile et le sommeil me reprend. Je ne sais ni qui je suis, ne ce que je fais ni ce que je veux, je ne sais si je suis vieux ou jeune, j’ai peut-être quelques centaines de milliers d’années à vivre jusqu’à ma mort, mon passé se perd dans un gouffre gris, j’étais serpent et je me vois 83

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crocodile, la gueule ouverte; c’était moi le crocodile rampant la gueule ouverte. Crier et hurler que l’air en tremble et les allumettes de loin en loin là par terre comme des bateaux de guerre sur la mer grise.59 At first I thought I would say how this book came into being, but now there’s no point in that, I feel, I’m here now, I think as though with nostalgia of the book just now put together, which is sitting this evening in a folder on the table in the office of Verve, in rue Ferou, and here I am with everything else to do aside from this book and sleeping [. . .] The silence, I’m alone here, outside there’s the night, everything is still and sleep is starting to return. I don’t know who I am nor what I’m doing nor what I want, I don’t know if I’m old or young, maybe I’ve got hundreds of thousands of years to live before I die, my past is disappearing into a grey abyss, I was a snake and now I’m a crocodile with its jaws wide open; the crocodile crawling around with its jaws wide open was me. Scream and shout so the air shakes, and the matchsticks everywhere on the floor like battleships on the grey sea.

This is the same writerly suppleness, flimsy and moving, with which Giacometti describes sensing Braque still there in sensing his own loss of space and place. Drawing here again on the experience of dream and the writing of dream, he shows the sense of his own time and his own mortality disintegrating, losing all dimension, leaving him powerless against the violence of his time, of any time, taking part in violence too through having no place from which to confront it, resist it, expose it. It is indistinguishable now from the naked, impulsive, sudden and explosive aggression of crocodiles and ships of war. Chaos. Myth has collapsed too, its power to represent life. The crocodile and the snake are not only dispersed and virulent in a fantasy. Emblematic of the Hydrus from the Nile, no longer integrated, no longer consuming each other, the crocodile and the snake are pulled apart here under a silent sheen of history. How far? How far from us? And from our reach?59 One of the lithographs from Paris sans fin is also reproduced in Écrits next to this text. And what an expressive title that is – combining the nostalgia in which Giacometti feels immersed with infinity – the concept allowing lines of perspective to be drawn, once upon a time. A boulevard corner is shown with deft mimetic strokes, invoking all the handed-down craft of the type, but the line is broken, that aesthetic now has no definite voice or form. The perfect perspective of the lithograph fades, the desire riding on perspective to stand and face the world fritters away. For looking at the picture now, I can imagine the corner for myself, I know I have been there, I can feel it, 84

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for it is now palpably mine, not Giacometti’s, the sense of place he wanted to find and affirm, the space for his own seeing is now transported out of his reach and rooted in my own way of remembering. Just as all the lithos in the book are transported into the mere memory of sensing a place in Giacometti’s description of leaving the book in the office of Verve. The subjectivity of viewing is not in itself the source of Giacometti’s concern – sometimes a self-voiding anxiety, sometimes creative joy. ‘L’art fait par les autres, vous le regardez aussi selon vos besoins,’ he says in his interview with David Sylvester: ‘Art made by others, you look at that too according to your own needs.’60 Giacometti’s concern, and it is at the root of his artist’s ethic, comes from the untranslatability of the place of viewing – even in its transport into the psychology of others, and their own place of viewing, in the moment. Writing in 1952 about his first trip to Venice in 1920, and beginning by drawing attention to the false start he suffers in writing the piece, his concern is once again with the mobility of the distances which make up his life and his seeing: Il y a comme un décalage, les faits n’ont plus pour moi la même importance ou plutôt ils ont glissé sur un autre plan, à une autre distance et moi je ne suis plus tout à fait le même, je ne suis plus placé au même point par rapport aux choses, leurs sens a une autre couleur, tout est passé sous une autre lumière, mais ce sont surtout les distances entre moi et les choses qui ont changé, le temps n’est plus le même.61 There’s something like a gap, the facts don’t have the same importance for me or rather they have slipped onto another plane, into a different distance and I’m not quite the same either, I’m not standing in the same place in relation to things, their meaning has a different colour, everything has moved into a different light, but it’s especially the distances between me and things that have changed, time is no longer the same.

A line of broken lines, interruptions and unmeasured intervals begins to emerge; although Giacometti also shows it dissolving. From loving Tintoretto, he begins to find Tintoretto’s painting superfluous, driven by a vain desire to dominate everything – ‘tout dominer’. Such a pointless pursuit of domination cannot meet, address, espouse, contest, embrace, resist, love or be terrified by the uniqueness of any experience of any reality. In coming to such a realization, for Giacometti once again reality is brutally torn, split, depriving him of a place from which to understand and witness it. ‘C’était comme un déchirement dans la réalité.’ A continual tearing, then, without beginning or ending or place. Only Cézanne would have the artistry and the spirit to make one line expressive; to allow it to have any meaning, any bearing on the 85

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affective attachments of individuals to their experience and their point of view. ‘Il faut toute la complexité de l’homme aux bras croisés de Cézanne pour être saisi par un seul trait’ – ‘You need all the complexity of Cézanne’s man with the folded arms to be overcome by a single line.’ Giacometti admires the singularity of Cézanne’s lines exactly for their power to be singular, to fascinate with their intimations of dimensions conjoined. For the dimensions of optics and of affect are also torn apart in Giacometti’s visions of terrifying tearing. Next to Cézanne’s understanding of line, he places Braque’s ability to move the vertical away from the axis of a line. In his earlier piece on Braque, he writes: ‘comment dire la sensation que provoque en moi la verticale à peine désaxée du vase et des fleurs qui monte sur fond gris?’ – ‘how to say anything about the sensation provoked in me by the vertical line that’s only slightly unbalanced and the flowers climbing up on a grey background?’62 The most subtle formal tremor is needed for art to engage with affect. Emotional, bodily, philosophical, physiological, loving and grieving understanding, in the terrifying joy of art, is once again shown in being not revealed, lost in the distance, in amongst the paths of its transports from maker to viewer. Or simply between you and me. ‘Comment dire . . .’ ‘Mais pourquoi, pourquoi les fleurs nous semblent-elles merveilleuses?’ ‘But why, why do the flowers seem so wondrous to us?’ Giacometti ends his first piece on Braque with that question. What is the point of art if it cannot answer such a question – questions of how we are affected by the world, how we engage with it, how we may value loving over killing or fail to do so? In his piece responding to the death of Braque, he evokes with nostalgia, once again, the daily lives of Braque and friends before World War I, the joy of Cubism, its power to reflect the indefinite reflectedness of life itself, in that place, Montmartre, at that time. But that joy is now unavailable to Giacometti, Cubist pictures are documents to him now, joyful ones and enormously encouraging, affirming, but documents still. Cézanne, Braque, Cubism, along with Byzantine and Egyptian art, and Giotto, show Giacometti the power in art to see what lies beyond not merely optics, Renaissance optics in particular, but the collapse of seeing in seeing itself. And in remembering. Why do we find flowers beautiful? To Giacometti the answer does not appear. The labyrinths of attachment are still cast in oblivion, the lines taking them to the eye, or to the hand, or into a style, are broken. It is the same question, in Giacometti’s art of the not-met, as how can I say the death of another human being? Of my friend? Or draw it? Or commit it to view, find the place where his death lives and is lost in my own living? In seeking to preserve the optimism of discovery, Breton leads the golddust of his metaphors into lavishing praise on the moments before revelation; on waiting: 86

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Indépendemment de ce qui arrive, n’arrive pas, c’est l’attente qui est magnifique.63 Independently of what happens, what doesn’t happen, it’s the wait that’s magnificent.

But for Giacometti, that waiting, that indefinite pause in which an understanding is perhaps being carried, is wholly, unlocatably, incorporated in the tremors of the optical dimension: in the inability to reach in himself the place of his seeing and his own understanding. On that hesitation between ‘ce qui arrive, ce qui n’arrive pas’ rests the appearance and disappearance of understanding how we see each other, and situate each other; how we witness each other, and our own time. For Giacometti these are still not alternatives, appearance and disappearance are made of the same stuff, in the same experience, and the same seeing. What he admires in ‘la peinture dite cubiste’, as he calls it in his obituary for Braque, ‘so-called Cubist painting’, are its multiple lines submerged in the complexity of lived experience, eluding any perspective. What he admires in Giotto is the truth of his gestures, like the mother reaching to her child; and the truth of the distances across which these gestures reach him: or do they?64 ‘L’attente, l’oubli’, as Maurice Blanchot has it: waiting, forgetting – at what point, either side of a comma, and in what place has time passing turned into the time of the now?65 And from within the visual skin of the present, what vestiges remain of an ability to embrace others and to care? Leaving aside the Abstract Expressionism of the time, and the formal purity pursued in Yves Klein’s Nouveau Réalisme, and even the attachments to materiality explored in the informe manner by Dubuffet and Fautrier, Giacometti finds in the late art of Braque, in the imponderable humility of his approach to objects and landscapes, a form for such questions; and for the vanishing point of art itself.

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Touch, Translation, Witness: Alberto Giacometti, La Main, Le Nez

2

For Patrick O’Donovan

I am driven by an experience of works of art, the way they reach out to me, and to audiences I can imagine. That reaching, that invitation to engage is tenuous, seemingly based on hope rather than certainty. Something about it involves the suspension of context, which now appears a matter of supposition, speculation, even colonization. But this suspension immerses viewers and readers in context as well, the context of the making as well as the receiving of such objects. Knowing that we share an experience of context without knowing it, that we share without sharing – such a situation might be a familiar one in response to any work of art, especially in its immediate, almost literal impact, as participants we become aware of the formal qualities being offered. The experience of these qualities is intimate, and yet impersonal, even anonymous. Let me mention Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale in passing, where we hardly know any distinguishing features of Frédéric Moreau, the central character, and yet because of that we recognize a whole avalanche of moments and places all marked historically, culturally or affectively. Let me also mention Immortality. In a broad imaginary cultural theatre involving Goethe, Rimbaud, Romain Roland and Éluard among others, Milan Kundera explores the intimate understanding of gestures that do not belong exclusively to any individual person. ‘Many people, few gestures’: like ideas, gestures are common to many, easily exchanged, borrowed, imitated, emulated or stolen. While the passage from an idea to a received idea indicates the anonymity of ideas, for Kundera it is not contrasted with the person, but with the anonymity of the person. The anonymity of an idea is not the same as the anonymity of a person. Kundera affirms at another point that suffering is the only indicator of the personal, for that is what a person cannot communicate and make personal.1 Intimacy is itself anonymous. It is intensified in its own anonymity, which is then all 88

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the more uncompromising for being intimate. That intimate impersonality is created, or grows within the digressive play of narrative as well as essayistic forms in which Kundera casts his novels. Giacometti’s La Main and Le Nez confront us starkly with anonymity, an anonymizing of the person, a loss of the person, loss itself recognized intimately and personally. Perhaps that immersion in the suspension of personhood and its context could just as easily have been arrived at through pleasure rather than pain. But as in Kundera’s novel, it will have arisen formally, through an engagement with the formal content of an aesthetic artefact. Genet describes his own sense of overwhelming anonymity in approaching his experience of Giacometti working; an anonymity that seems to define Genet’s own sense of existence. He remembers looking at a man on a train: Son regard croisa, comme on dit, le mien, et, ce fut bref ou appuyé, je ne sais plus, mais je connus soudain le douleureux – oui, douleureux sentiment que n’importe quel homme en ‘valait’ exactement – qu’on m’excuse, mais c’est sur ‘exactement’ que je veux mettre l’accent – n’importe quel autre. Our eyes crossed, as the saying goes, and was it brief, or intense, I don’t remember, but I suddenly discovered the painful – yes, painful sensation that any man is exactly ‘equal’ to – forgive me, it’s the ‘exactly’ that I want to stress – any other.

Genet is thinking of Giacometti’s artefacts, his shaping of the human form, the way he loses the human form in looking at it and looking for it, in perpetual search for emphasis and perspective – or is he seeking to divest himself of that search itself? Such questions immerse Genet in the sense of his own uniqueness, indistinguishable from everyone else’s, and for that reason irretrievable. My anonymity is not yours, else it would disappear; and yet in that I recognize my own anonymity as well. That cycle is formal as much as thematic; the thematic content is progressively suspended in the formal one. This is also a suspension of context and contact, and producing the material intangibility, if you will, of each one. With that in mind, in this chapter I shall try and show something of what Genet proposes as the basis of an understanding between humans, and which he has learnt from Giacometti about the singular anonymity of each one of us: Étant ce que je suis, et sans réserve, ma solitude connaît la vôtre.2 In being what I am, and unreservedly, my solitude discovers yours. 89

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13. Alberto Giacometti, La main, 1947. Plaster, iron rod, paint, 65.5 x 79 x 12 cm. Alberto Giacometti Foundation, Kunsthaus Zürich, © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Kunsthaus Zürich.

La Main is one of a group of pieces made in 1947. Giacometti has an arm impaled on a metal rod. Given the date, it is hard not to imagine the detritus of torture; and from there, man-made maiming from any of the world-wide conflicts since World War II, a testimony to the human capacity to resort to violence. Love has disappeared from view. But this is also the beginning of a body that might become whole. What passage can there be from one of these thoughts to the other without beautifying or aesthetifying suffering? And yet can we conceive at all of a body in parts without an idea of its completion? That idea of a complete body is an integral part of our thinking, and the situation we occupy in living with each other and imagining each other. Equally, we cannot imagine suffering without knowing we are not the sufferer; that the sufferer is another person; or ourselves suffering before, but not now. The body as part and the body as whole draw on each other for the knowing and the seeing of them; but this is also a keeping away, producing and nurturing 90

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a sense of the distance between a thing and the act of imagining it, a distance that is as much spatial as temporal. This is a simultaneity of the disparate, which we can imagine because of the dynamic keeping the dimensions involved apart. In his short book Noli me tangere of 2003, Jean-Luc Nancy writes of resurrection as a departure, of Christian thought showing forms of behaviour we might aspire to, or on the other hand simply be resigned to accepting. Do not touch me because I am not there to be touched; do not restrain me, because denying the otherness of me to you is in any case beyond you; the attempt will damage you. The generosity of behaviour and approach suggested in this lies in the ability to think the unknown from within the known. Nancy finds in the noli me tangere idea, its seepage into some level of cultural familiarity, at least in the West, the capacity easily, with grace, to think loss, grief and the not-I.

14. Rembrandt, Noli me tangere, 1651. Oil on canvas, 65 × 79 cm. Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Braunschweig Kunstmuseum des Landes Niedersachsen Foto: Museumsfotograf. Location: Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum. 91

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Let us imagine the presence of you to me; my love, my lover, my images and mnemonics of paradise both lost and regained with equal clarity, equal indeterminacy. ‘Comme elle vient, elle part.’ ‘As she comes, she goes’, writes Nancy of that sense of presence.3 Mary Magdalene loved Jesus. His loved body is what eludes touch in the gesture of reaching out to touch. Mary’s desire for Jesus is not rebuffed; rather it produces, of itself, the interdiction on the erotic touch of his body, any touch of it at all. Is this interdiction a sign and a consequence of the godhead of Jesus, or rather of his humanity? The interdiction on touch is told here at its most intimate level: lovers in the touching will not imprison in their embracing, although they may seek to; instead, they hope to touch again. But death will part them, just as anything else may. Le Christ ne veut pas être retenu, car il part. Christ does not want to be kept here, for he will go.

With stunning simplicity, seeming to come deep from within someone’s experience, forever not yours or mine, Nancy turns the resurrection narrative into a saying of grief, and also life; for one is made in the other, not only in those extremes, but in the minute passages and passings that anticipate them and of which they are the traces. Nancy shows thought and sensation coming from the pathos of the moments when you are no longer there. Can this, perhaps, be carried over to the suffering and the grace of La Main, and allow that to be told? With this sense of coming and going in mind, the presence of a person being there needs no deconstruction: there, but vulnerable nonetheless to being translated into a idea, resurrected into a consumable. There and not there: the illusions of that presence and that kind of resurrection are already put aside, their seams flying, coming and going. Perhaps Giacometti’s arm on a stick is a frozen wave, calling for an embrace, for love, for language, but a language made silent in allowing us, the viewers, our own air with which to breathe and speak; so now this is a frozen wave, a wave of farewell. Perhaps it is a witness to loss, she really is not there any more, only in the fits and starts of memory, as well as in willed, traditionalized remembrance: then the piece might look like monument, or even a standard. In any case, this is a witness that comes and goes, as the arm waves again, is made to wave differently each time as you might walk around it, making a living thing of a thing inert. But it is still not there for the touching, it is imprisoned in the looking, further imprisoned in the metaphors of looking embodied there and slowly emerging as we might look. And as we look, we are unknown to each other, even in the 92

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same room at the same time; which confirms that we still do not know what we see. These positions of elusiveness and rebuff make a dance that shows living with grief, a life of grief; living with others, without them; living without, to be with. Might this be an embryo of responsible living? La Main silences, though. An arm on a stick, amputated from a body; or is it seeking to discover one? But all place for a body has disappeared, for there is now no frame for one. Only the vestige of a frame remains in the form of the single pole, the last one remaining of the four uprights of a cube, of a box to put things and people in and to place them. It remains to torture the arm; but perhaps still also to liberate it, as frames might have had the capacity to do. The piece as a whole is a monument to the tortured in the camps; or it is to me. It is also a new beginning, made of showing a beginning; but this beginning has already receded, now that I see it. The arm waves to us, it waves us away. It is pinioned, it has no roots. The piece is rooted in its plinth, it has no place. It witnesses; those it bears witness to are not there, and are without voice. It has no voice itself; it is made in that loss, alive in the loss of others. And as I confirm the silence of the piece with my viewing and then with my words for it, I live that loss as well, by imagining it, by not being there. The place of suffering is lost in the living, and the immobile fabric of the piece too; both are lost to me. Living, and yet immobile: paradoxical, perhaps. But in that way, La Main gives a form to the destiny of loss, which is to become a loss, an idea of one. The temporal evolutions, or instantaneous transitions of a sense of loss into various awarenesses of it confirm that loss by banishing it. The idea of a loss is not loss but representation, presence, here-ness. The immobility of La Main shows this, its material inevitability; it shows waving to the departed and not the departed themselves, the dead or the gone. Whether in respect or grief or hope, it is an emblem to the living and to living thought. The arm also extends and is extended, stretched to the point of further dissolution. Rather than stretching over a chasm of the here and the not here, it extends over its impalement, over its rootedness in the time of seeing, and waves at all the possibilities there, each inevitably displaced in the one seen or articulated here, confirming loss in the making of it. Digression might be a way of showing that range of points of seeing and engaging, the diversity-with-immobility that goes with it: a critical method with which to approach Giacometti’s poetics of space, place and loss. Perhaps this digression should be understood in company with a sort of translation, if digression is not to lead us simply to an open-ended breaching of everything that divides us from others and from what is not here. What kind of resistance to that appropriative impulse might an idea of translation provide? Translation involves taking the unknown, at least to some, into the known, at 93

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least to some others. But the space of the known in relation to the unknown remains indeterminate, displaced. We read with a sense of reading something unknown to us; and traces of that are carried over as what we read becomes read and understood. Yet understood it will have become, and will always remain. The ‘enactment of reciprocity’ George Steiner aspires to on behalf of translation and its morals seems far off, still unattained, perhaps unattainable.4 By contrast, the idea of the trace serves to shows the obscure point, obscure beyond recovery, where the unknown and the yet-to-be imagined has become the known and the codifiable. Giacometti’s hand shows that obscure point, that transition, and what it is impossible to show, only wave at. Is it possible to sustain this sense of being brought up against – against some place, some transition, some event which cannot be told? And as a viewer or critic, why hold out against some form of telling in any case? Rather than the ambition of reciprocity, perhaps a practice of suspension will allow us to understand better, and live better with the ‘disequilibrium’ of which Steiner sees the threat in translation, caused ‘by taking away from “the other” and by adding [. . .] to our own’. Responding to Rembrandt’s version of Mary Magdalene’s meeting with the resurrected Christ, Nancy writes: À cet égard, Noli me tangere forme la scène la plus subtile et la plus retenue. C’est pourquoi les peintres ont su y discerner non pas la vision extatique d’un prodige, mais une intrigue délicate, qui se noue entre le visible et l’invisible, chacun des deux appelant et repoussant l’autre, chacun des deux touchant à l’autre et l’écartant de soi.5 In that light, Noli me tangere creates the most subtle scene and the most restrained. That is why painters have been able to see not just an ecstatic vision of a miracle, but a delicate intrigue developing between the visible and the invisible, each one calling to the other and moving it away, each one touching the other and separating.

In translation, as well as in commentary, it is structures as well as ideas that are translated and not just words. Giacometti’s boxes with no walls and cages without bars let everything in but prevent everything from leaving. The one remaining vestige of them in La Main is that one edge, that one remaining upright of the cube; it simultaneously impales, bears witness, gives life, silences; and we know this, and much more, from the way it repels form and content, one from the other. Such is the structure also imagined by Nancy of the relation of visible to invisible. These are mobile poles in the making of sense, also sensation, the sense of me, and of you, whom I will probably 94

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lose. For this is not a moment among any number where we might think of open-ended interpretation as a harbinger of mobility in the approaches that are available to us. Like Genet in his play Les Paravents, Nancy is appealing to the idea of a community of the dead, undermining empire and conflict in our ability to imagine such a community.6 In Immortality, on the other hand, Kundera wonders about imagining that possibility, and sees ‘immortality’ as a battleground of living power telescoped a fortiori back onto the present stage. For imagining the dead and the invisible will depend on imagining the living and the places where we consume it. We see what we see and not what we cannot. Looking at Rembrandt’s painting, then, Nancy finds proximity without intimacy. Also Resurrection without mediation or conversion – or translation either, perhaps. Unless translation is not a conversion, but a process, a witness to language in what is excluded from it: a witness to the capacity to understand, without translating there into here, you into me. But I am worried about the notion of proximity without intimacy, because it might appear to place a rather baseless optimism in a vacuous, undesiring subjectivity. Nancy shows a different noli me tangere here: an intimate whispering, but also a public imperative. The positions of ordering and obeying, affirmation and passivity are in the closest proximity, while still repelling each other. This is also the condition of loss, and of pain. The pain of loss is a living thing, it is present; there, and not lost. But it is also there because pain is lost – known only to those who have known it, understood by those who already have. Just as when pain is there, it cannot be expressed; it is expressed in the language of those who are not there living it, those who are not in pain. My pain is not yours, nor is my loss, sharing only that both will have passed; but at a different rhythm. Forms of writing, of signing, forms of silence also – creativity in all its variety can invent such forms for the sensations of loss, of existential loneliness, transience without word or shape, intense and vibrant for all its futility. Even so, these forms will always be the mental clothing, the gestures of those who are here and not there, here and not different, not lost. These are the tailor-made illusions, fitting us tightly like a skin and beyond our reach as well; made for us, each one of us alone seeking a voice; each one following the arm as it waves us towards the words in the dark we have already been given to speak. For the critic as well, noli me tangere sits at an indeterminate juncture, responding to a commandment as much as to the unmistakable: seeking revelation and a new Word, while at the same time bearing witness to what is. Understood as a form of translation, Nancy’s verbal response to the visual here offers a critical practice which shows a knowledge that extends only itself. It shows the limits beyond which critical practice cannot extend, showing also 95

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that we know only what we know and not what we do not. And rather than a passive capitulation to ignorance and aggression, this apparent passivity is itself turned into a practice of knowing without knowing, involving a collapse of recognition in which still we recognize – immersed knowingly, unknowingly, in the wounds of colonization and guilt. Giacometti seems also to live under the aegis of the interdiction on touch, and the intimacy of it which is the object of Nancy’s meditation. Touch and its interdiction make the situation of his art, the condition of engaging with viewers through sculptures in a public space (when it is not through painting, drawing, etching). This is a condition of embrace and also restraint, even withdrawal. La Main and Le Nez are truncated human forms, the human form cannot be seen whole – it is not seen here, its relation to the parts shown remains anonymous, unseen and not to be touched, shrouded in oblivion; and occurring in thought because of that distance in space as well as time. The apparently simple step of relating an arm to a body has lost its simplicity, its passivity, and we can wonder whether taking that step reveals or buries further. To frame or not to frame. Such is the form we give as viewers to that other question: to be or not to be there. Someone’s life and context is there, or was there; can we know that without confirming its passing – and its passing into our own context of knowing? These are questions of community, its formation, the gestures of cohesion it makes, and their fragility. In looking at La Main, the frame is barely there, vestigial, present only to those who might remember such gestures already; not quite gone. Does this help us know or help us forget? Does it show anything of the relation of knowledge to oblivion? These are questions of community, formal investigations and experiences of the material ability or inability to imagine an other, or the other. Nancy himself has embarked on this thought since La Communauté désœuvrée of 1990, and developed it in La Communauté affrontée of 2000. This thought is also a form of translation of, as well as into, the thought of Maurice Blanchot on community in L’Écriture du désastre of 1980, and La Communauté inavouable of 1993 – this last text itself being a response to Nancy’s La Communauté désœuvrée and absorbed by Nancy himself, in turn, in the writing of La Communauté affrontée.7 Blanchot is clearly pivotal, then, in Nancy’s thought on the community, the condition of community and the possibility of it. But with La Main, Le Nez and other pieces by Giacometti in mind, a pivotal or focal point is always in question. And reading Blanchot on his own terms, Michael Holland writes that ‘it has never been more difficult to read [him] than it is today.’8 Blanchot’s writing is ‘suspended’, Holland suggests, between the languages of philosophy and literature. Furthermore, if a place is to be found for Blanchot, that place might itself also be suspended between the witness box and the dock; and between 96

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the court of crimes against the nation and of crimes against humanity. How are we to understand Blanchot’s thought in the context of his pre-war, rightwing journalism; of the collaboration; and of French anti-Semitism? Holland also identifies the particular obscurity of Blanchot’s literary writing as in part created by the pressures of a nouveau roman novelistic orthodoxy, on the one hand, and a structuralist critical one on the other. Holland suggests the way out of this suspension of understanding is to re-anchor our engagement with Blanchot’s work in his fictional writing, and in that way avoid addressing ethical issues purely through philosophy. With Giacometti and Blanchot together, or my understanding of them here, I want to explore suspension itself, an ethics of suspension. The text I will look at briefly, or critically wave at, is L’Écriture du désastre, Blanchot’s ‘last major work’, as Michael Holland has called it. This is not a fictional text, but its state of suspension between various readings, its studied indeterminacy or anonymity of viewpoint and rhetoric, while still not making it a literary text, does make it a text that invites reading in relation. Perhaps this might provide a way of reading it without simply ‘scanning for ethical certainties or ethical flaws’, as Holland puts it. And in a digressive relation to La Main, and more briefly Le Nez, it might provide a way of approaching the history of each: a way of approaching, without finding or locating, that history from which, for Holland, Blanchot has been extracted and of which he has been so signally deprived. Perhaps Giacometti has too. Yves Bonnefoy, in his exploration of Giacometti’s work, explores the sense of presence emanating from it; as does another poet, Jacques Dupin, while emphasizing the visceral more firmly; and in a poetic mode of criticism, David Sylvester evokes a numinous quality in Giacometti’s standing pieces.9 Away from poetry altogether, Sartre talks of a capacity in Giacometti to create a new mythology, a newness in mythology itself. And James Lord’s biography is the history of a person. None of these approaches engages with history as such. And yet does Giacometti himself? Where are the junctures of history, life and art? La Main shows a fragment. L’Écriture du désastre is built in fragments; and Blanchot alludes to the effects of the fragment as ‘le peu à peu du soudainement’ – ‘the gradually of the sudden’.10 This does not sum up the effects of the La Main, but something of them is translated there. I am struck for the moment by Blanchot’s apparent disinterest in capturing the effects of the fragment in their entirety, seeking merely to say something of that: sudden and gradual. La Main: a ‘sudden’ eruption into your visual space of merely a part of a body. Its waving makes it alive – sends the sense of a body that is whole, just momentarily invisible. But its impalement makes it dead. It also makes it public; and La Main might then confirm and conform to the horror 97

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it evokes, by becoming a disembodied emblem of it. Within its form, these associations in La Main refute one another. The piece represents neither a living nor a dead thing; nor both. It uncovers the traces of its own emergence and its strangeness; it also covers them up. It shows neither a part of a body with the rest to be found and shown; nor a whole one solely desecrated. Its possibilities cannot meet. The space of the fragment gives that not-meeting a form. The impaling implement is rooted in a space before us, but that space has no place – no place to indicate or return to; remember or commemorate. The impact of La Main is sudden and gradual. Suddenly, we cannot see where it comes from; the place of its living and its suffering is suddenly unknown to us. Gradual: the place of its suffering is known to us its viewers in a temporality we cannot measure, familiar and intimate in its unmeasurability; which is also the incommensurability of my time and yours. The sense of a shared viewing space collapses in the moment it appears, and the illusion of a viewing ‘we’ collapses as well. The suffering expressed in the piece, in the space of the piece, does not move a cohesive group of viewers; it moves, but the time of the witness cannot be made whole. Is this not a form through which to show suffering, since it shows the deprivation of place; of a context; of a history, and the possibility of achievement? Equally, is not the language of suffering rediscovered in a witness that might add to asphyxia and inhumanity, and impose its present context and its present cures? Can a witness know without knowing and taking? But equally, what is the meaning of a sculpture which will not say whether it waves us in or off, though wave it does; which does not communicate, though communicate it does, the uniqueness of the historical moment it might belong to, which it might ask us never to forget? But should I not also answer the question, why not turn to thought and writing or art more explicitly concerned with testimony than that of Blanchot or Giacometti? More explicitly concerned with something than the processes in Blanchot’s writing, or the loss of place in Giacometti’s pieces? Felman and Laub, for example, separately and in dialogue develop a practice of testimonial as much as a theory of testimony. The aesthetic practitioners they engage with – Dostoevsky, Celan, Camus and Lanzmann among others – could not be more immersed in experiences of witnessing and bearing witness. Nothing could be more moving, more fragile, more in tune with what is possible, than the way Laub shows the development in psychoanalytic practice of a voice, a presence accompanying a person in the struggle towards testimony, and authenticating it. Nor is anything more in tune with the lived than Felman’s material pursuit, in and through texts, of a reference point, the point of witnessing and remembering, of history emerging in the trauma of its erasure and performed 98

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there.11 But what if reference itself were suspended, made in its own oblivion rather than performed there? What if the pursuit of reference performed the indeterminacy of loss and appropriation? What knowledge can we derive from what we cannot know? In L’Écriture du désastre, Blanchot evokes la mort d’autrui ou la mort toujours autre, avec laquelle nous ne communiquons pas, mais dont, en deçà de l’épreuve, nous nous éprouvons responsables.12 the death of others or death as always other, with which we do not communicate, but for which, on this side of that ordeal, we know ourselves to be responsible.

Blanchot’s poetics of the emergent and the disappearing allows him to point at something which is not there as much as there. The unknowability itself of death emerges as the test of our sense of responsibility in life. What if we were to learn how to accept the self-evident, and the self-defining, which is that we cannot speak with the dead? Or with our own loss of anything that affects us? What if loss were made in the fabric of life, of our sense of place, and context, and what if grief were the confirmation of that? And if grief perpetuates itself, what responsibility for life might be made from that? For a life built on the inability to know? Much of Blanchot’s book seems wilfully removed from its subject. The subject of any one fragment does not dominate, and moreover returns in other fragments to be developed in often very different directions. Leitmotifs interact and interlock but warn all the while against locking ideas up. They include ideas on patience, detachment, passivity; on the nature of history; on the responsibility of art in response to suffering and acts of violence; on the nature of memory, the unconscious, the ego; on the passages to oblivion; on the nature of interpretation breathing, as we do, the air of forgetting. Immersed in one another, such ideas emerge in Blanchot’s text as process rather than purely product, the process of coming to terms with them as well as the process of losing touch with them. Formally, the passage from idea to received idea is resisted – though no more than that. That limited resistance – and to show the fluid, living quality of its limits – is the purpose and the subject of the book, located in the manipulation of its dominant rhetorical form, the fragment. Rather than in deferral, meaning emerges in an endless and endlessly patient waiting. Perhaps there is something, no more than that, in this style of writing that makes it appropriate to the suffering of others; 99

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suffering at a historical level of magnitude: the Holocaust and the gulags, the genocides of today and those still untold. But also suffering at a personal level: the suffering of others, not mine. Blanchot’s life spans not only the ethnic and political purges of Hitler and Stalin, but also all the other violence of the post-war and post-colonial period. But L’Écriture du désastre, though published in 1980, refers in parts to the Nazi camps and the Soviet gulags, and that chosen distance in time – detachment made of historical as well as subjective time – is part of Blanchot’s writerly material through which he retains and shows the non-sufferer’s inevitable detachment from the sufferer. To witness is self-evidently not to share or be there, whatever the degree of proximity that might be involved. Even if the time of the witness were the time of the event, the place is not, and place also has its own time, unless the witness is turned into judge and even tyrant. To witness is rather to speak the unshared, to make of something that happened to them and not you an experience you can understand. And what of we, in this relation of you to them? What we? Where does the witness belong – to those who were there or those that were not and are not? It is true that people have movingly borne witness to horrific events or treatment to which they themselves have been subjected. They were there and they witness, because they were there. But then, can the time and the space of that unique living be told in a form that is unique? Perhaps the voice of witness is itself in an un-ending in-between. And then, perhaps Giacometti’s boxes with transparent walls, in an uncanny anticipation and reversal of the bullet-proof transparent box of the accused, is a form of appropriate restraint expressing that in-between-ness. The witness reaches out, waves, or pleads for welcome, and is also invaded; but the witness is not in the time or the place of what is told; and witnesses to that loss in the telling. Neither the time nor the space of the witness can be made whole. Perhaps to aspire to that matching or that recovery might in any case be to undermine the possibility of witness. To touch with the hand or a narrative the place of the witnessed event, suffering or joy as well, is to stifle and assassinate. The centurion piercing the side of Jesus on the Cross makes sure Jesus is not only dead but there, there and dead. When Thomas reaches out to the same wound, is this not the same gesture, probing away at a living wound, rooting around in a living flesh, a living pain, just to show it living, to show it come away from the dead, as though it were now a gift from Thomas himself, the witness, a gift he bears to the audiences of the future, which he dreams of dominating and silencing with the word of his question and his showing? And what of the equally sadistic, equally suspended stabbing and piercing enacted in Giacometti’s Le Nez, one of two pieces called that also made in 1947? 100

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touch, translation, witness 15. Alberto Giacometti, Le Nez, 1947. Bronze, painted metal and cotton rope, 80.9 x 70.5 x 40.6 cm. AGD 285, 1947 (version de 1949), n° d'édition 0/6 1965, fondeur Susse Fondeur Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti 1994-0017 © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Collection Fondation Alberto & Annette Giacometti.

Perhaps the law it imposes, whose imposition it witnesses, is not only the phallic law and the law of violence, but the broken law of the witness also. The shaft seduces, furrows a way through the transparent walls, makes them transparent, as opposed to indeterminate. And in that making, the intertextual allusion to Manet’s L’Exécution de l’Empereur Maximilien du Méxique comes alive.13 The torturing nose or the doubting hand reaching and probing are made into firing-squad barrels shooting, confirming the power to commemorate power which the picture commemorates. To say something is not there and cannot be seen can easily be turned into the power to say what is there and should be seen, taken and killed. Manet can only show his participation in this. For equally, Thomas is human, the law of the witness cannot fail to be broken, the indeterminate walls exhibit their loss, the loss of the generosity needed to imagine them indeterminate, and not transparent, or transcendent. La Main, taken together with Le Nez, is an art of the human, though not the undifferentiated, or the ungendered, or the unhistorical. In the gesture that 101

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it shows, its frozen wave of intimate anonymity, this is an art that resists the touches of mastery and assimilation, resisting also the pretension to dismantle them. An art suspended in a space with no place, made of loss and brilliance; made of generosity and grace.

16. Édouard Manet, The Execution of Maximilian, 1868–9. Oil on canvas, 252 x 302 cm. Photo: Andreas Praefcke. Public domain (Wiki Commons). With permission of the Kunsthalle, Mannheim Location: Kunsthalle, Mannheim.

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3

Walter Benjamin with Alberto Giacometti: The Broken Embraces of Witness and Form

Le rapport du masque et de la masse.1 Georges Didi-Huberman The relation of mask to mass. On ne voit pas réellement grandeur nature [. . .] Vous agrandissez mentalement. Parce que vous savez que ma tête a une certaine dimension. Et vous imaginez cette dimension. Mais vous ne la voyez pas. Vous me voyez petit et vous agrandissez.2 Alberto Giacometti We don’t really see life size [. . .] You enlarge mentally. Because you know my head has a certain dimension. And you imagine that dimension. But you don’t see it. You see me small and then enlarge.

These are the words of Giacometti in an interview with Pierre Dumayet in 1963, three years before his death. We do not see anyone life size. Viewers see other people not only from a point of view, but in a point of view, from within a space which makes seeing them possible, and allows them to be found. The adjustments we make in seeing each other, while common to us all, also separate us. My visual adjustments may involve the same visual procedures as yours, but they do not translate my viewing point into yours. On the contrary they confirm my way of seeing, show the seeing of you made in my own seeing. Even the showing of my seeing does not allow me to step beyond the space of my seeing; or in that way to find the space of my seeing, or locate it in relation to others. The event of seeing is increasingly isolating in the act itself of seeing, and in the process of reaching out to others through seeing. Seeing a person involves losing sight of a person; or beginning to; or it involves watching a person emerging translated into my own self-adjusting terms of seeing, or 103

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anyone’s. In Trois hommes qui marchent of 1948, three figures stand on a plinth; whether as standing or walking, we see them together; but each looks in a direction where no other can be seen. Each sees only in his seeing; sees blindly. If seeing involves loss, this loss can assume the intensity of trauma; but on the other hand, that intensity is made as much in dissipation as acuteness. What we have lost and forgotten, forgetting itself, is present to us, whether we talk about it or not, remember it with whatever bias, and in whatever spontaneous pictures we make of our present and future. The passing in sight from sight is an enactment of the effects of history beyond the personal: of an unnerving drift from an experience of legible history to one of oblivion. In this chapter my aim is not to enumerate the elements in the relation of seeing to forgetting, but to think about the nature of relation itself. What idea, what

17. Alberto Giacometti, Trois hommes qui marchent, 1948. Bronze, 72 x 43 x 41 cm. Alberto Giacometti Foundation, Kunsthaus Zürich, © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/ The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Kunsthaus Zürich.

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experience survives in the process of its own relation? What sort of survival is this? What ballet of community and anonymity? The figures walk together; or do they simply stand, and without seeing each other, remain suspended between showing and veiling the moment of their own making, and the place of their own becoming? One approach to the idea of relation is to place the elements involved in dialogue with each other. But what kind of dialogue would this be? Perhaps a rationalist one, based on mutual understanding, agreement, discovery, all the stepping stones in the march towards progress. But Walter Benjamin is one among many to raise the alarm at the way Enlightenment thinking, faced in his own time with the rise of Fascism, can only ever leave us in a state of shock, and with the question: how can such a thing happen?3 In the history of critical thought, intertextuality is one notion that allows an understanding of the past which, by questioning the notion of influence, reaches beyond a uni-directional idea of progress and of the way history affects us. It is derived in part from Bakhtin’s idea of the carnival, by which, in a living and genuinely progressive society, the plurality of voices and ideologies, in the past as well as now, allows them to be formed and reformed in response to each other.4 But other, quite different experiences of a non-rationalist dialogue have emerged to haunt us. Jacques Derrida’s response to Édouard Glissant in Monolinguisme de l’autre suggests that our own language is never our own: that it is alienation within language which is itself plural.5 The ‘other’ is monolingual, because from whatever moment of speaking we begin, the otherness in speaking itself is engulfing – a process which is at once specific and without dimension. To think of the other as pluri-lingual in an attempt to counter its depressing mono-lingualism would simply be to project our own language as plural; it would be to think of our own language as able to construct its own plurality, which we would then dominate with every type of spontaneity and naturalness, adopting all the forms and signs of an ideology comfortably at home in our lived experience. As Roland Barthes reminds us, it is the property of an ideology to be dominant.6 Any ideology that we know is the dominant one; all ideologies are dominant in the knowing of them. It is the property of a dominant ideology not to be in dialogue with others; or if it is, it is a dialogue such as we might find in a play by Beckett. In En attendant Godot, when Estragon speaks Vladimir cannot remember what went before, even though each has only the other to listen to or talk to; and then Estragon cannot remember what Vladimir has just said either. Not a dialogue of exchange, then; rather, one in which one speaker does not hear the other but displaces him, and the time of his speaking.7 And 105

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the singularity of the situation is translated without apparent mediation into one of exemplarity. Writing about Kafka, Benjamin describes this process as at once ‘mysterious and transparent’.8 This mysterious language of exemplarity is both foreign and intimate, like the body itself, perhaps: both mine and not mine. A kind of mime. The ‘bequest’, as Adorno puts it, of history to the present, obviously enough then, is a matter of mediation; this chapter is a musing on the nature of that mediation.9 Mediation seems to appear with a certain kind of self-evidence. But what is the simplicity of this emergence? How is it to be read? What is a simple gesture or a simple reading of it? In his essay on Kafka, Benjamin quotes from the Jewish philosopher and theologian Franz Rosenzweig, his Star of Redemption of 1921: ‘In their spiritual aspects, people in China are as it were devoid of individual character [. . .] What distinguishes a Chinese is something quite different from character: a very elemental purity of feeling.’10 But that purity of feeling is a matter of gesture, and Benjamin describes gesture in Kafka as an element in a very special kind of theatre: all that is expected of those applying for a place as an actor is the ‘ability to play themselves’. He goes on: ‘With their roles these people look for a position in the Nature Theatre just as Pirandello’s six characters search for an author.’ Actors seek an acting which exactly matches their gestures off-stage; and they seek characters who themselves seek what they already have – a place in a play, a play about seeking place, in a theatre which is as much about theatre as nature, as non-theatre. The critical space between spontaneous gesture and the gesture of acting has all but disappeared; the two are in the closest proximity with each other but still have not merged. Where is the place for understanding the generation of gesture, imitation and participation? In Benjamin’s account, Kafka also seeks the role as author he already has, and the stage where his writing is already there. As Benjamin reminds us, Josef K at the end of The Trial asks of the assistants or executioners who come to fetch him: ‘What theatre are you playing at?’ What can we say about such a theatre, one that is all-pervasive and resistant to conclusion? Is it oppressive or liberating? Does identification of the role of executioner allow readers to step away into a world without torture, or only further in, along with Josef K himself? For Benjamin, Kafka’s ingenuity consists in developing gestures which are neither living nor theatrical, but narrative. This is a code of gestures that shows the disappearance of code in the narrative fabric itself. But the idea of code still suggests we might arrive at some kind of symbolic representation of our behaviour, and an understanding of it. Benjamin writes that ‘[. . .] Kafka’s entire work constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no symbolic meaning for the author from the outset; rather the author tried to 106

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derive such a meaning from them in ever-changing contexts and experimental groupings.’11 The code produces the purity of a symbol without code. In suggesting that purity, Benjamin gives form to the problem of mediation: on the one hand, its fragile steps into a new and different understanding; on the other, its vulnerability to the language, as he puts it, of the victors and not the vanquished. For if this is an elemental rather than codified purity, as Benjamin suggests through Rosenzweig, it is still also an historical one. Returning to Chinese culture, and particularly work along the Yangtze river, Benjamin quotes Lev Ilyich Metchnikoff’s La Civilisation et les grands fleuves historiques: ‘Consequently, a life-giving river requires on pain of death a close and permanent solidarity between groups of people that frequently are alien to or even hostile to one another; it sentences everyone to labours whose common usefulness is revealed only by time and whose design quite often remains utterly incomprehensible to an ordinary man.’ Solidarity, the cancellation of conflict and alienation, progress – all seem to be alive in gestures of sociality and of work; but their meaning and context are beyond present understanding and lost to present view. The mediation from conflict to its cancellation, from alienation to progress, seems itself to have been cancelled. In formal terms, foreground has merged into background; each takes over the other. Benjamin seems to confirm this with his diaristic style of analysis in the Kafka essay, where quotation has the function of anecdote; where argument is lost in example; and exemplarity lost in a singularity from which there seems to be no return or mediation. But if specific gestures are lost in making gestures and in the generation of gestures, gesture remains the focal point of Benjamin’s enquiry. ‘Like El Greco,’ he writes, ‘Kafka tears open the sky behind every gesture; but [.  .  .] the gesture remains the decisive thing, the centre of the event [.  .  .] Kafka always divests the human gesture of its traditional supports and then has a subject for reflection without end.’12 The gesture is a mime whose object of imitation and whose context have dissolved along with the source of its increasingly place-less, increasingly engulfing imaginary power. In following Benjamin as he watches these gestures ripping open the sky, we might see the point on the horizon, the founding point of optical perspective, dissolve in the background it is designed to identify. This is the situation faced by Giacometti through the style he begins to develop in the 1940s during and after World War II. Giacometti is working in the wake particularly of Cézanne and Cubism rather than Expressionism, the pre-history of which Benjamin evokes through El Greco; but both those styles give form to an anxiety about place, about placing people, the human form, in space; whether subjectively, historically, or temporally. Where have 107

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the gestures come from which make up our sense of self and of our time, asks Benjamin. Where are the people we see, or have lost, or lose in the seeing, asks Giacometti, as his own art silently compels him to witness the events of his time. Giacometti diagnoses formally what compels the change in his forms. He is overtaken by the sense of the human form eluding the adjustments of perspective designed to place it and identify it. Quatre figurines sur base dates from 1950.13 Where is the base? At what point has a stand acquired length and become a base? Also, in looking for the base we see not only the legs of a stand, but the indication of a rectangular box. But we see through it, there is nothing

18. Alberto Giacometti, Quatre figurines sur base, 1950. Bronze, 162 x 41.5 x 32 cm. Alberto Giacometti Foundation, Kunsthaus Zürich, © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/ The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Kunsthaus Zürich.

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there, nothing has been contained, or retained, or commemorated, only the passage of seeing itself, and the vestigial tools of formal recognition. These themselves are barely distinguishable, we barely know what we see. The figures stand on top of the box which might have framed them and placed them; or on top of a mound which suggests the outdoors, even though as viewers we know we are standing inside. So in what inner or outer space should we locate what we are looking at? The relation of the piece as a whole to you the viewer sets off this indeterminacy from the first moment, intimately and continuously. Approaching it in Tate Modern, the sensation itself of locating, of looking for something in a space in front of you, of not being sure you have found it, or even of what it is – those sensations are literally reproduced. I am overcome by that uncertainty, see hardly anything else, and am reminded of a sensation as if living it for the first time, sensing also that it is integral to looking as well as seeing. Giacometti writes, you remember, that human beings, from a distance, do not just appear small, they are small. In that light, the relation of one place to the other, one point of view to the other, is not mediated, not circumscribed, it is without a place or context for seeing; just as the meaning of Kafka’s gestures in Benjamin’s reading is lost in their narrating, their miming, and also their observation. If mediation is suspended, where then lies the ability to speak, or to witness the experience and also the suffering of others? Perhaps the mound is a burial mound, and the figures on top are monuments to the dead, out of our visual and narrative reach; just as the monuments too fade out of sight in the distance – or in proximity. Perhaps on the other hand the four figures represent living people. They would stand on a vantage point with no panorama to survey, not facing each other, showing only their own seeing, and our own as well; but not the what of seeing, and not the how either. For if people in the distance are small, and do not simply appear small, then our seeing is made in the distance at which we stand, the place where we stand, which we cannot find either, for there is no place from which to see it. But still we look for what it is that we see. Giacometti’s figures, on their mound suspended in a space between emergence and fading, give us back the temporal, sensual, historical, intimate, public mobility of our own seeing, never redeemed from its own continuum. Benjamin’s sense of context lost in some temporal depth, in some nameless tradition, provokes the irritation of Brecht in a conversation recorded by Benjamin and included at the end of his Versuche Über Brecht, Understanding Brecht. ‘You’ve got to look around in Kafka’s writings as you might in a wood,’ says Brecht on 5 August 1934. ‘Then you’ll find a whole lot of useful things. The images are good, of course. But the rest is pure mystification. It’s nonsense. You 109

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have to ignore it. Depth doesn’t get you anywhere at all. Depth is a separate dimension, it’s just depth – and there’s nothing whatever to be seen in it.’14 In fact Benjamin might agree, along with Giacometti, that anything, in being seen at all, is lost in its own depth. But where Benjamin differs from Brecht is in the understanding of history that engulfs him as a result. Adorno seems to depress Benjamin considerably in this period with the same type of criticism, this time in relation to Benjamin’s writing on Baudelaire: ‘Let me express myself in as simple and Hegelian manner as possible,’ writes Adorno. ‘Unless I am very much mistaken, your dialectic lacks one thing: mediation.’ He goes on: ‘I regard it as methodologically unfortunate to give conspicuous individual features from the realm of the superstructure a “materialist” turn by relating them immediately and perhaps even casually to corresponding features of the infrastructure. Materialist determination of cultural traits is possible only if it’s mediated through the total social process.’ And perhaps the sharpest attack on Benjamin the political theorist is the accusation of lack of theory. ‘The “mediation” which I miss and find obscured by materialistic–historiographic invocation, is nothing other than the theory which your study omits [. . .] To express it another way: the theological motif of calling things by their names tends to turn into wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.’15 Where do these responses to his work leave Benjamin? At what critical juncture does it place him? Where Brecht criticizes Benjamin for an obsession with depth in Kafka, Adorno criticizes him for an obsession with surface in Baudelaire. The theory Adorno finds lacking in Benjamin’s study of Baudelaire is the Marxist theory of mediation between base and superstructure. Adorno’s aspiration is that of historical materialism, which shares with phenomenology the aspiration to account for being and not just mere existence. With mediation at its centre, this aspiration is to show an oppressive ideology at work while also detaching itself from its effects. It is the lack of such detachment for which Adorno, before 1939, criticizes Benjamin, at a time when both are committed to the task of establishing philosophically the possibility of resisting Fascism. But like ideology in general, it is surely the property of any mediation to become dominant. Perhaps the differences between Brecht and Benjamin on surface and depth, on beginning and the loss of beginning, and between Benjamin and Adorno on the nature of mediation, are not only differences about ideology, history and progress, but also about the nature of poetry. A difference between the art of Enlightenment modernism and the art of the modernist avant-garde. More particularly, in the dialogue between Brecht and Benjamin, the debate involves the nature of the parable.16 Brecht appeals to the power 110

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and rhetoric of the parable in He Said Yes/He Said No, derived from Japanese theatre, and other pieces from the 1930s; he combines it with techniques of fragmentation to suggest new beginnings, the interruption of depth, and an enlightened practice of choice.17 The viewer is left to decide on how to emphasize guilt, and how responsibility should emerge. Equally, the viewer is left suspended between past and present, between affective attachment to traditional values and a conceptual new beginning. Should the group cast into the valley the naïve young man who cannot complete the journey over the mountains and who, although he has broken generations of family rules to join the undercover operation, has only done so to save his mother from suffering? On the other hand, should viewers side with the cell from the communist party which works for salvation from poverty for the entire proletariat, and shows loyalty only to method and to no individual at all or any traditional grouping either? Each breaking of the continuum of understanding, each reorientation of guilt and responsibility, is of itself cast in a certain kind of flatness all its own. Actors move in and out of roles with no hermeneutic restriction on their understanding, or their ability to show the situation and its issues. As Brecht would wish, viewer identification is freed from adoration and the weight of precedence, and instead is attached indexically to situations present on the stage. The viewers are as free to move in and out of them as the actors are, each free to construct and show new conceptualizations of the future. And yet suspended in relation to each other, each of the alternative ways of breaking the cycles of suffering is absorbed in its own time, in relation to its own past and future. Perhaps that is the prerequisite of Enlightenment modernism, the quasi-literal foundation of its conception of progress. Perhaps that is also the message of the parable form, seeping past the mould in which Brecht re-casts it. For all his giving to the viewer the choice of outcome, the alternatives are not reconciled: the choice of one message is the negation of the other, which is then hurled into the vale of oblivion. Choice, the point of view at large, is made in this gesturesealing oblivion, confirming it, weaving together its living continuum once more. Brecht’s pursuit of flatness has lost its power of self-affirmation and drifted into the depth of which he despairs in Kafka and in Benjamin. And the dramatic forms of this flatness show the vantage points of the present, their trade in oblivion and invisibility. What are the vicissitudes of vision in experiencing these different approaches to historical surface and depth, subjective and conceptual time, beginnings and continuations, singularity and community? As well as the sign of powerlessness and suffering, is invisibility also the sign of a witness to the human dimension, to the human understanding of dimension and community? 111

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In a Marxist perspective, art is driven by bourgeois alienation whose defining characteristic is to be aufgehoben, synthesized, in the three-fold Hegelian sense of preserved, elevated and cancelled. But in Benjamin’s essay on Kafka, art is tied to a notion of pre-history quite different from the one that indicates the conditions from which dialectical materialism will develop and the liberation it promises. This is one of his allusions to pre-history from the essay on Kafka: Only Kafka’s stories and novels give some clue to the prehistoric forces that dominated Kafka’s creativeness, forces which, to be sure, may justifiably be regarded as belonging to our world as well. Who can say under what name they appeared to Kafka himself? Only this much is certain: he did not know them well and failed to get his bearings among them. In the mirror which this prehistoric world held before him in the form of guilt, he merely saw the future emerging in the form of judgement. Kafka, however, did not say what it was like. Was it not the Last Judgement? Does it not turn the judge into the defendant? Is the trial not the punishment? Kafka gave no answer. Did he expect anything of this punishment? Or was he not rather concerned to postpone it?18

Sure enough, in Benjamin’s account here, there seems to be no mediation to our own present world from the prehistoric one that, he says, dominates Kafka’s imagination. There is a mere assertion that the two belong together. Here, the past is without possible understanding, and the future is postponed; neither is part of a dialectic in which the end of bourgeois history and the future of non-capitalist history can be inscribed or foretold. A past guilt and a future judgement – each here is known im-mediately, each is un-mediated, under the aegis of Benjamin’s question marks. Subject to endless uncertainty, that guilt and judgement are nonetheless known – and known only to each reader alone: an exemplary aloneness this, not a subjective one, but still unique. Guilt and judgement, past and future, are lived in a present we know as intimately as the Chinese workers along the banks of the Yangtze river know the movements of their labour. But this present knowing is nonetheless displaced, without secure place at all under Benjamin’s question marks. This present not only displaces the past, but assumes the place of the past, casts it into oblivion. But in return, Benjamin’s own form of dialectical materialism – the form it takes in his writing and the forms it allows him to respond to in the writing of others – allows history a voice other than that of the present and its ideological fantasies. ‘No other writer’, he says of Kafka, ‘has obeyed the commandment “Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image” so faithfully.’19 112

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Benjamin’s account in the short ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ of what it means to be a historical materialist is closely linked to his understanding of what it means to be reading Kafka. This brings together, without joining, the organic view of history and a fragmented experience of it. It also brings together the capacity Adorno attributes to historical materialism to give a total account of the mediations of appearance, and the criticism he addresses at avant-garde art of showing only deconstructed remnants of fascination and empathy. How could those two ideas of human possibility live in the same space? Both are fantasies. A fantasy of origin re-emerges from historical materialism, in the capacity it gives to mediation to show both the new history of freedom and the pre-history it cancels. The ego is re-born here, securely placed, trumpeting its models of completion. Would there be any stop to that, where cancellation of the past, it seems, can only go unwitnessed? Equally, on the other hand, the fragment – Cubist, Expressionist or any other – can only be the fragment of something, a concept, which is then drawn to its wholeness and its dominance. Organic constructions, fragmented ones – both are made in what is hidden from view, from what the very conception of each, its process, makes invisible. That is the object of Benjamin’s study. For him, the dialectical materialist’s capacity to ‘blast open the continuum of history’, as he puts it, is made out of a cancellation of the past, not only in the sense of preserved, but also forgotten.20 Writing in the late 1940s rather than the 1930s, from a viewpoint dominated by the events of World War II, Adorno sees Benjamin differently from before. In Minima Moralia, he anticipates Barthes’s and others’ deconstruction of the dialectic, and of mediation, and shows how the terms of existence can only be transcended from within. In describing Benjamin’s ‘bequest’, he finds a way of allowing his own method to tell what exceeds method and what method is blind to. For Adorno, this bequest is the residue of what does not fit into ‘the laws of historical movement’.21 Adorno suggests that what lies outside any method, the tendency of which will always be to dominate, and outside any theory, in fact any experience of the present and in the present, is made opaque and obscure; it is obscure, without place. For Giacometti too, obscurity signals the experience of seeing in the present. What is Giacometti’s experience of place, of distance? Of method and form? Like Adorno, Giacometti also changes style in the 1940s, perhaps still more dramatically; Quatre figurines sur base of 1950 emerges from that transition. But the transition had already begun. Tête sur tige, of 1947, is an especially stark example.22 A head impaled on a metal rod, planted in a plinth. A death mask shockingly apart from the rest of the body; the whole piece implacably asking, where? who? how? The date engulfs the piece in its historical moment, the time when the reality of the Nazi camps was still coming to light. But still 113

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the piece bears witness, it does so without being there; it is a witness to those who were there from the time and the space of those who were not there and never will have been. For seeing everything is not given to us. That seems to be the lesson Benjamin learns from his own historical materialism, and which he gives form to in his diaristic and citational writing, always approaching and always receding from the name, theory, dimension – and poetry. In the same indeterminate approaching and receding, the forms of Giacometti’s Tête sur tige show the pre-history of perspective. There’s only one of the four uprights left of a cube that would frame and place this head in time and space, show the suffering it has endured, reveal the body it has lost. The metal impaling rod kills the past while making our understanding of it; the present we can only see, the only present we can see. The ‘continuum of history’ is ‘blasted open’ only for revelation to be reabsorbed there. As viewers, as we stand there in our indeterminate singularity, we have made the death mask, made death into a mask in seeking our relation to it, in trying to understand it and reach it. We see what we see and not what we cannot.

19. Alberto Giacometti, Tête sur tige, 1947. Plaster, 50 x 12.5 x 17 cm. Alberto Giacometti Foundation, Kunsthaus Zürich, © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/ The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Kunsthaus Zürich.

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Giacometti will invent different ways of showing the human form rooted in the material of its seeing, of seeing and being seen; but neither the time nor the place of the witness can be made whole. The four figures in Quatre figurines sur base cannot show their place, just as we cannot find our relation to them, or proximity to them, or our distance from them. Indeterminately fragile and confident, his forms allow us to imagine witness and new beginning, without making witness the graven image of the present moment, or a future foretold and forearmed. Perhaps mediation in Benjamin gives way to that idea of witness also; of a witness who, like the executioner in Tête sur tige, is not there, as he might have been in a picture by Goya, whose art echoes intertextually here. Neither that influence, nor the executioner, nor the witness is shown, or is there, any more than the viewer can re-assume the vantage points of seeing and placing. They are barely remembered. Still we look, displaced in that, as we seek the space with no place of the head. Or of this man walking: Homme qui marche I, 1960. You can see him walking again, reproduced, later in the book (see Figure 23, page 131).23 He strides forward with confidence. But in the piece he is standing still, literally, inevitably caught in the bronze in which he is cast, in which we see him, through which we ask the questions coming from within his forms: where from? where to? how? He only appears to walk – towards what, towards whom? Or does he walk away? Where will we find him? Spontaneously, we might imagine his gesture of lightly treading the ground beneath him; yet he stands still, treading down and away the place he walks from. And standing still, he walks on, suspended between surface and depth; still, he walks on – free and blind. Somewhere in the unmeasured dimension separating Tête sur tige and Homme qui marche, perhaps each one of us who has looked will have lived through a kind of mourning common to all, but related only to one. Perhaps in mourning loss of place, of touch, of seeing someone simply there, we might find a basis for imagining an evacuation of the ego and a company of the many.

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4

For Martin Crowley

Watt wondered how long it would be before the point and the circle entered together upon the same plane. Or had they not done so already, or almost? [. . .] And then Watt’s eyes filled with tears that he could not stem, and they flowed down his fluted cheeks unchecked, in a steady flow, refreshing him greatly. Samuel Beckett

I How are the senses, the experience of life, turned into a style? How is touch turned into a style of touching, and a style of remembering touch? How do we become aware of style, in others or in ourselves? How are we to imagine the intimacy of another? Baudelaire evokes the senses all in correspondence with one another, interweaving the perceptions and memories locked away in each one. Yet the narrator of ‘Correspondances’ in Les Fleurs du mal is observing the effects of nature, looking outward, while appealing to a reader looking inward, sensing the workings of the senses themselves. For the reader, that will be the subject of the sonnet, for the nature observed by Baudelaire’s narrator is not there in the mind of any reader now. To think how the nature evoked by Baudelaire through his narrator might be here is to engage with the labyrinths of sense impression which Baudelaire evokes, and which work for us as readers now, in a style of thinking and remembering that has been transported into our own. A kind of translation has taken place into the style of the present, the style of knowing in each reader’s mind and body. What we know in reading the poem has less to do with recovery of the past, personal or historical, and more with the absorption of the past, 116

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and its incorporation in the ways of our knowing now. In rediscovering the integration of the senses, the labyrinthine ways in which they work together and allow us to understand and to breathe the air of our own lives, Baudelaire’s sonnet shows something of the sensual, polyphonic autocracy of present understanding. His ‘forest of symbols’, prompted by an experience of nature, testifies to the absence of nature from present reading as well as from Baudelaire’s present time of writing – however ecstatic the moment involved. Gloriously free, his symbol-thicket stretches over everything – not only nature, not only Baudelaire’s emotionally charged and depleting city, but the intimacy of any reader. As individuals we recognize the ways our intimacy is translated into symbols, we have a hand in creating them, for in relation to them our attachments begin again to purr. The spontaneous elasticity of present moments of living stretches out and stretches back, and we might feel blessed with the prospect that everything we are given to say is expressed in everything we hold most dear. The ambition of Baudelaire’s poem is to have its symbols reach limitlessly past their own reach. But in illuminating the sensuality of thought, the poem lives trapped in the very partiality of its readers’ open embrace.1

II Towards the beginning of his life-long musing on the nature of meaning in Le Degré zéro de l’écriture, Roland Barthes situates style somewhere between the existential parameters of our immersion in the possibilities of language, and the controlled, supervised freedom of linguistic usage. In a lineage involving Buffon and Flaubert, for Barthes writing in the early 1950s, the notion of style suggests something of the paradoxical ease with which we absorb the rules of linguistic and social engagement: the paradox of a rhetorical spontaneity.2 Yves Bonnefoy’s Alberto Giacometti: biographie d’une œuvre is revealingly titled the biography not of an artist, Giacometti, but of his work. Bonnefoy is making his own attempt to tell the story of how a person is expressed. This is a story of experience and time: how Giacometti develops, somehow, from his eclectic art of the pre-war years to the distinctive style of sculpting figures that emerges during World War II. How does his art emerge from the Surrealist ethos of the inter-war period and the conflicting ambitions of Apollo and Dionysus? On the one hand, Breton offers the resolution of conflict; on the other, Bataille sees in resolution itself the subterfuges of an ideology disguising its own violence and muck. Where will Giacometti stand in relation to that debate, or how will he walk away? 117

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One element involved in such questions is Giacometti’s involvement in the post-war moment of existential doubt, which Bonnefoy describes in this way: C’est bien plutôt son ami Beckett qu’il retrouve, Beckett dont la constante pensée de l’absence et des instants de présence – réels? rêvés? – sait se porter et se maintenir au bord le plus extérieur et aventurier du langage, dans cette brume qui enveloppe aussi les passants de ces sculptures. Giacometti [. . .] ne cherche plus le sens qu’à ce niveau profond où, plus il est élémentaire, évasif, plus il touche au mystère de l’être ou du n’être pas.3 It’s far more his friend Beckett whom he rediscovers, Beckett, who in his constant thought on absence and moments of presence – real moments? dreamed of ones? – finds the furthest edge and the most adventurous edge of language, and knows how to stay there, in that mist which also envelops people as they pass by these sculptures. Giacometti [. . .] now only looks for meaning at this profound level, and the more elemental it becomes, and the more evasive, the closer it comes to the mystery of being or not being.

The evocativeness of this account and the power of its resort to metaphor together testify to the style of the thinking which it describes; and also to the way Beckett’s own writing seeps its way into the intimate and cultural memory of his readers. In the same way, in this chapter I want to write about being overcome with an idea of what might have moved Giacometti in Beckett: not so much the sense of being or not-being, but of being or not being there. Being there, and not being there: what are the relations that allow us to understand being there, being where we are, or fail to; and that allow us to find the place of our understanding, or fail to? These relations arise, come to life in the formal elements of a style, and the way it develops. In reading these formal imprints, I hope to show the human, aesthetic and social issues with which Giacometti engages. They emerge in attempts to approach beginnings, the idea of beginning, of beginning to step forward, to reach out, and to imagine gestures of relation and community.

III Part II of Beckett’s Watt concerns itself with seemingly endless permutations in the relation of master to servant, employer to employee. A common enough experience, the commonness of which, rather than any particular content, is expressed in the sounds of the names involved. Watt’s employer is Mr Knott, 118

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and the two seem irredeemably bound together in some relation I can’t think of the name of, a what-not. Or you might hear ‘what knot?’: what on earth is binding them together? Signifier (‘what-not’ – situations almost, though not quite, reduced to word-play) relates to the signified (‘what knot?’ – a question about situations) to produce a comment. What could more normal? What indeed. But how did we make it normal? What possibilities, moments, and instances, have passed by to make it so? Earlier, readers had already been treated to the rigmarole of Watt getting into the house of his new employer: how Watt had found the house, or found himself there; how the door had opened and when; how Watt had noticed it or failed to; how he had passed through it and with what volition behind him, if any. Now we see how he comes to terms with his duties. What are the terms into which Beckett translates them? What are Watt’s duties with regard to the piano tuners who come to Mr Knott’s establishment? Why should they be so crucial to his understanding of his position as a servant? Thus the scene in the music-room, with the two Galls, ceased very soon to signify for Watt a piano tuned, an obscure family and professional relation, an exchange of judgements more or less intelligible and so on, if indeed it had ever signified such things, and became a mere example of light commenting bodies, and stillness motion, and silence sound, and comment comment.4

‘Very soon’? Perhaps. Certainly a good number of pages have been devoted to this scene. This temporality is obscure, neither long nor short, and the incident might resemble all the others: ‘In a sense it resembled all the incidents of note proposed to Watt during his stay in Mr Knott’s house, and of which a certain number will be recorded in this place, without addition, or subtraction, and in a sense not.’ How many rings of Purgatory can there be? Always one more, or always one fewer? Endless permutations, endless frustration. How are we to understand? Or rather, at what stage has understanding taken place and how? With Watt, is Beckett not making the problem for himself by removing such concerns from any kind of material context? Are there not more immediate ways of understanding the relations of power that move us? But then the question might be, what is such a context and how might we arrive there with any certainty? Who is to say Beckett with Watt is walking away from such certainty and not in fact towards it? Or facing it, rather than turning away? Does not the grace of Giacometti’s standing or walking figures lie in the same uncertainty? I am thinking here specifically of Petit buste de femme sur socle 119

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(Marie-Laure de Noailles) (c.1946), L’Homme qui marche (1947), and Homme qui marche I (1960).5 But there is also a materiality in those pieces, one that seems palpable, and which roots them in some kind of here and now that we might be able to recognize and respond to. Yet this materiality is also untouchable. It is a tangibility confirmed in the loss of it, even if we were allowed the luxury of running our hands over it: for still we would be imagining the hands of Alberto, or anyone, touching me, touching you. The time of that touching will not be the same. But equally, how might we reach that other, Alberto or anyone who is not there, without the idea of such a reaching? How do we reach such an idea? It is both intimate, yet other; mine alone, yet recognizable; yours alone, yet public; unique, and yet anonymous. Intimacy is already an idea, then, just like the special materiality and sensuality of a context. Watt’s uncertainties show this, or show him suffering

20. Alberto Giacometti, Petit buste de femme sur socle (MarieLaure de Noailles), c.1946, cast 1973, 4/8. Bronze, 4.72 x 2.16 x 2.16 in. Collection Fondation Giacometti, Paris, inv. 19940202 (AGD 323) © Alberto Giacometti Estate/Licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Collection Fondation Giacometti, Paris.

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from it. His anxieties to do with the Galls and all the other incidents which ‘in a sense it resembles’ are consistently presented as conundrums of various kinds, whose elements are uniqueness and anonymity. They develop into patterns. As patterns advance or repeat themselves, the idea of the time passed with them emerges in the narrative, and in the time we have spent reading. The sense of time develops into an idea of it; it always was an idea. When did we start to know that, reading this text? Patterns, and ideas arising from patterns: forms then. Forms that we know as such because we can interpret them, or simply see they are being interpreted – ‘comment’, as Watt puts it: ‘[.  .  .] and became a mere example of light commenting bodies, and stillness motion, and silence sound, and comment comment.’ The word ‘comment’ comes and goes in a balletic rhythm all its own in this extraordinary little clause. Drawing the sentence to a close, the word comes and goes in the grammar, asserts itself by being there and by the elisions equally. However formal a remark this is, however more formal the style becomes, it prompts and feeds on interpretation all the more. Formally, the possibility of comment, of judgement, of point of view generally, comes and goes; but just as much, formally the point of view is always present, in its elisions and obscurities, drawing everything into its remit, and ending up with itself: ‘comment comment’. Watt has told us the incident resembles all others of note. How many different things are being translated, transported into comment – light, stillness and motion, sound – in addition to comment itself. All the senses combine to make a concept of what has gone on before into a concept that masks its generation, leaving an image of how that generation has passed, and a sensation of wonder and loss. ‘This fragility of the outer meaning had a bad effect on Watt, for it caused him to seek for another, for some meaning that had passed, in the image of how it had passed.’ We know things have passed, but we know that in an image which makes us wonder how they have passed. And what ‘we’ am I using? Interpreters of Watt. An indeterminate community made, if at all, or lost, in the time of reading, which itself is without secure boundary. An image that tells, nonetheless; a form that tells the story of its own genealogy and its masking, and in that way the story of an idea, a context, how an idea lives and is lost in its mediation: between Watt and the Galls, the narrator and Watt, Beckett and Watt, Beckett and his readers – relations all making mediation in interrupting it. In that interruption, the ‘outer meaning’ collapses, the apparent meaning, only to be replaced with an image of its passing, now the only form or concept of what happened. But equally, the consequence of this spurious security of signifying place, in other words meaning deferred, could hardly be more selfevident or natural, even if difficult to accept. And Watt does find it hard to 121

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accept. In a blink, as much as in pages of fruitless analysis, his meaning has become an image of its passing; making meaning is at once there and still not there, the stuff of its own generation or degeneration, incompatibly. Neither deferral nor presence takes the lead, neither optimism nor pessimism with regard to freedom from pain, and neither the capacity nor incapacity to think. But what then? Practicality, at one level, does seem to suffer. ‘The fragility of the outer meaning’ is the ‘face value’ in which Watt, according to his narrator, seems to pride, for he has clung to it during all those years now gone: The most meagre, the least plausible, would have satisfied Watt, who had not seen a symbol, nor executed an interpretation, since the age of fourteen, or fifteen, and who had lived, miserably it is true, among face values all his adult life, face values at least for him [. . .] And he had experienced literally nothing, since the age of fourteen, or fifteen, of which in retrospect he was not content to say, That is what happened then.

Practicality, face values, knowing what happened when, the content, the significance, the consequences: all the fibres of the way that idea is expressed here also undermine it. Neither the narrator nor Watt can say with certainty when confidence in these things began in Watt – at fourteen or fifteen. Why that age should be significant and not another is also not discussed. We have gone from the circumstance (fourteen, fifteen) to the concept (adolescent age), and absolutely no further; no distance is measured at all by that passage from chronology to symbolism. It is in retrospect that the security of the face value is provided, that it will have emerged. What a relief, you might say. And how obvious, as well. The idea works (of uncertainty, frustration, anxiety, power, of style itself). And Beckett has shown how. It works in working towards working, and also in simply submitting to that process. ‘Face values, at least to him [. . .] of which in retrospect he was not content to say, That is what happened then.’ Here we see two very common indicators of the point of view, one with the appearance of a spatial context, ‘to him’, the other with the appearance of a temporal one, ‘in retrospect’. Each one, separately and together, leads to the definitive-looking ‘that is what happened then’: the directive, the positioning, the organizing, and the affirmative. ‘That’ is in a clear and stable relation to ‘then’, in the here and now of speaking and thinking; thinking and speaking happen as one. To speak at all, to think about speaking or having spoken, involves making everything that was time into everything that looks like space. A translation of time into the space of speaking and its loss there. 122

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That space will always dissolve; but Watt’s desire for one, for the apparent, for the face value and the un-fragile outer meaning remains dominant, even in that dissolution. In retrospect Watt was content – but not at the time, and not at this time in the narrative either, where the retrospective is being invoked. Contentedness has already passed. And yet the idea of it has been conveyed and lives here at this moment, translated into this space. ‘That is what happened then’ is understood in so far as ‘then’ is translated, transported into ‘that’, taken over by ‘that’, giving ‘that’ its life. In just such a way, the points of intersection between Beckett and Giacometti fascinate and elude location. These elusive points of intersection are made in uncertainties about place, about emerging and being submerged, about standing or walking, beginning to walk or ceasing to, about arriving at a point of view or departing from one, about the absence of a frame or its ever-present invisibility and potency. Does the transparent cube of the kind in Le Nez of 1947 assert its power to enclose, or show how to come and go?6 Conversely, does the invisibility of a frame strengthen or loosen its power to constrict – or liberate? And does a plinth suggest a platform for departure, or fixity? From there further questions arise about the relation of art to thought, about the kind of thought in art. They arise by responding to the invitations of Beckett and Giacometti to think about, and with, the basic working principles of art itself, as these two artists seem to know them. This thinking in and about art takes the form of a continual return to the point of view in space, with Giacometti, and the point of view in time, with Beckett. Where they might meet is in the translation, mobile and inevitable, of space and time into each other, in the loss of one in the other. Without the arrest of time in space, how can an idea be developed? Without the loss of space in time, how can an idea be mediated? Both are required for thought to take place, to be seen to have taken place, to be directed, also simply to have been submitted to. Like Knott’s house, perhaps Giacometti’s Palais à quatre heures du matin represents any house and not a dynasty, but perhaps not. Have a look at the reproduction again, in Chapter 1 (Figure 7). In what relation does the piece stand with regard to the house as an everyday part of life, a commonplace, and the various symbolic dimensions of the idea of house which give it its continued life? Does Giacometti’s piece face towards or away from the ability to symbolize and make sense? As I said before, Giacometti made Palais à quatre heures du matin before World War II, in 1932, while he still seems to be exploring the meaning to him of Surrealist thought and practice.7 The human form shares the space with other elements, and each suggests its own history. Objects, each with its own history, incarnate and therefore hide the associations that have made them, 123

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given them form and shape; each reaches out for but suspends the associative highways and by-ways that might link it to others, resolve all the elements into a new understanding of understanding itself, and of beginning. Reaching out is both invited and suspended. Each element stands or hangs in its own room in the palace, its own frame, which is also a cube without walls, inviting visitors and viewers in but unable to get out. Viewers’ glances might dart in and out, in and out of all of the cubes in an erratic sequence, but that time of viewing will not bring the cubes or frames together. Association between the various frames works because it does not, and because of the continual interruptions which articulate this association and of which it consists. The bird-form is there for all to see, in flight, but evidently its flight is suspended; and whether it flies towards us or away is in as much doubt as its own morphology: skeletal? zoological? anthropological? A further transparent box below shows an object reminiscent of others in Giacometti’s visual vocabulary of the time (just as the bird might be reminiscent of Ernst’s), but its emergent phallic content is destabilized because of that reminiscence, the relation of this object to the others is not shown. So its relation to the female figure in the corner is also obscure, formally suspended in the piece: that relation itself appears forgotten, though evident . . . Each box we see into is also one we see through, see past, lose in the seeing; the relations of its content are multiplied to involve anything behind and beyond it. The woman stands in front of what appears as a series of screens, the set of a theatre perhaps. Her part on this stage and in this house is absorbed in her form, to the point of its oblivion: the collapse of enclosure is also the collapse of memory. What is the gift offered to the viewer from around any of the open corners? And from whom? What sense can be made of it? All the transparent frames, cubes, and towers of the piece are permutations of the ways it might be possible to place the figure in her space, in her scene, in the loss of her space in spaces. Meaning has once again been degraded into its forms, the possible ways of making meaning; its structures, if you like: possibilities of meaning that might apply to anybody in the same signifying house. But in their uses, these forms do not remain static, we can see they are not open to arrest or secure redirecting, as they might have become. All the permutations of a frame in the piece are articulations of time and memory; each framing shows something, but inaugurates a new framing in the displacement and oblivion of the previous ones, a new suspension of memory each time, in each reconfiguration or recalibration of meaning in the house. Time is translated into space and instantaneously translated again into time: the time and the space of thought, history, liberation or alienation from everything from which the house is made. How are we to 124

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get the measure of the symbolic content of the palace? That measure derives from parental authority, inheritance, property and provenance. Its forms are those of the generations, the permutations of genealogy which provide it with its present ownership, the forms by which we know it in the present. Giacometti’s house shows that the present of the house and its history, its signifiers and signifieds all translate into each other with the ease of a style. Are we any closer to understanding its provenance? Or further away? Or simply suspended there, like and unlike the figure?8 The space Le Palais makes for itself is lost in the looking; still, it signals to us from a time before 1939. It offers an ease of movement to the eye as it fixes on associative content and point, but in that ease punctual meaning is abandoned all the more. That same ease of movement between content and form, the styling of one pervasive symbol – the house – in contemporary life is experienced with greater anxiety by Watt in his post-war domains and deserts. He has been reminiscing about the Galls, and about the effect of that reminiscence on himself over time; or the narrator has recounted his reminiscences on his behalf: ‘the scene in the music-room became a mere example of light commenting bodies, and stillness motion, and silence sound, and comment comment.’ This bit of the narrative began with Watt becoming rather horrifyingly, if not trivially, engulfed in his uncertainty about the Galls, how as a servant in the house he should approach them, and what the relation is between the Galls themselves, in either a genealogical or a professional sense. That range or diversity is what settles in his mind as the image of something passed, light commenting bodies, stillness commenting motion – comment comment comment. But this comment is not the purely self-reflexive kind; on the contrary it involves the settling of thought in a form, a style, a working agility which is also a constriction. With Watt we walk in a domain that combines knowing and forgetting, and undermines our capacity to distinguish between them. Perhaps this is Watt’s style – not Watt’s, obviously: Beckett’s. But that hall of mirrors, or voices and echoes, does not only show its own endlessness, any more than the figure’s place in the space of Giacometti’s palace locates or identifies her. In both, in the open-ended, witty displacement of Giacometti’s figure, and in Watt’s mental self-torture, as viewers and readers we are shown a style. In looking at it we might see the way a distant past is absorbed in the ease of the present moment. Watt’s account of an image now there of something passed into stillness commenting motion is especially telling. Incompatible ideas prompt the need to account for them, which then testifies only to the loss of one in the other. Even so, stillness creates motion, even in the return it produces of that stillness once again. Even just at a glance, this prompting 125

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of motion in stillness reaches out to Giacometti’s pieces after the war, as they stand, or walk, or imitate standing or walking; each is still. Any one, each one uniquely, shows something of that moment, both there and passed, with a kind of literal simplicity, or a material simplicity, which transports them, in a renewed mediation each time, into the content of our living.

IV This kind of relation to others suggests trying to write history without the pretension to understand it. It is also an attempt to write the history of suffering by failing to understand it: by inventing ways of writing and showing which formally exemplify that not-knowing, so that it can be imagined without analogy, ideology or translation into the ego-driven perceptions of the present. In ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Walter Benjamin draws on an etching by Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, which he bought in 1921. The angel

21. Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. Oil transfer and watercolour on paper, 31.8 x 24.2 cm. Gift of Fania and Gershom Scholem, Jerusalem; John Herring, Marlene and Paul Herring, Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder, New York Accession number: B87.0994. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner. Location: Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

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emerges in its outline against a uniform, anonymous background, its features dominated by eyes which seem to seek a viewer.9 Benjamin turns to a representation of an angel to find a way of writing history. Faced with Fascism and his commitment to establishing philosophically our ability to overturn it, Benjamin the historian turns to painting, some lines of poetry by Gerhard Scholem, and myth. Ideas of progress derived from the Enlightenment will only leave us in a state of shock. What is the view of history that would help? ‘Klee shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history.’ In describing how he pictures history, Benjamin concentrates on a paradox of looking and fixing. From the lines of Klee’s picture, he discovers an angel moving away while contemplating fixedly, even though moving and fixity cannot occupy the same place. A storm made of positional frenzy emerges, in which we discover a content. This is not a content we can touch or take away from here, from this angel in this picture, in these lines of verse, in this poetic fragment. But because of that uniqueness, we arrive at a content nonetheless, one which can show us the nature of our responsibility to others – not only for their suffering, but for the idea itself of another, and the nurturing of it. For it appears that we both can and cannot nurture such an idea. Who can say, watching Beckett’s Happy Days, whether Willie strives to embrace Winnie or shoot her? Our responsibility lies in our failure to nurture it and to recognize that failure. Benjamin’s angel is of the most human kind – he cannot stay, he will die, he cannot redeem himself or others, he saves only the idea of saving with which he comes to us. The gift of the angel is to understand while not understanding, and to understand that we do not. The angel Benjamin has given us is the angel of its own mourning. What if we were to imagine him small, already drawn into his blind rush towards his place in that unplaced paradise of his own making, and ours? Small now, simply because he is far away, out of our reach, his effect on us unmeasured? What might he look like if that rush could show itself? Like Zeno’s arrow, the angel could only seem to stop endlessly, in a succession of moments, never reaching its objective, endpoint, or paradise; and we would see movement frozen, started in the freezing and frozen in the started. We would see our own understanding of the angel and its movement. Like for Watt thinking about the Galls, for each one of us who thinks of him, the angel will never be an angel any more. The years 1945 to 1946: in Petit buste de femme sur socle (Marie-Laure de Noailles), Giacometti fashions a fragile figure over a mound. It is one of several from 127

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this period, some still more frail, barely there, barely beginning to live or die, barely beginning to be seen or to disappear.10 What is emerging from where? From wherever we stand, does the figure recede or grow? Greet us or bid farewell? What story is ‘ill-told’, as Watt says, in that indeterminacy?11 This is still the dramatic period of transition and change in Giacometti’s art. Beginning in the late 1930s, he tells us he can only find it within him to try and depict the human face and the human form – and to experience his constant failure to do so. Perhaps that sense of human frailty digs still deeper into him as the result of being knocked over by a car in the Place des Pyramides in Paris before the war, in 1938.12 Whatever the catalyst, what could be a more fundamental set of concerns than scale, human scale, and the human form itself? If Giacometti’s figure is small, that is because we do not know where it is, or our relation to it, the relation that makes it small, to any one of us. To another it might be alive and in reach. That sightless possibility is given to us to see, to see that we cannot see, any more. The figure is caught up in its own disappearance; like the angel, it stands where its rush, its movement, cannot be seen, where it has been translated into immobility, into space, its other dimensions lost. The figure is caught in the spatial relations that show it and which, in that showing, are lost to us the viewers; and we are left attempting to show that angel within us, and to find it, even in its tangible form as a figure in front of us. The destiny of what is lost is to become a symbol of itself. At its indeterminate distance suggested by the plinth, and because of those indeterminate spaces, places, positions and relations, Giacometti’s figure might look like a monument. Such a monument would gain its expressive power from the place it marks, from marking its own indeterminacy in space. This is its presence over time, its there-ness in relation to innumerable vantage points that will not be made whole or one, as much there as not there. Let us imagine once again all the debris of Watt’s attempts to work out his relation to the powers that affect him, the debris of everything that can be known about the Master and the whims of his authority. Or about the mountains of food and all the possible ingredients that have passed through the Master’s pot on their way to being consumed. Or again about the shocking translations of suffering into the permutations of suffering at the hands of economic as well as sexual power that Watt witnesses, and to which he is subject. How better to see that than in an anonymous, engulfing mound reducing the figures who experience it to one, barely standing, barely there at all, barely in communication with the crowd of solitary viewers and witnesses that might walk by, see, or remember? 128

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That translation of suffering into the permutations of suffering, that translation of unique into anonymous experience, not only invites but also suspends pathos: like the angel’s eyes, like the grace of the Petit buste. It invites understanding on the basis of our own experience, and suspends it; it invites using repetition as a way to understand, but suspends understanding, as each thing is matched by the next and loses itself there. So now we suffer the anxiety of another, but in reaching out, in starting to identify with it once again, we know it is not ours; and the world, as Watt and the angel of history encourage us to accept, will not be made in the imitation of the pain and joys we expect from it. But that not-knowing, that prize of knowing without appropriation, of knowing oblivion itself, of knowing through oblivion and within it, cannot itself be reached. We are made in the knowledge that makes us, we stand in the places where that knowledge has been made and which make it ours. We cannot leave those places, for we cannot see them. But in not seeing them, we must also leave them, for we do not know where we stand. We have already left them. Giacometti’s figures begin to walk, for their space of walking also hides the place of beginning. They are already walking, for in a still sculpture can we tell the difference between walking and being about to walk, standing and being about to walk, walking and standing? Staying and leaving? Changing and repeating? Is the figure in the Petit buste being submerged or emerging? That indeterminacy, her own incompletion, is the material of her grace made static, untouchable, barely there. In the same way, as L’Homme qui marche begins to move in 1947, in moving he shows the plinth that gives him firm ground to step on; and shows also the treading down, the burying, that gives spring to stepping forward. That stepping forward is a step forward in time, now we see moving forward without the where to or the where from. That space is also time, but a space that has lost its place in time. The man walks in time, but the place where we stand in relation to his walking is in the here and now. Those relations are made by the viewer in the viewing: not an ego-centric viewing but an ego-evacuating one. This is a viewing driven by an attention to form, almost desperate, as though that were all that remained to see. For the ability of the man to walk is not shown, although its forms make it plain to see. Just as we ourselves walk in that secluded air Milan Kundera describes us all living in as we grow older, without being aware. The 1947 man takes the most tentative step, his textures suggesting roughness, the molten, a figure barely able to step from the flames. But a survivor, visibly, the flames left behind; so it is a viewer now who remembers the flames, either as a survivor himself, or simply as any viewer from another time and another place. Neither one is in the flames from which the figure might be stepping, has stepped, consigning those flames 129

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alberto giacometti: the art of relation 22. Alberto Giacometti, L’Homme qui marche, 1947. Bronze, 170 x 23 x 53 cm. Alberto Giacometti Foundation, Kunsthaus Zürich, © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Kunsthaus Zürich.

to the past, which now really is not there. The narrative layers of memory have been translated into Giacometti’s plinths. Metaphoric content, all the conventions of making sense, have collapsed into formal, visible content, merely the remnants of convention and sense, giving us all we have to go on in seeing what we have remembered – in seeing that we have remembered, but never quite the cost. In that vertical play of plinths rising and plinths being stepped down, each one is as likely to invite movement towards the other as away. We may see or we may not. We may see what it is that we cannot see in ourselves: the secrets of how we move and change, how we act, in a style making temporal individuals of us; a style whose very self-evidence makes us anonymous, like anyone with a style. We move and change not because we can, not because we can prove it, with all the fanfares of a new future better than an old past, but simply 130

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because we do. This is not only a passive changing, but one with the capacity to think passivity, the weight of anteriority that cannot be reached, embraced, abandoned or articulated in the sequences of talking and moving to which we are consigned. The man walking in 1960 – Homme qui marche I – strides forward with confidence, offers viewers confidence in a future that is as little known as the past. But this is a future that can be made, nonetheless, with others there or yet to appear, working with that shared reality of the oblivion through which we move and which moves us. In that endless play of pointing at places already lost, of standing here and walking there, something may begin, may have begun, may have overtaken us in its beginning, may evacuate our ideas of beginning, allow us to begin and reach to others in the fragility of their own beginning and reaching. Giacometti shows us that we can bring grief and joy together, incompatibly: that we can only . . .; that we can.

23. Alberto Giacometti, Homme qui marche I, 1960. Bronze, 180.5 x 27 x 97 cm. AGD 322, 1960, N° d'édition Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti 1981, fondeur Susse Fondeur Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti 1994-0186 © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Collection Fondation Alberto & Annette Giacometti.

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W. G. Sebald with Alberto Giacometti: On Reading Together Apart

5

Where is Alberto Giacometti? Much of his art is an unending exploration of seeing, of visual representation, of placing people in space. But that placing is elusive, and the spaces seem to dissolve, making Giacometti’s idiom at once unique and beyond reach – this creator of such tactile-looking pieces. One way of accepting the invitation to engage with an art that wonders how anything can be engaged with is to ask what it can tell us about the art of others. This chapter is an account of what I learnt about approaching Giacometti’s art through reading Sebald, and a story from The Emigrants especially. It is an account of how Sebald’s writing was opened out to me through the distant echoes in my mind of the experiences I was having of Giacometti’s art, and which I was still trying to understand and formulate. Or again, it is an account of how Sebald’s writing opened itself out to me from within my own blindness to it, from within an incomprehension coming simply from being somewhere else. How does Sebald’s The Emigrants, Die Ausgewanderten, first published in 1993, ever become a book about pain, about almost unbearable loss, and the inhumanity of the Holocaust? How has Sebald’s writing become appropriate to that? Sebald was born in 1944 and died in 2001 in a car accident caused by suffering a heart attack while driving with his daughter. For those still unfamiliar with Sebald’s by now widely admired writing, perhaps the reviews it has attracted would not suggest that it had traumatic content. Here are some quotations from the cover of the paperback editions of the book in English: It’s like nothing I’ve ever read [. . .] A book of excruciating sobriety and warmth and a magical concreteness of observation [. . .] I know of no book which conveys more about that complex fate, being a European at 132

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the end of European civilization. I know of few books written in our time but this is one which attains the sublime. Susan Sontag The delicate accumulation of vanishing details of four slowly diminishing lives hints at the vast amount of life that has been irrevocably lost and forgotten. This is one of those books that is so good its sadness is paradoxically enlivening against all the odds. A S Byatt The writing seems long distilled, intensely pre-meditated and yet utterly fresh. It has an unaffected earnestness, a loner’s earnestness. Karl Miller

And some other comments, more journalistic: Full of moving things and happenings. One of the most important writers of our time. Strange, mesmeric, sublimely beautiful. So convincing; spellbindingly accomplished; a work of art. Sebald writes about how grand events echo in the lives of individuals, and of the corrosive effects of time and memory. Childhood, displacement, loss, nostalgia and, above all, fear – the fear of history, of event, of human cruelty, of the pain of recollection – find their deepest and most brutal expression here. His art is a form of justice – there can be no higher aim.

Apart from the last one, perhaps, what strikes me about these remarks is how appropriate they are without necessarily engaging with anything particular or substantial about Sebald’s writing. They seem appropriate to the way Sebald himself systematically avoids his own subject matter, refutes the idea that his subject can be said. One of the stories of The Emigrants begins with the narrator, easily assumed to be Sebald’s first-person autobiographical self, renting a house with his wife at the bottom of someone’s garden near Norwich. That landlord’s life, it emerges, has been affected profoundly but in unspoken ways by European history.1 The next one, on the other hand, starts with the narrator telling his readers about the suicide of his former school teacher at 133

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the age of 70. But the tone has hardly changed, from the beginning of one story to the next. In this second story, the tone is still that of a conversational, though moving, report of a passing. Sebald seems to confirm this by quoting a notice from the supposed local press, ‘Grief at the Loss of Popular Teacher’. Those bits of review I quoted just now capture something of how the subject of Sebald’s writings is never there, pushed aside and away in the telling. And yet neither does this seem to me inspired by a post-modernist adoration of the absence of centre and the abdication of narrative dominion. For the self-dispersing subject of this writing, all the more there for its ambivalently emergent and decaying status, is pain. In his last novel, Austerlitz, published in 2001, Sebald’s intermittent interlocutor talks of the marks of pain which, as he said he well knew, trace countless fine lines through history. In his studies of railway architecture, he said when we were sitting in the Glove Market later that afternoon, tired from our wandering through the city, he could never quite shake off thoughts of the agony of leave-taking and the fear of foreign places, although such ideas were not part of architectural history proper. Yet, he said, it is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity. The construction of fortifications, for instance [. . .]2

For Benjamin, to think history as a dialectical materialist, is to ‘blast open the continuum of history’. The past is cancelled, not only in the sense of preserved, but also forgotten.3 By emphasizing those ideas of cancellation and forgetting in Hegel’s idea of the Aufhebung, by saying that ideas are conceived on the basis of oblivion, Benjamin opens a space for a language of the trace and of gesture. In Sebald, it seems that this continuum consists in the fortifications he evokes through the voice of Austerlitz, and that once these are made to disappear, an authentic, material history of pain emerges. If not liberation from it, Sebald offers some witness to that pain, but not one that fortifies against it. Like Giacometti’s, Sebald’s witness to pain is made in the inability to place it, or to fix its time; either the time of the witness or the time of pain. The time of witness and the time of pain are each made in accumulation, and in Sebald, each seems to leave the other untouched. As some of those snippets of review suggest, this ability of Sebald’s writing to give voice to what has been silenced and placed beyond our reach is also the source of its joy, its artistry, and its sublimeness. What I think this amounts to is witness that lacks mediation; or a witness without a position from which to witness. Or witness swamped and silenced by the variety of its mediations. Both the lack of mediation and mediation itself 134

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can be the source of alienation or pain. The loss of place is both thematic and structural in Sebald’s meditations, which take the form of digression, documentation, association, conversation, narrating and reminiscing. Exile and grief on the one hand; a determined indeterminacy of narrative point of view on the other. The writing contains both leitmotifs of passing, and formal narrative constructions of it. Passing makes the voices of grief, makes the shapes and patterns of its own silencing; and this also makes for that sense of a desperate, and desperately fragile desire to live which characterizes Sebald’s writing. One such leitmotif is a sense of aimlessness and futility that overcomes Sebald’s narrators from time to time. This aimlessness drifts into all the narrators’ conversations and perceptions, covering them over with a singular textual dust all of their own. I am going to concentrate on one of the stories of The Emigrants, which takes its name from its character, Max Ferber. And for the moment, I’m going to call the narrator Sebald, not because narrator and author are simply equivalent, but because in my imagination Sebald’s voice is implacably consumed in its various narrative figurations: that is how it lives. So in this story called ‘Max Ferber’, Sebald recounts arriving as a young student in Manchester. Rather than the Manchester of the late 1980s and 1990s, renewed by digital and service industries, this is the Manchester of the 1960s, with its decaying heavy industry and rampant unemployment; and Sebald arrives in the early morning at a time when the city is particularly inactive and immobile. This is reflected in the stagnant atmosphere of the hotel he stays in: ‘The day of my arrival at the Arosa, like most of the days, weeks and months to come, was a time of remarkable silence and emptiness,’ he writes.4 This emptiness extends to the objects around him, both familiar and unfamiliar. Neither familiarity nor unfamiliarity either produces or attenuates this sensation of vacuum. This is neither nausea nor pleasurable weightlessness; it makes a series of spaces each of which is unique, each is displaced. Each object or person we find there is threatened with dropping entirely from worth and value; and yet in each of these spaces renewal and re-birth might at least be imagined. One such displaced object is the Teasmade, which is an alarm clock and tea-making machine combined, a piece of home technology popular in the 1960s, and which the owner of the Arosa Hotel provides Sebald with as a token of her welcome. Those of us who will remember the object will react differently to seeing the photo of it in Sebald’s text to those who have never heard of it or seen it before. The two lots of people may well find much to discuss, or both may be bored and uninvolved; but either way, this will not produce a shared experience, it will be an experience of the unshared. Sebald includes a photo of it, a black and white one that has a graininess 135

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alberto giacometti: the art of relation 24. Teasmade (Image from W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants). Copyright © 1992, Eichborn AG, Frankfurt am Main, used by permission of the Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.

and general styling which impregnates it with a context, a palpable one that still resists definition. This comes over with a simplicity that is not the same as immediacy. For the photo itself, like all others in The Emigrants, is unattributed. The status or the authenticity of the photo is in doubt; and of all the photos Sebald uses in the book. Nor does Sebald say how he has come by it. Did he take it himself? The narratives in The Emigrants do not make any direct mention of his travelling with a camera. Austerlitz tells us about his life with one, but that voice is a much later one for Sebald. Who might have given him this photo of the Teasmade then? And why? Where did he get this photo? In Sebald’s text, the Teasmade is suspended in space, placing it outside chronological time. The associations it carries lack a platform on which they might be brought together or made into a coherent memory. This is emphasized again by the fact that Sebald talks of the Teasmade from the point of view of a young German lecturer just arrived in England in the 1960s; whereas in fact he is writing in the 1990s. His perspective is now the one of having lived in Britain and acclimatized himself to its culture, to the point where the unfamiliar is no longer in contrast with the known but part of it. And Sebald seems to make all this self-evident: a matter of experience, rather than theory. The theory of deferral simply reflects the experience of living with forgetting. Here is what Sebald writes about the Teasmade: I did not come to till almost half past three [in the afternoon], when Mrs Irlam knocked at my door. Apparently by way of a special welcome, she 136

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brought me, on a silver tray, an electric appliance of a kind I had never seen before. She explained it was called a teas-made, and was both an alarm clock and a tea-making machine. When I made tea and the steam rose from it, the shiny steel contraption on its ivory-coloured metal base looked like a miniature power plant, and the dial of the clock, as I soon found as dusk fell, glowed a phosphorescent lime green that I was familiar with from childhood and which I had always felt afforded me an unaccountable protection at night. That may be why it has often seemed, when I have thought back to those early days in Manchester, as if the tea maker in my room brought to me by Mrs Irlam, by Gracie – you must call me Gracie, she said – as if it was that weird and serviceable gadget, with its nocturnal glow, its muted morning bubbling, and its mere presence by day, that kept me holding on to life at a time when I felt a deep sense of isolation in which I might well have become completely submerged.5

Oddly, the tea maker provides a source of security, when every effort to secure it in time and space trembles and disappears. Sebald is observing something that disappears in the observing. That seems to be the point of what he is trying to say. Emphasis emerges from aimlessness. The roving, perceiving and sensing eye seeks something to see and that might be told. Here, what is told is some ability to keep emotional collapse at bay. But that is also to acknowledge such a collapse. So this moment in the text is made of transitions. Perhaps it is like one of Winnicott’s psychoanalytical transitional objects.6 But it does not have the shape or contours of an object, it is a transition that is implacably temporal. Moreover, rather than a transition towards a place in society, this is a transition towards further collapse and loss. Memories push their way back into consciousness, but are engulfed and lost again there, and memory joins forgetting. Another example comes from Sebald’s comparison of the tea maker to a miniature power plant. This means that the tea maker is also a miniature of the decaying industrial landscape of Manchester into which Sebald has inserted himself, and which not only mirrors but causes his sense of imminent psychic drowning. Photos Sebald puts in the book, again unattributed, show this decay; but there are other photos of the heyday of industrial wealth in Manchester.7 And yet all the photos are styled in such a way as to suggest the passing of what it is they show, which is the great canals, warehouses and factory chimneys of heavy industry in Manchester in the 1950s and 1960s. For Sebald here, to show the history of these edifices is to show their passing, for that is what can be seen of them. Sebald’s textual and visual polyphony does not resurrect them, the narrative point of view in the present predominates, however indeterminately; 137

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even if that point of view is one of decay. Sebald seems to have researched the edifices of capitalist history in Manchester; he describes that materially here in the text. But he has also textualized that history, developed a language for what the present continues to hide from view in the living experience of history. In Sebald’s writing, to be rooted in a historical moment is to reside in a residue of gestures that seems to fit like a skin, one which stretches to fit our sensations and perceptions. Perhaps we cannot even imagine having such a discursive coating to everything we do, so naturally does it voice our responses, and so seamlessly does it weave the past as an image of the present. In such a way, Sebald shows both the loss of self and the acquisition of a style. This style arises not so much from an unconscious made of repression, but more from an ambient, living unconscious. The unconscious in Sebald’s writing is not somewhere else, as a certain strand in Freud’s thought suggests; it is not a different stage as he calls it in The Interpretation of Dreams, on which the hidden but crucial dramas of the mind are played out, inaccessible to all but the psychoanalytical method.8 Here, the unconscious is more like the sum of perceptions, articulations and gestures that make up what we know and forget. Forgetting combines with various kinds of exile and grief, and takes over Sebald’s idiom as a whole, particularly in The Emigrants. But how does it interact with the voices of others, at least the others Sebald shows us in the book? If Sebald’s state of mind is stylized through his experience of industrial decay in 1960s Manchester, the elements of this stylized decay also come together in the form of an event, albeit one that is tenuously placed in space and time. This dissolving event is Sebald’s meeting with the painter he names Max Ferber. He introduces this event by mentioning another of his desperate meanderings in Manchester, and the reader might wonder where any new beginning, or the emphasis required for an event, is going to come from. Sebald says it was a bright day, but so silent that he reports, or invents, hearing sighs coming out of the Great Northern Railway Company depot; a railway long since gone at the time Sebald is struggling with this narrative. Slowly in this slow-paced writing, the indeterminacy of his despair is gathering expressiveness, emphasis, the sense of a difference between something being there and not being there. But what? Walking by disused gasworks, and a slaughterhouse, he begins to think of Gothic castles with parapets and battlements, and then for no reason of Nuremberg Lebkuchen, biscuits from Nuremberg, and he is unable to get the name of that city out of his mind where the huge Nazi rallies were held, and then the war crimes trials after the war. A reason begins to emerge after all for Sebald’s desolation, the Holocaust, not a reason that is hard to find for anyone to be overcome by despair. And yet Sebald is not a witness, he was born in 1944 138

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and he was not there. But a reason for his despair has emerged nonetheless, its self-evidence making it all the more pervasive and resistant to category or place. The chance discovery of Max Ferber’s studio, and the meeting with Ferber himself, are now a further transitional object; perhaps this time Sebald will able to move from pain to saying his pain. But if so, it will have been by inventing another voice, still another voice through which to do it.9 By the time Sebald meets Ferber in this narrative, Ferber has given up travelling and hardly ever leaves his studio. In that respect, Ferber and Sebald in the story are very different. Nonetheless, Ferber shares many of the characteristics of Sebald, including a passion for research into the otherwise irretrievable moments and monuments of history; and also a passion for photography as part of that, a way for each one of them to identify a moment in its transience. Gradually, as so frequently elsewhere in Sebald’s writing, the voice of the narrative is taken over from Sebald himself by another voice, and here it passes from Sebald to Ferber. Sebald is not so much in dialogue with Ferber, his voice is taken over by Ferber’s; and that is emphasized by Sebald’s identification with Ferber, increasingly apparent but unspoken in the text – never more so than in its final pages, where Sebald shows himself in another hotel room, this time in the Manchester Midland Hotel much admired by Ferber, and writes of everything but his devastation at his friend’s dying, the dying of his friendship and his own dying within that.10 The voice of Sebald is dissipated in the process of building up this identification in the overlapping narratives of the text. So now the text we read is made in the oblivion of Sebald’s own voice – even though the text has been written and is being offered to us by Sebald himself, the writer. A writer discovering voice by inventing ways of representing the loss of his own. So if Sebald, born in 1944, is not to be a witness to the Holocaust, will Ferber be? Rather than a voice for that emerging, it is the problems of voice and voicing that continue to engulf all the speakers, writers and readers involved in making this book. Even though Ferber is older than Sebald, he is nonetheless still a boy or a teenager in the late 1920s and 1930s, we are told, and so his reminiscences are filtered through his later adult interpretation of himself as a boy reading the behaviour of his parents. And there is more. Ferber’s narrative voice takes over, at various points at least, from Sebald’s own, as I say. But the new voice in the text keeps the style of the previous one. Ferber talks in the style that Sebald writes in. The new voice does not unequivocally take over the previous one, but is then also taken over by it. The difference between here and there, mine and yours, is blurred; it decomposes just as Sebald and us with him might have thought that a new departure or revelation was about to emerge. The handing over of the narrative voice combines with another 139

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loss of voice. This transition of one voice to another begins to produce an acute sense of grief, the reason for which is clear to the extent that a voice has been lost. The cause of this grief is still obscure, though also evident simply by mentioning the Holocaust. But that self-evidence is still out of reach to Ferber and Sebald. Although a set of relations has been found to show grief through this handing over of voices, grief is still without its cause and its object. To those that were not there, it is the form of Sebald’s fiction that shows grief emanating from the Holocaust, not content. Or not yet. That is the witness Sebald offers. So when he speaks in the text, Ferber’s voice gradually substitutes itself for Sebald’s own. But Sebald’s voice also returns in the text, and though each is inflected by the other, the two mirror each other as well. In addition to their shared passions that I mentioned before, they also share the habit of leaving gaps in what they say. Their discourse is made up of silences as much as affirmations, and this happens sometimes for reasons that are said and sometimes for reasons that are not. In the same way that Sebald addresses his reader, Ferber in the text tells Sebald of things he himself also only now partially knows, or remembers, or can bear to think of. Here is one of the things he tells Sebald: I still did my homework under Mother’s supervision; we still went to Schliersee for the skiing winter and to Oberstdorf or the Walsertal for our summer holidays; and of those things we could not speak we simply said nothing. Thus, for instance, all my family and relatives remained largely silent about the reasons why my grandmother Lily Lanzberg took her own life; somehow they seemed to have agreed that towards the end she was no longer quite in her right mind.11

The philosophy of Wittgenstein, alluded to here and for which Sebald expresses his fascination more explicitly in the long novel Austerlitz, combines with the psychoanalytical theory of repression, particularly the repression of trauma. The unspeakable cannot be spoken of; that is, the inhumanity we see or the pain we suffer. And neither can its passing into the oblivion of which the present moment consists, in all its indeterminacy. Out of that non-speaking, a language emerges nonetheless, gestural and spontananeous: it seems natural not to discuss grandmother Lanzberg’s suicide, just as natural as mother supervising my homework, or walking quietly with my father in the Alps. But this is a kind of spontaneity that is also symptomatic. We are left to find for ourselves reasons why an elderly Jewish woman of whom we will hear nothing further would take her own life in the early 1930s, to piece that 140

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together by trying to remember what we have been told – about the Jewish ghettos of Europe, for example, as well as the Jewish quarter of Manchester, which Sebald tells us no longer existed at the time of his arrival there in the 1960s. Or the doctored photo Sebald says that Ferber has given him, but which in fact he must have found for himself, of the Nazis burning books on the Kristallnacht.12 And as we do that, we might hear again the voices we ourselves have grown up with and grown up getting used to losing. Once again, the unconscious is not somewhere else, but here. Through evoking these voices formally and structurally, and through the various temporal digressions of the narrative, Sebald takes a step closer in the dark to indicating the traces of the overpowering sense of self-decay that has characterized his language and his behaviour from the start. And from there, a further step also towards showing not what an individual might remember of the Holocaust, but that we all both remember and forget; that we forget in the remembering. As Edgar Allan Poe and Jacques Lacan together remind us, what is most evident about what we look for and about how we see is exactly what remains invisible to us.13 The studio Sebald imagines for his imaginary double, for Ferber, and that he imagines discovering in the Manchester deserts, bears an uncanny resemblance to the studio of Giacometti. Like Ferber, Giacometti did not travel widely, and only ever had the one studio, his own studio in Paris which he occupied until his death in 1966. Like Ferber, he is attached to the signs of detritus, anything that can remind him brutally but also sensuously and educationally of the inevitable failure of his art. Dust is a central and overpowering feature in the psychic life of Ferber and Giacometti, and their studios.14 Here are some of Sebald’s observations about Ferber’s studio, comments which are written by imagining the memory of a conversation. Once again, this is writing in which one voice passes to another, its double, its substitution. This is what he writes: The entire furniture was advancing, millimetre by millimetre, upon the central space where Ferber had set up his easel in the grey light that entered through a high north-facing window layered with the dust of decades. Since he applied the paint thickly, and then repeatedly scratched it off the canvas as his work proceeded, the floor was covered with a largely hardened and encrusted deposit of droppings, mixed with coal dust, several centimetres thick and thinning out towards the edges, in places resembling the flow of lava. This, said Ferber, was the true product of his continuing endeavours and the most palpable proof of his failure. It had always been of the greatest importance to him, Ferber once remarked casually, that nothing should change at his place of work, that everything should remain as it was, and that nothing further should be added but the 141

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debris added by painting and the dust which continually fell and which, as he was coming to realise, he loved more than anything else in the world [. . .] The facial features and eyes, said Ferber, remained ultimately unknowable for him. He might reject as many as forty variants, or smudge them back into the paper and overdraw new attempts upon them; and if he then decided that the portrait was done, not so much because he was convinced that it was finished as through sheer exhaustion, an onlooker might well feel that it had evolved from a long lineage of grey ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there, as ghostly presences, on the harried paper.15

This is the passage of thoughts and perceptions that makes up Sebald’s initial immersion in this text with his interlocutor and alter ego, his friend in the making, even his reader in the imagining. It starts off with describing dust, which is the last stages of the falling apart of things. But the starting-point also consists in the opposite of that, which is some lava-like build-up and solidification. Quickly Sebald introduces a progressive squeezing out over time, and the development of attachments, of any place for Ferber to paint, to place his work, perhaps even to understand it. From that hybrid starting-point, in the passage Sebald finds his way to the eruption of these ancestral faces and figures. This is an eruption which is covered in ashes and dust, the visible signs of its own decay; and yet decay, this ‘profusion of dusty glitter’, is also the stuff of revelation.16 Might I think of Giacometti’s figures in this way? And of the crisis of size which enveloped him from perhaps even as early as 1940 and which never left him? ‘C’est-à-dire qu’en 1940, les têtes devenaient minuscules, qu’elles tendaient à leur disparition.’17 ‘In other words in 1940 heads were becoming minuscule, and tending to their disappearance.’ In ‘La Recherche de l’absolu’ of 1948 which I discussed in the Prologue, Sartre credits Giacometti with an anthropological power to inaugurate a new mythology: the power both to show and to start the beginning of culture, to develop totems and icons that represent a situation and allow it to be assumed.18 But like Ferber’s, Giacometti’s figures do not emerge from a secure place, or create one, but from a complex one whose elements will not coalesce. I am coming back to Tête sur tige, made in 1947, an especially stark piece. (See Figure 19, page 114.) A head is impaled on a metal rod, itself thrust into a slab; vertically, implacably: the head is a death mask, the silencing of the rattle. Once again, the date engulfs the piece in its historical moment, the time when the horrors of the Nazi camps were still coming to light, especially in France where Giacometti lived. But seeing everything is not given to us, whether from 142

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close up or afar. We see what we see and not what we cannot. Seeing is neither seen nor whole, and the human form emerges in this seeing. It lives there, it also vanishes there. But the forms Giacometti discovers to mime this seeing invite his dispersed, individually overwhelmed viewers to imagine witness, and new beginning, without making what is witnessed the graven image of the present and its fading images of redemption. Unlike Giacometti’s works, Ferber’s paintings do not exist and cannot be seen, only read, visualized though that mediation; but this is also a substitution of the painting by the text. We imagine the painting from the situation of not being able to see it. Of course Giacometti’s art can be seen. But it is made nonetheless of the same profound doubt about place; about his ability as an artist to place himself in relation to the people he represents in his twodimensional or three-dimensional art. This is doubt about the capacity of visual representation to place objects and especially people in space; a space where we can locate them and know them. In perspective, things at a distance seem small, and the mind makes optical adjustments to see that smallness in terms of a real size, in terms of what we can spatially assume about the objects and people there in different places from our own. But for Giacometti, once again, if we see things at a distance as small, that is because from where we see them, they are small. It is that quasi-literal smallness that forms the basis of his own re-investigation of the possibility of realism, the realism of showing things as he sees them. But this is only another way of saying, in fact of confirming, that what we see substitutes itself for what we cannot see and cannot know. In Realist Vision, Peter Brooks talks of the scale model, the miniature, the model in general, and suggests that from realist writing to the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss and to Freud’s psychoanalysis, the miniature is a form through which to master the world, to understand it, perhaps become free of it.19 These miniatures of Giacometti, on the other hand, form the basis of a different kind of realism, one that shows us that art does not capture or master. For LéviStrauss, the myth-maker is able to use the miniature as a practice through which to come to grips with his or her culture, in an almost palpable and tactile way – certainly with the approach and the sensation of handiwork, and by contrast to the conceptualized, abstracted approach of the applied scientist as well as the industrialist. But Giacometti’s most tactile of sculptures and his immersion in the problems of scale confronts him with what cannot be touched. The figures in Giacometti’s Quatre figurines sur base from 1950, to which I am drawn again here, are small not as a result of the visualization of distance: they are neither small nor large, neither clearly here nor there, neither definitively with us nor lost to us. Nor both. (See Figure 18, page 118.) Giacometti does not offer us a celebration of these various possibilities but a witness to each one taking the 143

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place of the others and substituting itself for it. A witness to the dominion of the point of view, but at the same time a resistance to its complacency. Through his representation of figures, Giacometti discovers a space for them which has no place, and which in that way testifies to his failure to represent them or to account for them; and to a special kind of grief at the loss which that entails. But it also testifies to the capacity to think what is beyond the thinking and the knowing; and to think without appropriating or colonizing. Sebald finds a way of discussing the miniature as well. He finds a way of discussing the miniature through his elusive mirror image, our friend the painter Max Ferber, whose first name is in fact also the nickname of Sebald himself in real life. Sebald had already alluded to the miniature by comparing the Teasmade to a power plant in Manchester. On this occasion, Max Ferber is taking painkillers that produce a combination of dream and hallucination, in which he cannot remember when he was awake and when asleep. An indeterminate psychic space, then, made up of elements that are incommensurate with each other, but which self-evidently merge nonetheless. In amongst those states, Max’s own position as an artist is further overrun by that of his father who, we are told, was an art dealer before being killed with his wife and relatives by the Nazis. From within that space of a lost place for himself and his art, our Max, who is indeterminately Max Sebald or Max Ferber, sees a Jew called Frohmann. Frohmann is carrying a miniature model he has made of the Temple of Solomon, and he was now travelling from ghetto to ghetto exhibiting the model. Just look, said Frohmann,you can see every crenelation on the towers, every curtain, every threshold, every sacred vessel. And I, said Ferber, bent down over the diminutive temple and realized, for the first time in my life, what a true work of art looks like.20

But we the reader do not. No photograph here, whatever its status. This is a miniature made of invention; but also historical research. The research survives in the form of a fictional miniature. That is the invitation it extends to us: to imagine what we cannot know, to engage with what is unknown or lost to us by allowing it to remain unknown, even in the witnessing of it. To attempt to remember the loss of the Jews under Hitler, the loss of life and culture daily renewed, is to contribute to that loss, to absorb it in the point of view of the present, even though the present is also an unstable place. But this is also a way of showing not so much the theory as the realism of the point of view, which is that what it seeks to show is made lost in the showing. In that way Max Ferber and Max Sebald together, each living in the loss of the 144

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other, allow those ancestral sighs of transience to be heard. That is the art that Giacometti also proposes: an unresolved plurality, a plurality of elements that do not come together, made of motion and immobility, the unseen in the seen; anthropological and present time; revelation in oblivion. Turn to Giacometti’s Le Chariot (Figure 30). Together or apart, perhaps the art of Giacometti and Sebald suggest community without appropriation, and decay with creativity, grief with life.

Coda If touching is the silent breath of life, it may also be the touch of the end, the end in the beginning, the beginning of the way I might know you or anyone, the spells that give me life and confuse me too. Time and time again, Sebald voices ‘the dissolution, in line with the inexorable spread of processed data, of our capacity to remember’.21 Despite the melancholy of the tone, what generosity of spirit is needed to live out what he says, which is that we understand only in failing to grasp what matters. Historical, critical, scientific, moral positions are compromised from the start faced with the attempt to seek out what matters, to hear its faint cries as it disappears in the forms and fibres of how we each understand and feel. Sebald’s love of Stendhal and his wit brings not only vitality but compassion to the betrayals of representation and its pathos. ‘Le roman est un miroir que l’on promène le long d’un chemin’, ‘the novel is a mirror carried along an open road’, as a voice in The Red and the Black shouts to the reader.22 The ambition to tell life as it is, its complexity and sensuality, is spoken in the same voice as the one we use anyway in telling our experience; and in trying to see ourselves, clearly we each take our own mirrors with us. Mirrors made of models of mirroring. They recede and engulf, just as art breeds artifice, and just as artists try and give shape to how we see, understand, reach out, venerate, love, but still silence. One translation after another; what uniquely moves and pains someone turns into their own way of living and reaching out to others. Failure and hilarity compound each other; just as grief is turned into life and betrays loss. To respond to the evaporations of life and history involves looking for some space for humility. But where is the line between humility and any new beginning, any new recurrence of appropriation even in attempts to share, or create, or give? In the original story, Max Ferber is called Max Aurach. There is something very touching in Sebald giving his painter Ferber the general look of Frank Auerbach, then responding to Auerbach’s resentment at having 145

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his life re-shaped, and then removing the image of him in the transitions of the narrative from German to English. The episode acts as a reminder, it seems, of the need for self-effacement Sebald seems to feel, and promote, the need to find voice in effacement and not just for it. Not just abandoning the pursuit of authenticity but that attempt itself might involve loss of the past, might break relation with the past, might break relation at large. Perhaps loud allusions to people and events signal the capacity to remember and revere; if so, silent ones signal the fragility of hearing, the everyday catastrophe of hearing only what we hear. But silent allusions also signal a simple celebration of the hearing we have. In seeing Ferber with Giacometti, I have not tried to substitute Giacometti for Auerbach, nor Giacometti for Ferber. I have found myself looking at Ferber from the point of view of an immersion in Giacometti and his manner of inviting his viewers in. I have tried to avoid capturing either Giacometti and his effects or those of Sebald: a lost cause, as I will have been ensnared in my own ways of looking and writing in response to the story. Still, in whatever idea remains of looking without capturing, perhaps I have learnt something about the difference between loud and silent allusion, about its uncertainty and its melancholy, which is a pervasive and sometimes brutal one, no less so for being on the verge of disappearing completely. Somewhere in that uncertainty lies the magnificence in Sebald of pointing at what cannot be seen, and the capacity which he shows we have to live the loss we live. Somewhere there too lies the miracle of a voice which, if only in art, is one, living, and scattered in the many.

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6

Reading the Invisible with Cees Nooteboom, Walter Benjamin and Alberto Giacometti For Jane Fenoulhet

Parler d’Alberto Giacometti par allusion, analogie, évocation d’image sans rapport analysable avec le trait à déceler, plutôt que par thèse ou description.1 Michel Leiris Talk about Giacometti by allusion, by analogy, an evocation of images without any analysable relation to the feature being indicated, rather than with a thesis, or by describing. Tout travail du deuil est un travail de lieu.2 Georges Didi-Huberman The work of grief is a work of place.

I In a lifetime of writing, Roland Barthes seeks a writer’s way of being responsible for the forms we use to express ourselves and represent others. But how can forms of writing be re-created and co-created with readers? In Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, Barthes describes his critical writing as a process of decomposition. A writing of decomposition differs from a writing of destruction, in that destruction implies the search for somewhere else, free of the blindness, or the enforced seeing and understanding involved in being here. But where would that somewhere else be? Barthes tries the notion of atopia instead of utopia – a place that is not simply somewhere else, but a place free of the idea itself of place. The benefit of atopia, though, still lies in how it relates to other places, otherwise it starts to trade in delusion. It emerges in the 147

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passage itself, and nowhere else, from the u to the a of a-topia – in the space between the decay of one idea to the as yet un-formed formulation of another. A-topia is the utopia that dares not speak its name. And in writing these pages, what do I still need to learn so as to compare without appropriating, and find a place from which to relate without silencing?3 This time my entry point into my own experience of Giacometti is Cees Nooteboom’s novel All Souls’ Day. I am writing about a novel in translation, published in 1998 in a language which I do not read with any competence, Dutch, and about a European capital city of which I have no lived experience. The position is insecure, I feel acutely aware of my own way of hearing every word. And I am grateful to Susan Massoty as the translator of the novel in English for putting me in that place of uncertain wonder; just as I am grateful to Michael Hulse for his way of hearing Sebald, and for transporting Max Ferber into his indeterminate English space. All Souls’ Day is a novel about the history of Berlin, but also about the location of historical experience. Where do we know history, and how do we discover it? How do we discuss it, communicate it and live it? How do we hear history, as temporal beings who experience, recollect, forget? What is the relation of that personal, unique sense of time to its not-there-ness to others?4 The events in this Dutch-language novel unfurl not only in Berlin, but also Madrid, as well as taking in the Zen Buddhist monasteries of Japan. Located in Berlin nonetheless, the history observed in the novel wanders as its narrator does, in search of a form. This is a novel about bodies of learning and the process of learning, but also the collapse of learning. It occupies a space which by being literary shows the inherent relation of history to its own translation. Personal, cultural, generational, national histories – how are they all told? What are their audiences, which group and re-group in amongst the shapeless diversity of the point of view? The novel is made up from mental, geographical, cultural, psychological, as well as historical journeys. Its traumatic shocks and transitions arise from Germany in World War II; from Germany before and after the collapse of the Wall; but also from the Estonia ferry disaster of 1994, and the personal grief of the principal character, his mourning for the loss of his wife and child in a plane crash. For Nooteboom, these experiences and conceptions of time, of the person, of psychic, cultural, historical time are at odds with each other; and our understanding of the past, and of each other in the present, rests not on the passages between these conceptions of time, but on their incompatibility. Daane is a filmmaker working for news agencies, reporting on events in news items and documentaries. He is also an independent documentary 148

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filmmaker, reflecting on the way history is made in the contemporary moment. Nooteboom recounts Daane’s recollection of his producer and sometime employer, who tells him: ‘I know you have two polar opposites in your . . . head (he had been about to say ‘soul’), namely action and reflection. But reflection doesn’t get high ratings.’5 Events need to be commodified to be bought and sold on the news market. Moreover, in the producer’s experience, events with a high ratings tariff are traumatic ones. Daane is reminded of the bodies of children shot by the Brazilian police in Rio as part of the shocking way the military government of the 1970s chose to clear the streets of beggars. Arthur saw the bodies of eight or so boys and girls stretched out on marble slabs, grotesque feet poking out from under grey sheets, labels around their ankles, names on pieces of paper that would perish along with them one day, interchangeable, bits of words that had already begun to moulder along with the broken bodies supposedly named.6

Are we reading a form of resistance to the commodification of suffering? Or watching someone simply standing and looking? This indeterminacy is formal as well as affective – we read about the recollection of a film we will never have seen. This formal indeterminacy casts doubt on standing and looking in one place and not another. The repression involved comes to light – we see from the point of view of seeing now. Daane remembers when prompted, is not sure how to deal with the memory, or with his own film that has passed into the public domain, leaving its sediments in his private bank of pain. Insofar as those sediments reappear, perhaps the easy routes to forgetting have been dismantled. But still Daane stands and looks, in his own mind, removed from the event, locked into his troubling conversation with his producer. The allegiance of looking and forgetting is confirmed, and of remembering and the present – the chance happenings of the present and its markets. The novel form developed by Nooteboom shows rather than denies this allegiance. We read what we read, in our own imaginings, translating and synthesizing in the present moments of our own reading and living. A traumatic knowledge, rather than a knowledge of trauma, would be one that seeks to know loss and not just its translations into recovery; or into the forms of its passing. Would this simply be a morbid way of thinking? A passive one? In Freudian terms, would it exemplify the failure to translate melancholia into mourning, as does Daane’s own grief at certain points? Perhaps. But still, Daane seeks a vision that is not simply self-regard; he seeks not just the authoritative voices of the present, but also their passing. ‘You were only dead when you couldn’t even remember disappearing.’7 149

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One of Daane’s projects refused by his producers is a documentary on Walter Benjamin entitled The Soles of Memory – one of Benjamin’s own phrases. Uncannily, reading Benjamin’s material included in The Arcades Project is formally analogous to reading the ‘private’ films of Daane in Nooteboom’s novel. These textual films explore the relation of private to public, the lost to the used and the consumed, and of recovery from trauma to an enduring sense of responsibility towards trauma – or is that simply a regressive attachment? In the ‘Convolutes’, which form a substantial part of The Arcades Project, Benjamin has assembled under various headings – some with a title, some not – a host of quotations which hover in an indeterminate relation to Benjamin’s own comments. In their translators’ Foreword, Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin write that ‘what Benjamin seems to have conceived was a dialectical relation – a formal and thematic interfusion of citation and commentary.’8 In such a light, the ‘ Convolutes’ consist not so much of notes for an unfinished project, but instead they are the manifestation of a way of thinking and working which is integral to the project itself. What is that project? A section in one of the ‘Convolutes’ is devoted to mechanical dolls, of the notorious kind exploited by E T A Hoffmann and Offenbach. Benjamin’s collage of citations and responses undermines the distinction between the two, but through that indeterminacy of observation and interpretation, a story is told of the alliance of clockwork technology and the exploitation of labour. What have we learnt about learning anything of the past? Benjamin has a story to tell about the formal as well as economic alliance between the technology allowing the exact measurement of time, and the management procedures allowing the exact measurement of the relation of labour to profit. But through the ‘Convolutes’ we have also learnt again to understand historical developments through lived time, rather than through conceptual or a fortiori time. In other words, through a formal engagement with a particular kind of reading, perhaps we have re-learnt the cultural and affective sensations of knowing in lived experience. This is an intuition that perception is made instantaneously and indefinitely backwards in memory; and that it is therefore made in forgetting. In everyday moments of synthesis, allowing the performance of the simplest and the most complex tasks, we synthesize not so much past and present, but the past in the present. The present is the place of our becoming, of a material understanding of how our situation has come about. But we can only understand that becoming if we accept the risk that we will not be able to locate it in the place of its living. In speaking or writing or showing, we cite the voices that are lost to our view – if only there were someone to hear them. The ‘Convolutes’ offer a reading within which we might imagine such a listener. 150

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Benjamin’s citations and Daane’s film entries are calls to the past, they are forms given to the voices of the past. In each case, the call of the past and of its voices is sad, ranging from mourning – and its ethical withdrawal from selfregard – to the traumatic – with its irreparable haemorrhaging of the sense of self. Here, and as an approach to the past, neither mourning nor trauma seeks a cure, or seeks recovery, in the sense of a return from illness or a recapturing of the past. Perhaps Daane clings to his sense of loss after all, and to a passivity which finds its way far into his sexual behaviour as well. But perhaps that indefinite suspension of the point of view, a kind of all-pervasive un-knowing of a standpoint, taking place over the time of the novel, cracks open the cycle of loss and compensation, of alienation and aggression. The mobility of the novel’s forms does not allow for the disintegration of the point of view, or of any escape from the territorializing impulse in human relations. Rather, an increased because de-localized sense is created of the appropriativeness involved in the simplest acts of looking, conversing, thinking, constructing images. The suspension of the point of view does not liquidate it or evacuate it; instead it shows its coming in and out of being, along with the forms and formlessness of events.

II Despite this boundless implicitness, the messages of translation do speak. Nooteboom seems to listen also to the developments of the modernist European novel, in which Joyce assigns Ulysses such a prominent role, and whose voice travels not just in messages but in forms. Proust seeks to fashion narrative voices that show the processes of revision and hindsight, but without the vantage points of authority or revelation. Points of view coincide, converge, overlap, communicate in the synchrony and diachrony of a person’s life – or do they? Work with the forms of representation engages with questions of where: where to place, in both time as well as space – familiar questions to all modern art since the explosions of Cubism. Nooteboom inflects questions of perspective and of narrative points of view with questions of trauma, loss and potential rebirth. The Brandenburg Gate dominates All Souls’ Day in the same way as it dominates Berlin itself – in ways that make it hard to place. The novel complicates the placing of the Gate, the way we might locate it historically, geographically and mythologically. On the night of the symbolic collapse of the Wall, Daane joins the crowd in an ecstatic but easy political, cultural and sexual fluidity: easy to live, easy to forget, easy to anticipate repeating in the 151

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25. Carl Gotthard Langhans, The Brandenburg Gate, 1788–1791. Photo: Marek Matula. Location: Berlin.

future – as freedom should be.9 But the ease of living and of anticipation is also the ease of its passing, of forgetting, and the wounds left over may re-emerge at any time. In this indeterminate constitution and loss of events and place, the four chariots of victory on the top of the Brandenburg Gate call to mind the Charioteer of Delphi. On the one hand the complete quadriga; on the other, the incomplete charioteer, his victory a matter of conjecture now, dependent on making visible what is clearly no longer there. Even if we can draw diagrams of what was, the charioteer exists in part now, a part of himself, an intransitive synecdoche that is not to be made whole. He is made in the way the charioteer is seen now, in the loose and indefinite community of those who know him. Within the visibility which is his viewers’ own, he lives in our lived time. Rosalind Krauss sees the Charioteer of Delphi at the decentred centre of one of Picasso’s series of sculptures from 1929–30. One of them is reproduced here, Figure (proposée comme projet pour un monument à Guillaume Apollinaire) of 1928. The Cubist practitioners Apollinaire championed share with Constructivist ones the ambition to see beyond the permissible vision of perspective, and 152

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26. The Charioteer of Delphi, 474 BC. Bronze, 1.80 m tall. Photo: Raminus Falcon. Location: Delphi Archaeological Museum.

27. Pablo Picasso, Figure (proposée comme projet pour un monument à Guillaume Apollinaire) autumn, 1928. Iron wire and sheet metal, 60.5 x 15 x 34 cm. (C) RMN-Grand Palais/Béatrice Hatala © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2013. Location: Paris, Musée Picasso.

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to reconstruct the impositions of the point of view personally, affectively, historically and ideologically. Will such art free us from what is the tragic vision of perspective: the marks and the scars of seeing from one point of view and not another? At the time of writing this early book, Passages in Modern Sculpture of 1977, one of the many she dedicates to the transformative power of aesthetic form, Krauss sees Picasso’s set of sculptures as a testament to a sense of conceptual time rather than lived time. An integral part of that reading is Krauss’s invitation to see an allusion to The Charioteer of Delphi at the heart. As I look in that way, the network of rods emanating from the figure, which they also suspend, seems to show the reins of the charioteer restored – and not just the reins of the chariot, but those of The Charioteer’s construction. This is like

28. Georges Braque, Woman Reading, 1911. Oil on canvas, 130 x 80 cm. Private Collection, Basel, Switzerland/ Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2013. Location: Private Collection, Basel, Switzerland.

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saying that what Picasso has recreated and made visible are the threads of The Charioteer’s own reception. But equally, Krauss suggests, Figure is suspended in the temporality of its own making. The geometric, triangular and circular forms which allow the figure to be seen also enclose it, provide it with its only space. But still the figure here drives its own construction, just as much as it is driven by it, and the sculpture as a whole in Krauss’s appreciation shows the terms of its conception in the manner of its execution. The time of conception and the time of generation are shown in and through each other, in an indefinite transparency which can be constituted in any number of different ways. At the same time though, Krauss suggests, the seamless transparency of the sculpture, of its passages from generation and reception, forms the glass walls and ceiling of our own knowing. The aspiration to expose the frames of knowledge may serve only to confirm our affective involvement in them. Krauss contrasts this sculpture with another slightly later piece, Tête de femme of 1929–30. Together, they show again Picasso’s ability not only to reproduce styles but to engage with their philosophy. For Krauss, this later piece shows the part Picasso played in the Surrealist development of the collage, its disruption of the contexts of the visible, and rationalist notions of reconstruction and revelation. Instead, art is made in response to the effects of chance, the unpredictable and the non-known, the formless. Here as later, in Informe, which she wrote together with Yve-Alain Bois in 1997, Krauss develops Bataille’s notion of l’informe to suggest the possibility of a knowledge free of its own Gestalten, its own forms, and the history of their ingrained and exclusive recognition. Krauss points to the eclecticism of Picasso’s Tête de femme, the interruption and redirection of viewing it solicits, as though each of the many different kinds of surface in the piece invites synthetic understanding but resists it at every turn. The formal simplification of context in the service of recognition, as well as the censorship on which recognition depends, is undone in this open-ended process of viewing, continually suspended between beginning and continuation. Making an art object and in turn looking at it are welded to the moment; the present is rebuilt in its relation to the past. Makers and consumers of art objects are re-immersed in their own history, and enfranchised there. Perhaps l’informe, the formless, draws close here to Barthes’s notion of le neutre, ‘the neutral’ developed in his seminar at the Collège de France in 1978. He puts the notion into effect in the form of the seminar itself, which he describes as a ‘une suite de fragments en état de variation continue’: ‘a series of fragments in a state of continuous variation’. This continuous variation unfolds both as you read each fragment, or each seminar, and in your developing sense of their relation to each other.10 155

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alberto giacometti: the art of relation 29. Pablo Picasso, Tête de femme, 1929–30. Iron (metal), mixed media, metal, 100 x 37 x 59 cm. (C) RMN-Grand Palais/ Béatrice Hatala © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2013. Location: Paris, Musée Picasso.

Perhaps this is what Daane seeks as he films from underneath the flow of shoes going up a flight of stairs. And yet at any moment in Nooteboom’s narrative, the willed interruption of synthetic, cohesive understanding involves the collapse of all meaning and all communication. As Barthes continually reminds us, how can we expect to insist on the index? The mark of the moment? The metonymic succession of moments that make up life is certainly without redemption. And as Krauss suggests, we do not need the recourse of sublimation to be able to tolerate our own passing; or to harness the unpredictability of the creative impulse. Nonetheless, how can we resist the assimilation of individual time into the time of others? Or of one collective time into another? Moreover, what imaginary position would allow us to combat that enforced translation? Where is the step from orthodoxy to variation, and not the reverse; from sign to experience, and not the reverse; and from the ideological to the formless, and not the reverse? 156

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In All Souls’ Day Victor the sculptor talks of the sensation of historical time as one of invisible powder – such is the sensation of the present, not simply its passing, but its disturbing and magical ever-presence: He’d also used another word that Daane had remembered all these years, because it had seemed so out of place in these surroundings – the word ‘powder’ [. . .] Victor [. . .] groped in the air, pulled out something that wasn’t there, and wiped the invisible stuff from his fingers. A magic trick. It’s seeped into everything. Including their eyes. Which is why they can’t see where they’re going. Once again. Reunification – they don’t understand the first thing about it [. . .] Do you remember the euphoria? [. . .] And have you listened to them lately? About how they dress, and about how they behave? Racist jokes about people with the same colour of skin.11

In quoting Maxime Du Camp writing about fashion, Benjamin offers the insight that ‘history is like Janus: it has two faces. Whether it looks to the past or to the present, it sees the same things.’12 Always seeing the same thing, but never knowing how or why – such is the effect of Victor’s dust as he describes it, strolling peripatetically around the Synagogue, the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate. He also attributes experience of this powder to a sculptor’s particular kind of knowing, the particular understanding of making something by chipping or carving or modelling away. Familiarity is coupled with oblivion, and with incomprehension, in the very process of making something in which others recognize something of themselves. Find a point of view from which to tell; resist the point of view and its blind telling and endless re-telling; but find a point of view . . .; or a translation that translates to the exact extent it fails to. Such is the task set by Victor’s sculptor’s powder and Daane’s filmmaking one. Victor’s sculptural powder, the powder Nooteboom seeks to remove from his eyes and ours, the same powder he shows in our eyes and Daane’s – this formal and aesthetic powder produces a paradoxically living anonymity. It is reminiscent of the effect produced on Jean Genet in watching Giacometti sculpt in clay, which he describes in L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti. There too, layer upon layer of dust is produced which Giacometti refuses to remove from his studio, it piles silently higher, and we only know about it if we follow Genet’s imagination, or someone else’s; just as we might follow Victor here, as he wanders around the Potsdamer Platz conversing with Daane and a younger journalist. We might imagine that we understand – not anything in particular, not the return to the racist hate feared by Victor, for example, 157

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and not the reason behind Danne’s fixated pursuit of generosity; but an understanding nonetheless, however de-focused and intransitive, of how we look, in our own time, and of how we look for understanding. And yet still we see only what we see. For Giacometti in his post-war style, sculpture treads the same invisible line as Victor’s invisible sculptural powder between emergence and disintegration. The figure standing in his Le Chariot, 1950, stands upright like The Charioteer of Delphi, to which it sketches a clear if profoundly implicit gesture of recognition. In Giacometti’s piece, the chariot is now there to be seen. Perhaps the passage from antiquity to the present has resumed its journey, without destination or return. The reins are still absent, though, the direction of the charioteer is ours

30. Alberto Giacometti, Le Chariot, 1950. Bronze with gold patina, 167 x 69 x 69 cm. Alberto Giacometti Foundation, Kunsthaus Zürich, © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Kunsthaus Zürich.

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to make. But as you might walk around the piece, the figure seems to grow still flimsier, still closer to the perfect vertical and to its own disappearance, still more deprived of movement; until your next step reveals the slightest change in the line, a tiniest beginning in her grace and movement. For Giacometti’s charioteer is a woman, his anecdote suggests she was once a nurse, and the male claim to victory seems long since abandoned along with aspirations to revelation and repossession. Even to recognize her female form, viewers might need to step closer, and closer still, until facial features do begin to emerge from a place barely to be seen, or located, since by now you might be so close as to be unable to relate the face to the rest of the body. Once there, some might see the face of an Etruscan sculpture, some again the features of a portrait by Matisse. But the allusion will not arrive, it seems to disintegrate in the travelling, as each viewer tries to reach out. Le Chariot invites a sense of community, paradoxically, by showing a figure on her own, about to move, but locked in the immobilizing place of the way each of us will see her, unable to see the wheels in motion, or see the motion of our seeing. But in that notseeing, Giacometti’s female charioteer reaches out to the present moments of our viewing – and still we cannot see her, for we cannot find or locate her. Neither formal nor formless, neither neutral nor significant, Le Chariot remains suspended, always differently. Giacometti seems to create an angel of his own at the moment of its disappearance, standing in the space of its own becoming, or departure. Only you or I, as individual viewers, can realize the chariot’s incomplete movement. Still, it does not move, for each one of us, differently; and a platform emerges, suspended in its own space without place, for this angel of history. Reaching, losing, forgetting, in its company we make the humanity of our time, and our capacity to relate. Walter Benjamin’s own Angel of History comes to him through Paul Klee. (See Figure 21, page 126.) It rushes forward into the future, taking with it the ruins of the past which it can only show and not see. And yet Benjamin has invented this Angel, invented a knowledge of history, and in history, which allows us to think what we cannot know, and see what is outside the places of our telling. Nooteboom, emphasizing Daane’s desire to make a film about Benjamin, includes passages in his novel written in the language of angels – ‘And we? Ah, we .  .  .’: those are their last words. Along the way towards their own disintegration, they have suggested the power to synthesize and conceptualize. They fix on the perspectives, perceptions, points of view that any one person is unconscious of, is made unaware of in the space without place of her own existence. The angels have offered commentaries, or have merely observed; they have observed above all that their voice cannot be heard. Invented in the language of Nooteboom’s novel, the novel charts 159

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their necessary disappearance. They have given voice to their omniscience, as well as their attention to the uniqueness of each one of us. But in the end, they speak of their inability to speak of omniscience and relativity at once; their inability to fashion the total human voice, a transparent human history. That idea, however generous, exhibits its own futility, and its one use – to ‘bulldozer’ the scars of our losses and of our own passing, as Nooteboom puts it. And astride myth and mortality, each now failing to find itself in the other, Giacometti’s female charioteer, his disappearing angel, watches and waits. Perhaps she shows without showing, fleetingly, that we have allowed ourselves to see, blindly to see, as only each one of us can, the translations that make our moment.

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The Struggle to Translate: Living with the Sculptures of Alberto Giacometti

7

For Guy Mathews

I Je crois que le fait de la ressemblance est inconsciemment beaucoup plus profond que ce qu’on croit, n’est-ce pas?1 Alberto Giacometti I think the fact of resemblance is unconsciously much more profound than we think, don’t you?

Anyone coming across a sudden and overpowering sense of the familiar walks into the most intimate parts of themselves. Such a wonder to recover those parts of oneself lost in the rapid interchanges of life! It is accompanied too by the rekindled need to stay ahead of the forgetting which makes up anyone’s private sense of self. Something a little infantile, then, about a sense of the familiar which arises from things seen together, perhaps similar ones, perhaps different: a sense of something carried around with one forever, a confusion of the remains and the retained. Also something acquisitive: an instinctive egoism in seeing connections no-one else can, and discovering a labyrinth to which no-one else has the key. What if the most familiar experience were an experience of loss? Or a combination of freedom and grief? A moment of knowing again only what each one of us, individually, intimately, fails to recover? I am thinking of those inner voices we seem to have carried with us forever, which have sought to tame us and which we still continue to try and convince. Perhaps we renew contact with what will always have eluded us and which for that reason continues to speak to us. 161

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Still, there is a simplicity about moments of familiarity, and it overcame me again as I wandered around the L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2007. A suspension of time joined hands with the resumption of time: the clarity with which I felt these pieces communicate coincided with the past-ness of Giacometti himself, of each of his pieces, and also of my own time spent with his pieces until then. The simplicity of looking seemed on the verge of a new rotation: something learnt, something forgotten, something learnt about forgetting, something learnt in forgetting. No-one like Giacometti seems to me to make time immemorial so evident. The two figures in Le Couple of 1927, so open, it seems, to being welcomed into conversation as male and female, are each covered in signs and insignia of Giacometti’s own devising. They signal a culture different

31. Alberto Giacometti, Le Couple, 1927. Bronze, 58.3 x 37.4 x 17.5 cm. AGD 321, 1927, N° d’édition, Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti 1980, fondeur Susse Fondeur Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti 1994-0185 © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Collection Fondation Alberto & Annette Giacometti.

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from the contemporary Paris of that time, and also from Paris in 2007 from within which I was looking at the piece. It was as though an anthropological attitude, the attitude of reaching out to other cultures from within this one here and now, was everywhere apparent in looking at the piece, in the absence of any anthropological practice. Which left the question, what do we know about others, given that the dimensions of our own recognition may escape us? In making an abstraction of anthropology, the piece seems to show how the life of other cultures reaches here, and takes form in the now of the mind’s eye. The continuity of recognition, of a sense of familiarity with times and places quite removed from the viewer, is both maintained and broken. How has Giacometti’s practice of forms come to express how we, his viewers, know and recognize; how has the world and what we see in it become familiar to us? Knowing, styling, knowing. Knowing styles of knowing. What, then, is a passage from me to you – what is the understanding that is made? The exhibition itself seemed to offer some clue, a further moment in the life of the questions Giacometti works away at with such patience. It evoked Alberto’s studio, though in name only, and now the studio is clearly absent, displaced, but also opened out – it reached out to its new environment. Richard Rogers’s conception of the Centre Georges Pompidou is designed to let the city into the museum, and conversely to allow the artefacts in the museum to be continually re-framed by the building and its open dialogue with the city coming in through the windows. The building participates in Marcel Duchamp’s aspiration, exemplified in Nu descendant un escalier n° 2 of 1912, to display the workings and pretensions of art. Like the frames which colour our viewing in Rogers’s building, Giacometti’s transparent boxes in which figures stand are truncated, or await completion, were passed through along anyone’s lines of viewing. What is now the meaning of the head of Giacometti’s Homme assis, 1965, the year before Giacometti’s death? What is the meaning now of its humility, its wisdom, its capacity to give life to a spiritual impulse over and above context and category, as it meets with the dome of the Sacré Cœur along a line behind it through the windows of the Centre Pompidou? The aura of things past and the uniqueness of the present moment coincide but fail to meet. The arbitrary and the subjective coincide in a moment of intense familiarity made in the mind of one viewer; but is the manner of this knowing common to others?

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II All this was the well-known incoherency of ideas, with their way of spreading out without a central point, an incoherency that is characteristic of the present era and constitutes its peculiar arithmetic, rambling about in a multitude of things, for a hundred possibilities to yet a thousand others, and always without a basic unity.2 Robert Musil Les fétiches nègres et océaniens. Quelle valeur nous leur donnons par rapport à Révolution et Religion? En tant qu’idoles, jusqu’à quel point nous les acceptons, en tant qu’œuvres d’art ou simplement en tant que documents d’une certaine culture? Idolâtrie de la Sexualité et de la Peur. Quels rapports pour nous entre Peur, Sexualité et Fétishisme (mort)? 3 Alberto Giacometti Black and Oceanic fetishes – what’s the value we’re giving them in relation to Religion and Revolution? As idols, how far do we accept them, as works of art, or just as documents of a particular culture? Idolization of Sex and Fear. What are the relations for us of Fear, Sex and Fetishism (death)? Pour détruire, en somme, il faut pouvoir sauter. Mais sauter où? [. . .] Tandis qu’en décomposant, j’accepte d’accompagner cette décomposition, de me décomposer moi-même, au fur et a mesure: je dérape, m’accroche et entraîne.4 Roland Barthes All in all to destroy, you need to be able to leap. But leap where? [. . .] Whereas by de-composing, I agree to accompany decomposition, to de-compose myself as I go; I skid, grip, and drag. La portée des incidents étranges mais insignifiantes à première vue Et leur don d’appropriation finale vertigineuse à moi-même Je chante votre horizon fatal Vous qui clignez imperceptiblement dans la main de mon amour Entre le rideau de la vie Et le rideau de cœur Yeux zinzolins YZ De l’alphabet magique de la toute-nécessité 5 André Breton 164

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The range of strange incidents insignificant at first And their gift of decisive capture dizzying to my sense of me I sing of your fateful skyline As you blink imperceptibly in the hand of my love Between the curtain of life And the curtain of the heart Eyes gazing violet YZ In the magic alphabet of complete-necessity

In his silent allusion to Gérard de Nerval and his own magic alphabet, Breton gives voice to the silence of allusion itself, the indeterminacy of the way cultural and subjective references of all kinds come to anyone and can be picked up by anyone.6 For Breton, that is the mark of allusion and its power. The strength of the desire and the need to embrace, to know and to love another does not only reach past the apparent insignificances of life that stand in the way, but is pollinated there. Heterogeneity at all levels of the content and impact of experience is the sign of the power itself to connect, and of the power of individuals to read and understand the revelations which come to them. Response in a blink to uncategorized circumstance leaves traces of the language of life. The eyes of a lover and the words evoking them leave traces which are beyond orthography and grammar, beyond barbarism and a civilization of the censored, and show the interconnectedness on which life depends. Meetings of a generalized necessity emerge, allowing creative, rather than self-repeating, interactions of past and present cultures. The appearance of isolation from each other of objects and artefacts is itself the language of their interrelation, which is a condition of seeing, thinking, loving. ‘Cette participation l’un vers l’autre de deux systèmes tenus séparément pour subjectifs’ – ‘This involvement in each other of two system which taken separately are thought to be subjective’.7 In Breton’s vision, subjectivity explodes timeless legend into the fragments of a self-generating narrative. The all-exclusiveness of intense subjectivity, the interruptions it generates in the seamless flow of permitted memory, propels it in a powerful analogy towards an other’s memories and living sense of self. However, interruption may also display the oblivion in which the generation of anyone’s thinking is cast, anyone’s way of seeing. I am thinking thoughts that are coming to me now and not at some other time. The Y and the Z in the language of the unrepeated, unemulated, unmodelled eyes of a lover, letters so embedded in what they name and the body they name that they are transported into a universal alphabet of intransitive refraction, and of unique, multiple 165

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intersections – these letters without words may also sign the ruins of a language and the passing of an understanding. Like the Y and the Z of Breton’s poem, the insignia Giacometti has invented for Le Couple to show the anthropological dimension of viewing may only reflect the domesticating notion of the primitive in which early twentieth-century European art approached African cultures.8 A style of seeing is offered to view, and a style of appropriation too. In Homme et femme, or in Objet désagréable, or Objet désagréable à jeter, which I discussed in Chapter 1, the ‘complete-necessity’ so optimistically invoked by Breton, rather than the magnetic and living force of otherness, expresses enforced cultural response. The phallic spikes and vaginal concavities drive their broken but impregnable drama of sexual aggression into instantaneous recognition. The magical hieroglyphs of a universal alphabet are lost, and in being lost are not regenerative, but seamlessly enclose viewers in the anthropology of their present moment. After all, Y and Z simply follow each other in the Latin alphabet, there is no magic left there at all, other than the magic of familiarity. Still, Giacometti and Breton, across everything that divides them, seem to share the same driving question, or desire: how can I see differently from the way I see here? Giacometti’s Femme cuillère is a testament to the separate experiences of Breton and Giacometti in response to objects found by chance. One such object is the ‘femme cuillère’ evoked by Breton in the meditations of L’Amour fou which I also discussed in Chapter 1. Discovered by Breton as he wandered with Giacometti around the ‘marché aux puces’ in Paris, it is indeed a wooden spoon, but with an elongated handle and shaped at the end as the high heel of a woman’s shoe or boot. Breton stresses that the significance of the object for him lies in the fact that is was discovered by two individuals together. While Breton had been attracted to this object, Giacometti, with greater hesitancy, had been struck by a mask of indeterminate use and history, which Breton later tells his readers turns out to be a discarded type of lethal gas mask. Two people finding such objects together signals for Breton the coincidence of different desires, different psychic responses in all the individuality typical of anyone’s intellectual and psychic uniqueness. Inner terror for Giacometti – but for Breton the transformations out there of reality as it is lived, interfacing with inner psychic impulse and energy. For Breton, intense subjectivity and irreducible circumstance are revealed together, in a dynamism that is at once already complete and open-ended – indefinitely open to re-configuration. The power of this process of revelation to escort egoism from the stage is confirmed when it is centred on objects found together by two people. Breton draws on the electricity produced by the clash of weather fronts to evoke it.9 166

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the struggle to translate 32. Alberto Giacometti, Femme cuillère, 1927 (1953 version). Plaster, 146.5 x 51.6 x 21.5 cm. AGD 372 1927 – état 1953, Édité en bronze à partir de 1954 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti 1994-0297 © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Collection Fondation Alberto & Annette Giacometti.

But in Giacometti’s aesthetic, in his view of the world and in his approach to his viewers, there is no coincidence.10 Where is the passage to be seen from the shoe spoon or the woman spoon photographed and reproduced in L’Amour fou, to Giacometti’s Femme cuillère? At what point has the the shoe spoon turned on its axis and begun to represent a woman? Where does an individual psychopathology begin its interaction with a cultural climate? Returning to this piece again, it is clear that like Le Couple it has an anthropological air, its elements are heterogeneous and it can be imagined as one of a pair of totems. But it is not attached to a particular culture and its character of cultural otherness seems to arise in its own demise, at a point where as viewers we too lose a sense of our own place, historically as well as culturally. Similarly, as viewers, the more we might feel Femme cuillère is familiar to us, the more that 167

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sense of understanding itself remains unfathomed. The impact of the sculpture testifies to its own illusory present-ness, as does the collage of forms and styles in which it is made. The torso of the woman resonates in morphological metaphor: it is concave and womb-like, absorbing the memory of a spoon into the idea of gestation. The head, on the other hand, resonates in the contiguity of various styles, one of which Giacometti points to explicitly in one of his sketches of the piece: the abstraction of Brancusi and its engagement with the tactile qualities of the materials in which he makes his sculptures.11 Where does Giacometti himself stand in this relation of the abstract to the material? Other styles which the head might evoke, like found objects do, and depending once again on the sensibilities of any one viewer, include the geometric typography of Russian as well as Italian Futurism, and the constructivism of Naum Gabo or El Lissitzky. And alongside stylistic allusion, there as much as not there, the head might remind someone of some implement ancient or modern. Myth and counter-myth collide in the metaphors of the sculpture’s morphology and the metonymy of its stylistic allusions; but the collision point dissolves. The temporalities of motherhood and technology coincide in the forms of the sculpture, giving rise again to the question: where? The coincidence of forms testifies to the fragility of knowing, and of knowing what we see. This sculptural collage walks a tightrope with agility on one side and alienation on the other: on one side, familiar elements are transformed into new configurations and understandings; on the other, the sense of place and meaning is lost. Each beckons to the other but they do not meet, and my grasp on the piece continues to fade. Walk around the piece, looking for some kind of threshold to cross, and from the side you might sense an indication of movement, whether in the bronze version or the plaster one I am reproducing here. The temptation to look at the Femme cuillère head-on, and indeed to reproduce it head-on, seems to paralyse other sightings; Giacometti seems to alert himself and others to that danger by simply sketching the piece in profile.12 But the substitution of one view by another, or their juxtaposition, confirms the exclusiveness of each, leaving us again as viewers suspended in the question, where? What is the nature of our attractions and temptations, and of the attachment to one point of view and not another? The concave space of the torso invites a head-on viewing, and seems at last to offer a face-to-face response, drawing viewers naturally into its vanishing point. But that surface is not purely or geometrically concave, which appears after a moment; it dips out towards the viewer at the top, giving some mnemonic of a human facial expression, which immediately drifts into a more generalized, self-dispersing expressivity – a style. Giacometti’s sketch in profile seems to concentrate on that, we might be looking at a person wearing a hat. 168

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From the side, though not necessarily in rectilinear profile, that indentation from the back, that disturbance in the purity of the curve creates an indication of movement. The concave surface seen from the front wraps viewers up in their own viewing, perhaps. From the side, the dent in the curve suggests a twist, suggests coiled energy. And as we walk around it, the piece suggests a walking of its own; we make that revelation. That ‘we’ is not yet a community, still less a coincidence of different psychic beings, each one typical of herself. There are no knots in the affective net the piece casts over me as I stand or walk by. Revelations that may come to me are not just my own. What I see is still not apparent to me, but a capacity to see differently may have begun to emerge. Still, there is no moment of ‘That’s it! I see!’; beginning is the beginning of a passing, and revelation is still coloured by pain or nostalgia. Each step we take around the piece is taken up in others and lost. At such a point, Femme cuillère leaves its viewers still not knowing where they stand in relation to it as they look, but sensing nonetheless an ability to wonder at their own viewing. There are always further steps to be made walking around Giacometti’s pieces and watching the solitude resonate off each one. How many times have I seen Femme qui marche I, of 1932–6, reproduced from the front?13 And in effect there she seems to stand, both demure and mutilated. There is no head or face, no arms either to show us which way to turn. Perhaps the lack of arms suggests Classical sculpture, in the ruined versions and image of them with which we live with now. But the elongated lines of this figure suggest a different culture, perhaps intimations of Africa in the European viewer’s mind, and the bronze casting is black. Perhaps too the piece is reminiscent of a mannequin, the artist’s tool used to create models from which to draw or sculpt: models of people and how they are seen. Perhaps the shape of the torso as a whole suggests a piece of bone – physical rather than cultural anthropology, then. These and any number of other associations fall away as much as they appear. Perhaps that is the source of the figure’s paradoxical, incomplete grace. What sort of grace is this, emerging from truncation, its very incompleteness confirmed by the viewer’s own incapacity to see an interpretation through? On the other hand, what capacity might each viewer invent to see agility, grace of movement, without seeing it through, without seeing past her own sensation, improvisation and fantasy? But then, what is the relation of spontaneous invention to a response that is simply natural to someone? In his journeys with, towards and away from the human figure – upright, truncated, standing, walking, coming and going – Giacometti seems both indulgent and firm in the offerings he makes to viewers. Any viewer will come to notice the dent in the chest of Femme qui marche I. But its force will not 169

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alberto giacometti: the art of relation 33. Alberto Giacometti, Femme qui marche I, c.1932–6. Bronze, 150.3 x 27.7 x 38.4 cm. AGD 317 1932 (version de 1936), n° d’édition Épreuve d’artiste 1972, fondeur R. Fiorini et J. Carney founders. Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti 1994-0138 © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/ The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Collection Fondation Alberto & Annette Giacometti.

emerge in the same time or in the same rhythm for every viewer. It can only be noticed in the contrast of one moment of viewing to another, and of one impression of a surface to another. The time of noticing will be the time of an interruption. To begin noticing or watching, simply to find something visually, is to reposition oneself in front. The dent in the figure’s chest seems so implacable once noticed, and yet look again, and is edges might merge gracefully with the surface around it. In the sketch Giacometti makes of the sculpture in his letter to Pierre Matisse of 1948, which I was drawn to in Chapter 1, the dent appears further down the torso, and together with the breasts it suggests a face – two eyes and a mouth.14 The dent is both striking and without definite feature, in part natural, in part horrifying – in any case, familiar, reminiscent of inhabiting a body. Perhaps 170

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because of its indeterminacy, it gathers symbolic meaning, a symbolic way of accounting for it. How else would we tell the story of mind and body? And if there is something inevitable about reading the body symbolically, perhaps Giacometti shows something of that in transporting the symbolism of the body into a symbolism of seeing. Perhaps this dent – which looks like a mark left by shapnel in a wall, or a bullet-hole, or a scar, or a birth deformity, but which is also a pure, indefinite form, a fascinating play of line, angle, surface and depth – perhaps the dent combines violence done to the body in life with the violence of optics and the point of view. To see from one point of view is to subordinate others, and to that extent to exclude others, to absorb them in the point of viewing now. In Giacometti’s art of the human form, more than a simple analogy between viewing the human form and viewing human beings is being developed, for the two elements fail to coincide. Symbolically, the dent in her body seems to position the figure implacably – but where? The boring through of optical focus shows only its own momentum; and it has been immobilized in the sculpture. Revelation has been suspended, the broken surface of the figure reveals more surface, or surface in a different dimension; its depth is soon seen as a bronze surface once again, now a concave one. More surface, more black, more shine. And what of the version in white made of plaster and wire also in 1932? It has no dent. Where has it come from, was it invisible before? The moment of viewing, embedded in the fragile mass of this figure, fails to materialize, Femme qui marche I itself is still taking shape, still incomplete: perhaps un-made then, un-compliant in the drama of viewing and sighting in which it is caught? And yet, indeterminacy of view and place are not enough to create inclusiveness of approach or generosity of understanding. The immobility of the sculpture, of any sculpture, seems to dispel such hope; Giacometti seems to draw his viewers into a partnership of incapacity – an incapacity to set in motion, to see beyond the place of seeing. Deprived of head and arms, the figure is deprived of agility, even in the grace of its lines; deprived too of thematic coherence, any cohesive meaning. The situation of sculpture – its lack of movement – and the situation of this unique sculpture – its lack of identity – seem to combine. Still, Femme qui marche does not seem to stand at a clear meeting point, or to offer one. The place of our viewing remains obscure, its perspectives are absorbed in viewing and not revealed. What is the meaning of this ‘our’, this first-person plural – of what or whom does it consist? The brilliance of the black bronze seems to spread a light in which some distant sense of community and shared recognition comes to life again. Equally, light seems to recede in the matt white of the plaster, and be reabsorbed there. Enclosure, or agility? Agility in enclosure? As viewers 171

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standing by this graceful and mutilated figure, will we be able to invent our own arms and legs, our own steps, and a place in which to see our own looking and be free? But a step where? And what kind of freedom should we imagine? To take a step in one direction excludes others, and the repositioning of a viewer in front of something, and of a viewer left looking without seeing his own point of view, begins again. In response, the offering of Femme qui marche is not one of arrival but suspension. Perhaps a viewer might be suspended between awe and incomprehension. Those or other attachments fade, lose their content or purpose; Femme qui marche is still. What sort of walking is offered? Not a walking away, or towards; from any oblique angle, perhaps in walking away and looking back, the smallness of her step appears, the light barely showing between her ankles. There is no transition from stillness to movement; or translation from one place to another; or communication of one point of view to another. Each seems reabsorbed in the other. In that reality of its form, in the inability of optics to create transport from here to there and back, the walking of Femme qui marche loses the dimensions of its own appearance. If steps appear as we walk around her, they are the steps of our own viewing, literally, inescapably; we will have to imagine what her walking would be made of: this is our responsibility for her form. To accept it is a moment of pure optimism and lightness, openness to the grace of someone else’s living and feeling, and the ability to see it. And yet still, as Zeno saw, movement is immobilized in seeing it, in seeing it from one point of view and not another. Gradually and suddenly, movement is once more pre-conceived and trapped from within our own sensations and attachments. Femme qui marche stands still. But what else might we imagine? Her feet are like a ballet dancer’s poised before a step. A solo dance or a pas de deux? How does the version in matt white plaster reach out to the one in brilliant black bronze, if at all? What are the steps between them, towards or away? Perhaps by simply creating two incarnations of this figure, Giacometti gives formal shape to a dialogue to come, to be made by viewers? Might it be one which allows for an interplay of approach and distance, of coming closer and moving away, freeing people from the pressure to see as one? That degree of honesty seems somehow required by the indeterminacy of each piece, seen in its singularity – poised between various ways of seeing it complete, and of responding to its evident incompletion. It will not be made whole. Nor will the two be made whole together. The indeterminacy of each stretches to the indeterminacy of the space between them: neither juxtaposition, nor contiguity; nor separation. Symbolic and optical dimensions have fallen away here too, leaving each in a space (we can see her) with no place (where is 172

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she?). In the continuously interrupted continuity of looking at her, at them, at her, there is no enlightenment; no passage from darkness to light. Each figure occupies its own brilliance and its own obscurity. The relation between one, and the other, is suspended: neither broken nor consumated. And yet Giacometti has created a common visual space for each one, for the silent visual voice of each Femme qui marche singly. As viewers we are invited to think of a community of response made from a formal, living inability to locate; a community which relates to others without placing them. But there is no redemption here from the impulse to appropriate and smother given to each one of us in the positions of our viewing and knowing. Each Femme qui marche shows the passing from view of how it reaches out to each one of us singly, if it does; how it speaks to you, if it does. Each Femme qui marche steps forward and falters in its unique, and shared, equilibrium of emerging and slipping from view. Which is the damaged, and which is the graceful? L’Objet invisible (mains tenant le vide) of 1934 – what is the invisible object of the title? The addition in parentheses adds to the paradox of naming and showing: pointing at the void dispels and makes something out of nothing. Returning to it in L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, it seems to me that Giacometti’s offering is simply the piece itself, the figure and its framing. The piece is of a piece, not a vehicle for an offering hidden in the hands and which we might try and unveil. Rather than an understanding of the self-reflexivity of art and the sad decline of that approach into conceptualized consumerism, Giacometti offers an invitation to wonder about the passage into commodities of things imbued with living thought. The invisible object is not something which the figure carries and which will soon be delivered, but the sculpture itself, in its entirety. Looking at the piece might not be the same as making it visible. The title itself suggests as much. Suspend the hermeneutic approach for a moment, the capacity to make connections metaphorically, and we are faced with an oxymoron. Invisible object: but an object is defined by its visibility, at least in part. ‘L’objet invisible’ – ‘invisible object’: will we be able to see the object in front of us? To step outside our point of view and see how we see – see our own seeing? To what extent is it possible for any one of us to conceive of an anthropology other than our own? Like Le Couple and Femme grande, L’Objet invisible suggests, if you like, Africa or Oceania. But this is no more than an allusion to the fashions and aesthetic as well as ethnographic concerns of the time. What does Giacometti make of them? Looking at L’Objet invisible (mains tenant le vide) from the front, the ambition to see beyond the parameters of any seeing, a Western European urban one in particular, if you like, seems dampened by a formal and stylistic flattening. The face seemed to flatten out, whether I was standing in front of the plaster 173

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alberto giacometti: the art of relation 34. Alberto Giacometti, L’Objet invisible (mains tenant le vide), 1934. Bronze, 153 x 29 x 26 cm. Photo: Claude Germain – Archives Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence (France). © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris + ADAGP, Paris) 2013, licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence.

model in L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti or the bronze casting at the MOMA. And the figure’s feet and ankles seem painfully trapped behind what might once have been a platform or a plinth, but is now folded up against them. The frame as a whole, against which the figure stands, encloses rather than reveals, even though the figure stands out against it; it might easily start to look like an instrument of torture, a vertical rack. Reading metaphorically, we might see pain, enclosure pinning down. Reading formally, we might wonder whether we can see beyond the invisible forms and framing of our viewing, and the imprisoning for which it is responsible. Still, in their indeterminate immobility, the hands reach out. Viewed from the side, they reach still further out from the vertical lines and the vertical dimension holding the figure in place. And walking around the piece for 174

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a longer time, any viewer will see the hands appear in a range of different positions all in dialogue with each other, each suggesting holding as much as offering, and suggesting too the gestures of talking to someone. But the sculpture will always remain silent, trapped in its own visibility, in the way each one of us sees it individually. It is suspended in a space of private viewing which cannot belong to one person alone but whose dimensions elude more general sighting as well. In the same way, the figure and her gestures form the frames in the sculpture. The optical drama involving enclosure, pathos and grace reaches out, if it does, not by inviting us to accept an offering, or to make the empty whole or the invisible visible. We are not asked to see beyond our seeing, or to transcend the relativity of our witness – spatial, affective, cultural . . . The invitation from the hands – especially seen from somewhere to the side, to me at least – is simply to engage. If as viewers we do engage, if we walk around as much as away from the un-anchored symbolism of this sculpture’s forms, and attempt the impossible job of putting together all the front-on sightings we find from whatever angle, as viewers we will be left with a question, and not a prize: a question of disarming simplicity, arising for anyone, a question of ethics. What do you know about what you see in a human form? About the echoes coming to you of another culture? Perhaps we cannot know what we see, or what is made visible to each one of us alone; in that continuing, lived invisibility Giacometti, in making L’Object invisible, seems to have discovered a self-emptying shape for generosity and the ability to take part.

III Si je vous regarde en face, j’oublie le profil. Si je regarde le profil, j’oublie la face.15 Alberto Giacometti If I look at you from the front, I forget the profile. If I look at the profile, I forget the front. Le simple fait de pouvoir regarder cet objet ‘en face’ de toutes parts, c’est-à-dire sans jamais être sûr de trouver la face définitive de notre parcours . . .16 Georges Didi-Huberman The simple fact of being able to look at this object ‘face-on’ from all sides, which means never being sure of the definitive shape of our looking . . . 175

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La violence me touche dans la sculpture.17 Alberto Giacometti Violence touches me in sculpture.

The engrossing quality of engaging with Giacometti’s figures, the increasing difficulty I find in walking away once I have accepted the invitation to look, ought to make me wonder, perhaps, about the value of comparing them, of setting one next to another at all. But the same thought turns the other way; the waters of comparison, translation and synthesis cannot be stopped. The humility of Giacometti’s invisible offering in Objet invisible does not invite the egoism of enlightenment or the affirmation of a new beginning. Giacometti’s figures, although they stand alone, also stand in groups. How do they come together? What is the nature of the recognition involved? How does the recognition needed for things to be seen together develop? I would like to begin a response by putting two pieces into the same space which might seem to rebuff each other stylistically. Both are representations of a head, or a face, but one stretches down to become a bust. One is Tête qui regarde, dating from 1929, though Giacometti made versions of it throughout 1928, and in different media as well. The other piece is one of the busts Giacometti made of his brother Diego, and the one I have chosen is Grande Tête de Diego of 1954–5.18 Each is unique in itself, each alludes to others in its own series. Each on its own, and across the spaces which separate their visual impact, addresses relation itself. How is relation made? How should it be made? Tête qui regarde looks a bit like a sculpture of a painting, and in that way seems quite unique. But the distinctiveness it proposes is also undermined in echoing the style of Brancusi, once again, who in the same period is developing a morphology of elemental purity. An artisanal intimacy with the materials used, drawn from a particular forest or quarry, is offered to viewers by Brancusi through the polished smoothness of his completed forms. An impression is left of the private and the public being continually bridged, along with nature and culture, body and symbol. In such a way too, perhaps, Tête qui regarde offers material smoothness (though still untouched), and an enjoyment of the geometry of the square. The title tells us, though, to look for a head and in particular one that looks. The formalism of the piece takes us in the direction of modernist portraiture and Cubist investigations, such as Picasso’s Femme aux poires of 1908, of the procedures used to represent depth in two dimensions. Although using a different expressive vocabulary, Tête qui regarde echoes too the attempt in Picasso’s Femme qui pleure of 1937 to show facial features we 176

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the struggle to translate 35. Alberto Giacometti, Tête qui regarde, 1929. Plaster and pencil marks, 40 x 36.4 x 6.5 cm. AGD 460 1929, Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti 1994-0439 © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Collection Fondation Alberto & Annette Giacometti.

know to be there in a face or head, even though they are hidden by adopting one perspective rather than another, one illusion of a total visual account of the human form. The expressive forms of the iconic Femme qui pleure might have us wonder, quite starkly, at the cost in victimization of the pursuit of total seeing, and even of the pursuit of sympathy, dependent as that is on some idea of a whole picture of someone. In a different style, Giacometti’s piece takes up the baton in the exploration of what a sighting allows to be seen and disallows from view. There are a number of indeterminacies in the way the head is represented; but one thing is certain, the piece in itself, even as it recedes, as it seems to, in the light rather than emerging under it, is seen from the front. The stylization of the head as a whole, and of the eyes in a line which supposedly look but which of course are looked at, comes to life from the front; by the fact of viewers standing in front. There is nothing on the back. Or rather, in the plaster version, shown in L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, there is: a few tiny marks, made seemingly at random. They might look like fault lines in the material; in fact, Giacometti has drawn them on. They are the mark of invisibility, of what is on the back when looking from the front, under the rule of the head which looks. We 177

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cannot see these marks from the front; they are remnants that drift back into a nothing. The implacable flatness of Tête qui regarde allows viewers to distinguish a head only on one side and not on the other; the piece even tilts back slightly on its plinth, as if to facilitate viewing from the front still further, and to the further exclusion of the back. Véronique Wiesinger tells us that Giacometti became interested in photography as a way of making his works better known.19 In his work together with Man Ray on photographing Femme qui marche I, issues of positioning and the point of view seem to have been paramount, along with the allusion to a mannequin. In Marc Vaux’s and Rogi André’s photographs of the plaster and clay versions respectively, Tête qui regarde is resolutely shown head-on, and of course in a photograph there can be nothing on the back.20 In collaboration with photography, Giacometti seems to emphasize still further that viewers see from where they are, from where they stand or sit; and more generally, that we remember and recognize from the position we occupy now, in the present moment. Tête qui regarde seems made to look like a photograph of itself; and even in conjunction with the plinth, viewers are drawn into looking with some reference to the two-dimensional, whether in photography or painting, watercolouring, drawing, etching . . . Tête qui regarde is an offering caught in a space between the two- and the three-dimensional. It reproduces the indeterminacy of looking at something, particularly a human face. It can be seen either as a portrait head-on or a portrait in profile. In his own conceptualization of the image, Magritte also suggests that a head-on portrait encourages the belief that everything to be seen in a face is being revealed; and in response he ironically offers a picture in which a mirror image shows what cannot be seen in one mirror by any one person: the back of the head. Responding here through Cubism rather than Surrealism, and with reference to the abstract materialism of Brancusi, Giacometti wonders again about the relation of vision to visual form. In looking at any picture of something, viewers assume depth on the basis of flatness, translate flatness into an image of depth; or conversely, depth into the flatness they are looking at. Perhaps Giacometti suggests that viewing a picture cannot be translated into viewing something, that viewing and its object will not meet, and that viewing shows viewing, reconstitutes, interrupts and repeats the terms and positions of seeing. In the assumption of depth in the flatness we are looking at and which we see, depth is translated into flatness. The flatness of surfaces we look at as viewers is the starting-point of the assumptions we are able to make about our position in relation to things and people. Looking at a flat surface shows the continuously repeated suppression, re-emergence and further suppression of diachronic in synchronic awareness, a suppression on 178

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which acquiring knowledge depends. Perhaps the optical domain, as much literally as metaphorically, is the domain of the flat: the translations of depth, time and place into the positions of seeing now, increasingly bereft of relation and understanding. But what a powerful, self-renewing domain that is, Giacometti seems also to suggest through the formal meditations of this piece, in the sightings of itself it offers, and in the indeterminacy of head-on and profile. The plinth might suggest a neck, and the incline of the left edge, looking from the front as it tilts back, might suggest the line of a nose, which is confirmed by the vertical indentation of the surface itself of the sculpture. The horizontal one then plays the role of the eyes. In the preparatory study Giacometti made for Tête qui regarde there is a front and back – a back with facial features indicated in the same method and style, but using protrusions rather than indentations.21 Even when considering figuring the face on both sides of his sculpture – and the viewing of one is still not available in the viewing of the other, emphasized in the need for two photographs to show both sides – the eye or eyes and the nose are formed in the same way in each case. On the one side indentation, on the other, protrusion. This increasing equivalence of elements in the formal vocabulary spreads to the indication, never quite fulfilled, of a right angle between nose and eye, and emphasizes the drama of vision and recognition being played out metonymically on whichever surface is being looked at, materially and almost literally. The final version, with ‘something’ on the front and ‘nothing’ on the back, shows two different viewing possibilities on its front surface. Giacometti shows them separately one from the other, in continuous interruption. One understanding of the viewing surface suggests a frontal sighting of the head; another, a sighting in profile. What is the relation between them? One of becoming, rather than one of cohabiting alternatives. But a viewer must always start somewhere, at one point, not another; just as we look at one side of Tête qui regarde, to the exclusion of the other. Giacometti seems to invite the piece to be seen frontally, rather than in profile. The invitation of the profile is to see on the other side, the unseen side, a mirror reflection of what is seen on this side, here. The indented indication, in the assumption of profile, of an eye combined with its eyebrow turns into an indication of both eyes, in the assumption of a frontal view. The indentation of the nose which might appear in profile, is now a nose seen from the front and shifted to the side. Such is the result, perhaps, of our two eyes as viewers locked into one line, rather than seeing along different lines joining in an illusion of undistorted total vision. A resistance of forms emerges, for a moment, to the oh-so-easy dialogue, facilitated by the mechanics of profile portraiture, of 179

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the relative and the global. The nose and eyes shown in that imperfect right angle, rather than as two eyes above a nose, is also a moment in which our powers of synthesis as viewers are re-arranged. The two eyes above a nose, in a frontal view, also invites an abstraction of the viewing surface in favour of implicit depth. Some new hope has arisen that the ways in which a face is seen will be understood; neither frontally, nor in profile, nor both, but in the displacement of one in the other, continuously. Frontal view, profile view; each inviting the other into the viewing surface, each removing the other from the viewing surface, continuously. Tête qui regarde shows our capacity as viewers to re-configure the very idea of what is visible to us, rather than being continually inhibited by the pressure to synthesize the unseen in the seen. The frontal and the profile understandings of this piece both attract and repel each other. There is an ease, I find, an imaginary mobility created as the eye interprets, a conceptual freedom, an ability to re-fashion my own ways of seeing. But that non-convergence of surface and depth, of metaphoric transport and metonymic contiguity, deprives that sense of viewing freedom of a place; the space of the face eludes the eye which looks for it. What are we looking at? Tête qui regarde, as an object, clearly does not look, in spite of its title. It represents a head which looks, then. In its title as well as in the forms of his piece, Giacometti seems embarked again on an exploration, an obscure illumination of an encounter with others, of the point of encounter itself. Perhaps this is the beginning, renewed, of sensing someone there, in everything that makes them different, existing in a place and a temporality which is theirs, a their-ness which my own lived experience confirms. But there is no redemption here, in Giacometti’s head which looks. We are not carried over to the other side of what we see; we relish the visible instead. If only formally, we see that our seeing banishes. But in amidst the ease of formal and stylistic perusal Giacometti offers, the enjoyment of a surface, a simple, indirect and troubling truth continues to emerge: as viewers we cannot see ourselves seeing – the manner of our seeing and banishing. In yet another moment of new beginning, or interruption, this piece offers its own ‘invisible object’, to quote from the title of the other piece: itself; the manner of our encounter with it; our own moment of looking, each one of us individually. The form and the title of Tête qui regarde together mark the self-eclipse of viewing. It shows viewers viewing inevitably from the front; seeing one surface in the exclusion of another. But the viewer herself is not shown, is not there. Enclosed in the point of view, freedom to re-cast viewing emerges at the cost of its own understanding. Grande Tête de Diego shares with Tête qui regarde the quality of a blade, the mnemonic of a sharp edge. Tête qui regarde presents the viewer with the 180

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increasing flatness of a viewed surface, an increasing exclusion of depth, and in that way the increasing sharpness of the surface edge. The busts of Diego – Buste de Diego dit Aménophis as well as Grande Tête de Diego – place two sharp-edged near-flat surfaces on axes at a near right angle to each other; head on shoulders. The right angle is not perfect, there is more of an allusion to one; and the sharpness of the edges cannot be confirmed by touch.22 For both those reasons, the distances separating sculptor from viewer is renewed in the complexity of the meeting point itself in which this sculpture is made. Giacometti has also replicated it in different materials, further erasing even his own point of contact with his work in simply releasing it in many forms, each part of a different temporality and memory. In that release, there is also a reminder, one that is significant in itself. How has it come about that as viewers we need

36. Alberto Giacometti, Grande Tête de Diego, 1954. Bronze, 65 x 39.5 x 24 cm. Alberto Giacometti Foundation, Kunsthaus Zürich, © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Kunsthaus Zürich.

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reminding of the differences of point of view and position? What is the cost of the easy syntheses we make in absorbing everyday life? In the adjustments we make to engage with the world and enjoy it, and in identifying what we see or touch or hear, what are the changes of direction, voices, tonalities, ecstasies, fears, passing perceptions and pangs of anxiety – what are all the sediments of triumph and devastation that are lost and removed from view? Giacometti reminds us, simply, that to see something is to forget what is then not seen. The subtitle of Buste de Diego dit Aménophis confirms the oblivion in which our own seeing is made. It alludes to Amenophis, the pharaohs of Eighteenth Dynasty, 1570–1293 BCE, to the art of that ancient civilization and its frequent representations in profile; but it alludes also to the way we see them now – perhaps only to that. There is no resurrection offered. The plane of the torso, itself truncated, is opposed in that indeterminate right angle to the plane of the head.23 The point of view in front and the point of view in profile stand together on an axis which twists them against each other. Either way, there is profile, for either way there is flatness. There is no redemption. To challenge the dominance of the view in profile is to rediscover dominance in the view in front. Walk around from the profile and you will be faced with the uneven sharpness of the nose and the head seen frontally, which seem to promise a jagged cut rather than a gesture of welcome: sadism rather than community of understanding. Still, seen from any angle as any viewer might walk around it, a face does appear, the eye that can be seen allows a viewer to imagine the murmuring of its sensuous dialogue with the one on the other side. In this face, a kind of serenity seems to have found a beginning; a living, dis-placed, fragile reconciliation with what is lost in viewing. The pointed skull, even in continuing the jagged line of the chin, mouth and nose, shows again that by walking around, away from or towards the impaling force of that vertical, the mobility of the human form is free to emerge; free and expressive. From whatever your height as an individual viewer, perhaps you will have peered down at the piece and at whatever height it is displayed. Or perhaps you will have bored into the surface of a photograph in a book looking for clues of its depth. Such seeking has not revealed to me the meaning of the expression in the face Giacometti has fashioned; I have simply become absorbed in that seeking, in the coming and going of impressions, mnemonics, internal narratives and their suspension, all the ways which have occurred to me of trying to make the head speak. I have learnt again the futility of that metaphor, and been reminded again of the unmeasured distances separating an artefact from a response to it. In becoming ‘une tête qui regarde’, a watching head, I am unable to penetrate my own looking. But in that inability I have become familiar with Giacometti’s offering. 182

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Grande Tête de Diego is not an abstract sculpture, but inseparable nonetheless from the conditions of its making. It delves into the human, but it is simply, uncompromisingly not human but material. It promotes intimations of movement, of turning on an axis, but it is visibly solid and rooted. It is rooted, but without secure dimension, while still engaging with the dimensions made in viewing. It shows a truncated human form, ever more in isolation, it seems; yet it still proposes dialogue and community. Silent and dis-placed, it remains elusive on its own spot. In all these interruptions, these dis-articulations in the translation one place, one position to another, this sculpture of a piece of the human body deals in recognition, seen from a distance. The eyes seem to look, and wait; clearly bronze eyes cannot see, so in watching them, as viewers we wait. The mouth is on the point of a smile, of welcoming, but only in relation to the eyes which wait; they seem to observe knowingly without (our) knowing what they see. Perhaps the eyes suggest a moment on the point of seeing, or of losing from view once more; just as the mouth may be on the point of weeping as much as smiling. In making the piece originally with his fingers, Giacometti seems to testify to the sediments of recognition in bodily responses and gestures. He can only do so unknowingly, the generation of that mind-body labyrinth of recognition is unknown to him, as it is to his viewers. In admiring Giacometti’s powers of expression, we might wonder that we recognize without knowing how we do. The sculpture is loudly incomplete, but equally, the more we look, the more it is known to us as complete, there is nothing more to see: the complete form of the sculpture is known to us; and in our encounters with it, as viewers we lose sight of the distinction between what is completed and what is not. Walk around, and viewing Grande Tête de Diego from a position head-on and viewing it from an angle in profile seem to embrace: the intersection of the two planes is once more a joining-point full of movement. We may be free to imagine how arms might once have waved and the legs run towards a loved one or away from terror. Suspending identification of what it is we see, the axis in the sculpture allows the two planes to criss-cross in any number of ways: the upwards vertical tapering of the head is now perhaps a mere vestige of imprisonment in a perspective, and a testimony to the possibility of unenclosed meeting points. A beautiful man is shown us, beautiful because he is humble, because he smiles, because he is indulgent, because he forgets . . . Giacometti seems to invite as well as rebuff identification with his sculpture: the plane of the head and the plane of the torso interact; they do not interact. Do not connect, and a space may be open to us, as viewers, for understanding and dialogue – with this sculpture, with our own ways of seeing, with each other. 183

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The same interplay of recognition and its suspension takes shape if as viewers we take up the invitation to look along the other plane in the sculpture, the torso. Once again the axis of the piece seems starkly to divide head from torso. Once again we might discover that the viewing mind wanders across even that no-man’s land, that devastation, and that the mind synthesizes incommensurable positions with ease, and joy, and creativity; still we recognize a man mutely testifying to a life beyond reach. But equally, perhaps the line of the vertical dimension, a mere vestige of itself in the plane of the head, where it disappears openly, has returned with all its power to fix, appropriate, identify, locate, translate and banish. The transport from the domain of one plane to the other – torso to head, back and forth – now signals the implacable return of the point of view, its sightings, tyrannies and fantasies. The roughness of the surface of both torso and head, its static suggestion of decomposition or incineration, appears as the mask of our own understanding as viewers, the intactness and invulnerability to which we now cling again. Perhaps respect for the other can still be discovered from within the cacophony of recognition and appropriation. But perhaps this head, emerging from a body made amorphous, anonymous, still flat and featureless for all the signs of a human hand, of a human being’s living and memory imprinted across it – perhaps this head is a desperate sign of Giacometti’s time, of anyone’s: a desperate, inadequate, and partial evocation of human violence to humanity. As a viewer, I see from a place invisible to me, only to me. Both Tête qui regarde and Grande Tête de Diego, each in its uniqueness, repeats the simple, desperate reality of the unseen. We see what we see and not what we do not, each one of us individually. Though resistant to deadening homogeneity, there is no promise of progress in this realization. Even to see in the light of the partial is also to synthesize, to cover over what remains beyond view in a new skin of present understanding. If signs and offerings help communication between people in different cultural places and affective ones, they also silence their own generation, slough away their own temporality in prompting the new one of their reception now. La Main points to that lost yet living time, indefinitely. It seems to bring the time of showing and the time of the shown, and of the viewer, closer together, closer still, and still they do not meet.24 (See Figure 13, page 90.) Facing Tête qui regarde or Grande Tête de Diego, materially, in a particular gallery, in the complexity of a particular light, in her own time, a viewer might be faced with a simple, everyday, comprehensible sense of something which passes understanding. For still we do not know what we see, nor occupy the space of what we see over there. We see from the place of our own seeing, and banish it. Does our seeing add to the invisibility of others? 184

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IV On peut aussi bien lire les tableaux de ruines comme les figures d’un portrait, voire d’un autoportrait.25 Jacques Derrida Equally paintings of ruins can be read as figures of a portrait, even a self-portrait. Comme un vent hagard, brutal et soudain, le sol manque sous les pieds.26 Alberto Giacometti Like a wild, brutal and sudden wind, the ground falls away from under your feet.

There is a dual invitation coming from Giacometti through his sculptures in human form: recognize, but wonder, what is being recognized? Interpret, watch as interpretation fails. Resort to metaphor, allow metaphor to fall away. Seek understanding of these sculptures, open out to the intransigence of their forms. I feel I have still more to learn about this way of looking, responding and thinking; that I am still failing to take up that elusive invitation. In continuing to try, I am hoping to carry you, my readers, with me. If I can do that, I am hoping to follow further the paths of Giacometti’s art, as they appear to me, and the paths of aesthetic form, which speak humanity by speaking the ability to reach out, with disinterest, without application, without certainty, and perhaps too without hope. How does an individual way of seeing contribute to the invisibility of others? What individual, what group of individuals, what others? Notions of I, of we, of community, fracture in the very act of addressing them. Is it for that reason that Giacometti’s by now invisible steps and stages towards showing a complete body seem too tentative? A compete body – disappearing; or an assemblage of bodies and figures – augmenting? Diminishing? Individual figures, accompanied by others or not, never seem to face each other. Perhaps they seem more divided from each other than brought together by the indications of walking as well as standing. But there is a still further space of fracture, of incoherence, immersing me again in a tentativeness which has characterized so many of my approaches to Giacometti’s pieces in human form – fearful perhaps of contributing to such fracture in the effort to understand it. How self-evident, nonetheless, open to understanding, is the flimsiness of the arms in La Cage, of 1949–50, as I re-discover her now the figure reaches out to the bars of her transparent cage 185

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but clings to them as well. (See Figure 1, page 18.) ‘Self-evident’ – it seems that a timeless language of pathos reaches out to us again, this indefinite community of viewers. Equally, an ordinary sense of time places her beyond our embrace. But faced with her, we still sense that ‘beyond’ affectively, subjectively. The figure is transported into the flimsy, stifling place of the ‘we’. The figure clings to the bars as though to life itself; the bars making the space in which we see her, in which we lose her. The cage forms the un-placed space of her loss, made in our seeing, and in the way we reach out to her now, through the transparent walls of her cage: transparent because of our seeing her now, in the present. Still she clings, to the space of her own disappearance, the disappearance of her place, of her time, in her own time. The space in which her place is lost is the space through which we identify her, confirming her loss. But that loss is still hers, not ours. Her flimsiness, made in our viewing, her pathos, made in our viewing, are still her own. But where is she? Giacometti has made the most disturbing gift for viewers. The figure seems to have suffered to the point of her own disappearance – but not quite. She is enclosed in the disappearing space made in our viewing, each one of us individually, together confirming her suffering. Each one of us may see her losing the fibres of her sense of self, see her dying and witness her own dying, clinging to the bars as though to life. But the bars suspend identification with her as well. We do not share her space, but we are complicit with her dying. We do not share her space, we make it, make it transparent to each one of us individually, spontaneously. Giacometti places a head in the cage with this female figure, a male head. It looks from the inside out, from within the transparent box of what is framed and seen. The box or the cube creates six possible viewing frames, visual ways in. But the five transparent viewing frames of this cage evade synthesis; or rather they show synthesis being made in lived time, in the viewing of an individual. We may walk around the piece, this caging of a woman, but none of us will do so in the same sequence as others, nor will any one of our wanderings repeat any of the ones before. The relations between the female figure and the male head change continually as you might walk around, making the frames dissolve, almost irrelevant, almost invisible; and the bars are so flimsy. Still she seems to cling, to her life, to her death, to being seen. But the head looks away, bespectacled, stern, philosophical, looking off to one side, unaware of his own framing in one plane, or the other, or others together. Once again, I have turned to metaphor: given in to the affective lines from pathos to the promise of recognition and witness. How are those lines drawn? Perhaps in returning to the simplicity of what we are given to 186

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see. If as viewers we see that the male head does not show seeing, what do we see? Only that – he does not see. Giacometti’s gift to the viewer is to see this not-seeing. Viewers are in a position which calls out to the position of Josef K in Franz Kafka’s The Trial. In an iconic and formally complex piece of literary fiction, Josef K listens in the cathedral to the parable of the man standing at the gates of the city waiting to be granted entry. The gate-keeper assures him his case is in the hands of legal specialists, awaiting adjudication; and he waits for the outcome for the rest of his life. On the point of death, it occurs to him to ask why there are no others here waiting to hear their fate. The gate-keeper, his only companion for that very long length of time, gives the answer he himself has devoted his own life to delivering: this gate is only for you, you have watched it and waited all your life and not recognized its message, that the questions you ask are made by you alone and concern only you. Such is the gift of sight offered by Giacometti in his figures, or parts of figures, caught in transparent cages and boxes; particularly this La Cage, where the head is there watching – but where is he? Each frame in the cube also undecidably appears and disappears, it is so flimsy. As the bars of each frame appear, we might be aware of our way of seeing; as they seem to move, change shape or even disappear as we walk around, or just look further, we might begin to know the blindness of seeing. Frames appear and disappear with each blink of the eye; what we see is made visible in the suppression of how we see it. Even knowing that perspectives coincide, the point at which they do, for each one of us, is not made apparent. Our eye may drift from the man looking away, to the intersection at the throat of the crucified angel. But in the multiple framing of the piece, or within any one frame lost within the others, that intersection remains unfixed and beyond the reach of the point of view, always disconnected from what it seeks. We shall not then see the truth, nor shall it set us free. Still, in the self-displacement of our own viewing, each one of us, we may reach out to the vision of others: reach out, but not meet. Like Benjamin’s Angel of History, Giacometti’s crucified figure rides the crest of the destruction which we make, as viewers, in our blindness to our own seeing. Like Benjamin’s, Giacometti’s angel here recedes as much as it emerges, rushing headlong into its own absorption in present history, and the present rush to supersede.27 Such is the witness to the past and the experience of others open to us, Giacometti seems to suggest in this troubling piece. To witness is to be blind to our own witness. In La Cage, there is another box underneath the box with the remnants of human figures. But there is nothing to see. Where are the people we loved? Where are those whose suffering appals us and whom we seek to 187

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honour? They are not there, assumed now in the forms given them in our memory. Those we have lost will not come to us again. But in an understanding of the part we play in our own blindness, perhaps a community made of generosity may be sketched on the surface of our imagination, a community made in claiming as our own a knowledge of loss.

V For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.28 St Paul, I Corinthians Les signes de l’écriture ne sont les signes que de ce qu’ils ne sont pas. En peinture, c’est la même chose.29 Alberto Giacometti Signs in writing are only signs of what they are not. In painting, it’s the same. Puis elles s’éloignèrent, sauf une que je vis passer jusqu’à cinq et six fois, sans que je pusse apercevoir son visage [. . .] la seule Inconnue qu’il m’ait jamais été donné de rencontrer.30 Marcel Proust Then they moved away, except for one who went by up to five or six times, without my ever being able to catch sight of her face [. . .] the one Unknown Woman it has ever been given me to see.

One of Giacometti’s sketches for La Cage shows the figure opening the curtain on the stage where she stands. It is a gracious gesture, welcoming and unassuming, unaffected, confident in the feeling that what is shown is bound to be seen, and understood. In the other of these two sketches, there is not only a head on the stage, where the angel, as I have called her, is revealed. There is also a figure in the box below, which is drawn bigger than the box above in the sculpture; and there is even a figure standing to the side of the piece altogether.31 A community is there, sketched at least, though perhaps only a community of shadows. But there nonetheless. And in the bronze sculpture of 1950 also called La Cage, the head has been turned inwards: it looks into its own space, the space of the cage or the theatre, and looks too in the direction of the female figure, now more like a companion. They share the same height, 188

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the struggle to translate 37. Alberto Giacometti, La Cage (second version), 1950. Bronze, 175 x 36.5 x 40 cm. © Musée de Grenoble Giacometti – © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Musée de Grenoble.

though not the same shape. But she is whole and he remains as bust, the head tilted back, as though looking – at her? And now she stands, arms at her side, still, waiting, perhaps waiting to move, perhaps acquiring stillness. This is more than a version in bronze of the sculpture in plaster. It is rather a different sculpture with the same name. The box, or cage, or stage space is smaller, and the space underneath much longer, made in a different visual vocabulary, with different associations for each one of us. As I say, the figures are of a comparable height, within reach; but one at least, the male head, is here positioned to look at the other. Spectator and actor, perhaps, for a moment, seem to stand on the same spot, view in the same way. A community, then, of viewing, and of understanding, emerges from the sketches and from the second La Cage; the spaces in all the pieces are being continually adjusted, it seems, to allow an idea of community to emerge. In a photograph 189

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of Giacometti working on the portrait of Pierre Matisse, La Cage in plaster is seen in the background from the side, suggesting the ease and grace with which the figure opens the curtain still more powerfully than in the sketches; and suggesting that ease still more evidently than the agony I felt and tried to describe before. From this angle, the head looks at the spectator too, drawing him in.32 But Giacometti’s pieces, and the moments of sighting, thinking and reaching which each one offers, do not join one another. They supercede one another and the community Giacometti would have us imagine, and live, is still to be made, vulnerable to collapse, still fragile. A community. One which Giacometti offers aesthetically, in an ethics of form, and to which I have felt the need to try and respond in kind. Why? Perceptually, spatially and critically, Giacometti’s figures continue to elude the grasp. Moving closer to them is part of moving away, and they exist in an indeterminate space eluding place. They never seem to look at each other – or are they about to? Some stand, some walk; each seems unable to do both, like the characters in Beckett’s plays, some of whom can sit, some can stand, some are being buried, some reach out, some have mouths and language, others only a body. All live in the collapse of the faculties into one; and then one into none. And yet . . . there are also indications of the most fragile, perhaps detested knowledge emerging, within reach, but within reach of domestication too. To understand is to begin the cycle again of having to understand, of being drowned in understanding, of yelling the fear of drowning, but also of dominating. The point of view imprisons again, it already is imprisoned. Individuals continually move towards their own idea of a shared point of view, they also move away from one. Are the walking figures moving forward or coming to a halt? Neither is human, each is a statue, a sculpted figure, immobile. This literal, inescapable quality of viewing Giacometti’s figures itself seems to incarnate – formally, perceptually, existentially – the central moral problem of art addressed by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus : aesthetic forms seek out but cannot repeat human forms of interaction. But in Giacometti’s figures the opposition between authentic and inauthentic, illumination and deception, even mimetic and non-mimetic art is suspended; and community is rediscovered in the space without place of that suspension. After Giacometti made Figurine dans une boîte entre deux maisons in 1950, it is the female figures which stand, and the male ones which walk, whether they appear alone in groups, or in mixed groups. Une femme immobile et quatre hommes qui marchent plus ou moins par rapport à la femme. Je m’étais rendu compte que je ne peux jamais faire qu’une femme immobile et un homme qui marche. Une femme, je la fais immobile et l’homme je le fais toujours marchant.33 190

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38. Alberto Giacometti, Figurine dans une boîte entre deux maisons, 1950. Bronze, glass, 30 x 54 x 9.5 cm. Alberto Giacometti Foundation, Kunsthaus Zürich, © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Kunsthaus Zürich.

A motionless woman and four men walking more or less in relation to that woman. I’d become aware that I can only ever make a woman motionless and a man walking. I always make a motionless woman and I always make a walking man.

Despite the dramatic change being described, Giacometti’s account of the step from inhabiting one kind of sculptural space to inhabiting another involves retrospective awareness and a sense of indefinite transition. For all the figures are immobile. Some look like they are walking, but they are still; perhaps as viewers we create the illusion of movement as we walk around them. Or perhaps the memory of movement comes to life as we stand and look, or sit and look at a reproduction. Still, all are immobile, and immobilized still more emphatically, it seems, by the varyingly heavy, sticky-looking feet of both those who appear to walk and those who appear to stand. The women in La Clairière (composition avec neuf figures) of 1950 stand on plinths of various heights and depths, stressing their rootedness in the ground 191

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which rises up to greet them, keep them, reabsorb them. Or do the plinths show still more firmly, in their varying sizes and impacts, a power invested in these figures to emerge, to assert their own form, and through a new mythology, as Sartre suggests, to assert a new understanding of the human? Giacometti frames the question as a suspension. The piece as a whole is still. A paradoxical stillness. In being still, the figures suggest not only stillness but waiting: the possibility of movement. The figures suggest neither stillness nor movement, nor both. And yet each is suggested, to the exclusion of the other. On that paradoxical exclusion rests the possibility of the community offered by Giacometti. La Main, too, seems to wave viewers both towards it and away. Exclusion itself might include: each one of us understands exclusion, can communicate an experience of it; but what is the manner of

39. Alberto Giacometti, La Clairière (composition avec neuf figures), 1950. Bronze, 59.5 x 65.5 x 52 cm. Alberto Giacometti Foundation, Kunsthaus Zürich, © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Kunsthaus Zürich. 192

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this understanding? Its impact? If this question remains open, exclusion itself may be shown, visually staged, rather than absorbed in narratives of sacrifice, socialization, and progress, however benevolent. And yet how isolated, still, the female figures in La Clairière seem to be: de-located, not looking at each other, even though some are in a position from which they can see the back of others. The figures are united in style as well as a sex, but they cannot be drawn into the same perspective. The figures are not so much lost or anonymized in a crowd of others similar to them, as individually de-located: they are sharing that condition. The perspective of each, wherever a viewer might stand, does not match the perspective of the others. In making the differently sized plinths Giacometti testifies to this collapse of synthesis. Giacometti de-locates his individual figures – the victim in her cage in La Cage, perhaps, and perhaps too the woman brightly standing in her own clear box, this time with coloured uprights and base, in Figurine dans une cage, 1949–51.34 These de-located places, and Giacometti’s act itself of placing his figures, are not replicated when it comes to placing figures in groups: the process is simply begun again, repeated, each time without precedent, whether the figures stand alone or in groups. In the presence or absence of frames, whether drawn or painted or sculpted; with disappearing or appearing plinths; and in a surprising, withdrawn diversity of styles, figures are lost in the space they occupy, the space given to them in viewing. This collapse of perspective in the perspective, of optical location in optical experience is repeated each time singly, whether Giacometti places his figures in groups or alone. The figures in groups do not coalesce into a shared optical space which might spontaneously be called theirs. This is not an optical illusion – on the contrary, to stand or walk around his figures is to feel free of illusion, but only to the extent of watching illusion germinate as well. Each plinth in La Clairière (composition avec neuf figures), by simply being different from all the others, not only in height, but breadth and volume, places each figure in relation to a different horizon. As a viewer, what space do I walk into, what am I immersed in as I approach the dimensions of this clearing? Clearing in what? Is the piece as a whole small or large? Where are its limits, the ones that give its size? Are the figures themselves individually large or small, in relation to each other, or to others still, at the moment not in view? In the dimension of this loss of dimension, in this dimension, each of the figures appears to me: in itself, and not; of my own making, and not. Art is a step away from reality, from lived experience, from me. That step is incomplete, its direction undetermined, obscure. I walk towards art as well, the art object, I engage with it, I see it in my perspective. Not everything is art. Equally, not everything is a projection of my own experience, or my inability to account 193

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for the diversity of things. In this suspension of art in art, of place in space, of reaching in reaching out, Giacometti constructs his notion of community. This community is still a semblance of one, still in the domain of form. And yet seeing, responding, perceiving, recognizing, remembering are all matters of form, of spontaneous interaction with the world, with others. They form too of our spontaneous unawareness as we recognize and see. Giacometti’s art is placed a step away from experience, and a step towards it as well. This community of figures does not create a space of liberal choice. In being without place, Giacometti’s attention to the human form in the space of La Clairière reveals the space of a human dimension and of a human capacity to understand. There is a kind of literalness to the invitation to look offered by Giacometti. There is also a confidence in viewers’ capacity to see. It is simply possible, within our reach as viewers, to see each figure in isolation from others, and yet together; to capture the piece at a glance, its style, its anonymity, and yet to see that each figure eludes the temporal and spatial reach of any one glance. Simply, it is possible to see in any one viewing that the figures each need a viewing – singly, together; that they do not share the same horizon, and that their dimensions are differently measured, conceived, seen, remembered. Patiently, it is possible to rediscover, to learn again the reality of our viewing, our point of view: that it is ours, that we share its singularity with others, even though we also share the synthesizing, de-differentiating impulse which allows us to think at all and move in the world. The figures stand alone, together. An idea, an experience, a memory of aloneness emerges, along with an experience of togetherness. The two step ever closer to each other, or away. They resist each other, reach out to each other, indeterminately. In this indefinite suspension, Giacometti offers a way of viewing, of thinking about viewing, and about community, which not only allows for but survives in its own fracture, the fracture of witness, and the terror of oblivion. In his interview with Pierre Schneider in 1961, Giacometti at one point talks about seeing the world through the screen of the past, of past art, and then seeing the world without the screen of the past: Mais pour moi, la réalité reste exactement aussi vierge et inconnue que la première fois qu’on a essayé de la représenter. C’est-à-dire que toute représentation qu’on a faite jusqu’à présent n’a été que partielle. But for me reality remains exactly as virgin and unknown as the first time anyone tried to represent it. In other words all representation until now has only ever been partial. 194

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Before, as a child, and as a man, he saw partially: saw partial seeing in all representations of the world. Now he sees the unknown; the known has given way to the unknown in its absolute purity. Cela depuis le jour où j’ai commencé à voir . . . car avant je voyais à travers l’écran, c’est-à-dire à travers l’art du passé et puis, peu à peu, j’ai vu un peu sans cet écran et le connu est devenu l’inconnu, l’inconnu absolu. Alors, ça a été l’émerveillement et en même temps, l’impossibilité de le rendre.35 And that’s been going on ever since I started seeing . . . for before I saw through a screen, in other words the art of the past and then, little by little, I could see a little without the screen and the known became the unknown, the absolute unknown. And then it was wonder, and at the same time the impossibility of rendering it.

Wonder has emerged: optimism in its purest form; but the impossibility too of showing it and rendering it. So where now is the partial seeing? On which side of the screen? For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.36

In Giacometti’s silent reworking of St Paul, the transition between seeing as a child and seeing as a man is incomplete, the day of vision indefinitely in the past, and response as a man still in the future. Each is cast in the ‘peu à peu’ and the ‘un peu’ – little by little; a little. The dark glass, the mirror of our own limited seeing, limited to each one of us, is now a screen. From the unknown and the luminously partial, we see through to the unknown and the dark partiality of our own seeing. The partial cannot be put aside, it is the manner of our relation, it is not whole. Where is the place where I might see something different and know it? Am I standing there? Giacometti’s Grand nu of 1962 is a flat picture, we cannot walk around it, nor realize for the moment that in walking around anything we are still looking forward. We look forward at the picture, perhaps we see a figure coming to meet us, and perhaps we see her receding. Perhaps our seeing is one that allows people to step out, perhaps one that pushes them back. We see as through the walls of Giacometti’s transparent cages, for we cannot be sure whether the frames impose or are ours to dismantle. Perhaps they disappear. Still we look forward and flatten the future. In Grand nu the figure appears partially, she is not whole, for we might recognize something in her or we might not. She 195

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alberto giacometti: the art of relation 40. Alberto Giacometti, Grand nu, c.1961. Oil on canvas, 66.92 x 47.44 in. Collection Fondation Giacometti, Paris, inv. 1994-0623 (AGD 255) © Alberto Giacometti Estate/Licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Collection Fondation Giacometti, Paris.

emerges, but she is absorbed in the paint which makes her, and in our seeing from the front, always forward. The grace or the joy of her new light comes at the cost of understanding it. In ‘Max Ferber’ from The Emigrants, Sebald’s narrator disguises in his wanderings around Manchester his memories of the Nuremberg biscuit tins which carry so much of affective content for him. He buries his allusion in the floating present time of his narrative, of his recall, of his invention of recall through which he reaches out to a reader absent to him as a writer, and whose time of recall is different from his own. In the indeterminate light of narrative, allusion and reference, all the fits and starts of memory and affective response are unreliable. They collapse in the transmission. Their transmission is made of imminent collapse: readers may notice allusions, they may not. They may impose their own readings or seek to avoid that, with whatever success. In 196

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Chapter 5, I thought I saw that Max Ferber’s studio echoed Giacometti’s, the layers of dust accumulating there, but which now only exist in reading an account such as Genet’s awestruck one. But there is no validation within reach, a recognition may as easily be the illusion of one. Sebald’s text, in its living forms, confirms the pain of loss. Experience, recollection, witness, shared life and understanding all go as much unnoticed as noticed. Their transmission is made in their own dispersal. Yet what could be more self-evident? How selfevident, as well, the reality of forgetting, and the illusion that we grasp the content of what we see. At whatever cost, life is affirmed, it seems, and nothing is exempt from its illumination or its darkness.

VI Avez-vous observé que plus une œuvre est vraie plus elle a du style.37 Alberto Giacometti Have you noticed that the more a work is true the more it has style. Le monde des différences n’existant pas à la surface de la terre parmi tous les pays que notre perception uniformise.38 Marcel Proust For the world of differences does not exist on the surface of this earth in all the countries made uniform by our perception. Suspendu entre des formes abolies et des formes inconnues.39 Roland Barthes Suspended between forms that have been abolished and forms that are still unknown. Le lieu même, voire le style, d’un moment mélancolique.40 Georges Didi-Huberman The place, and in fact the style, of a melancholic moment.

What is the mysterious light cast by La Clairière (composition avec neuf figures) on itself and on its viewers? What sort of clearing is this? In the past, the world is only partially represented, it casts a partial shadow over understanding, 197

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or illuminates it partially. The moment of revelation is wrapped in the provisional, the temporal and the relative, its difference from what we thought in the past is partially formed. A community of artists emerges made in its own suspension, each a step away from others, and a step towards them and their vision of the past. Revelation is part trauma, part freedom. Perhaps this revelation forms a community of becoming, growing, a community of people able to embrace a knowledge which sees past the twin affirmations of self and loss. La Clairière is accompanied in some way by Giacometti’s La Forêt of the same year, 1950. If we put the two pieces and their titles in proximity with each other, experiences of place, of finding and losing in space and time, come into view again: simply, and rather comically this time too. The immediate

41. Alberto Giacometti, La Forêt, 1950. Bronze, 57 x 61 x 47.3 cm. AGD 487 1950, n° d’édition Fondation A. A. Giacometti 2007, fondeur Fonderie de Coubertin Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti 2007-0200 © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Collection Fondation Alberto & Annette Giacometti. 198

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impact of Giacometti’s style seems the same whichever one of the two we look at: slim figures indeterminately placed, each group inviting a passing glance of recognition or prolonged contemplation. Each group could equally well be associated with either a forest or a clearing. Each can suggest trees if we follow the titles, or a concentration of trees, or an opening in them, or several openings. But the titles do not indefinitely hold the attention, the anonymity of the style eludes the titles and paradoxically brings the pieces closer together, although each is titled in terms of different density and diffusion. The style draws viewers in, it seems, under its coating, making and remaking the nets of recognition flexible and flimsy enough to allow viewers to see with all the interruptions and hiatuses in which their own viewing consists. Once again differences come through. La Clairière consists of female figures and their plinths. La Forêt includes the bust of a male figure. Formal analogy occasioned by the positioning of the bust gives life to differences of gender. The male gaze sees the women only from the back, assuming his eye is directed at them at all. Moreover, as viewers we also see the man only partially. Seeing is once again directed at not seeing, at partial seeing, at not seeing how we see. Seen head-on the man’s stare might be fixed on the figures in front of him, but he might also be contemplating other figures beyond, or simply an inner vision. Looking from behind, viewers might sense the possibility of capturing that indeterminacy, that mobility of possible sightings; they might even sense community, recognize one intimately, subjectively. The anonymity of the style in which Giacometti casts his figures breeds a kind of familiarity, a renewed rather than repeated recognition. Renewed rather than repeated – is that a fine line to draw? Overconceptualized, perhaps? But a simple way too, perhaps, to describe the effect of Giacometti’s positioning of human forms in space. The process of becoming and disappearing of the male bust, on the one hand, and of the female figures on the other is not frozen at the same point of appearing or disappearing from view, and from memory. The group in the forest is not made of equivalent sightings; figures even in facing the same way stand, and look, from different heights. The forest is made from these different lines of looking, absorbed in those of the viewers as we in turn stand or walk. But the figures do not look at each other or at anything visible to viewers. Where the style reaches into the desire for cohesion, the viewing re-creates fracture. Each is made of the other. Each is lost on the other. Similarly, the originary difference of gender is seen, men and women are not looking at each other or cast in the same form, nor in the same dimension. Difference is neither clarified nor magnified but absorbed in the living, in the way it is seen, in the way of the seen. 199

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Once again, the blindness in which seeing is made is offered to viewers by Giacometti’s pieces in human form. Giacometti gives his viewers the simplicity of this philosophical understanding, which is also psychoanalytical and historical, though none of these exclusively; knowledge seems covered over rather than discovered in its present manifestations and forms. A feature of the exhibition L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti was not just to show photographs of the studio which Giacometti occupied from 1924, but also to emphasize the sense of each piece as a work in progress. Véronique Wiesinger comments that one of the aims of the exhibition was to show this constant re-working, which extends over the various media of Giacometti’s thought and practice: objects, graphic work, sculpture and writing.41 Movement towards is part of movement away. Sebald seems to share that intuition too – simple, devastating, life-enhancing. Where have these figures come from? Where has the style come from in which Giacometti casts his experience of coming into view, and slipping out of view? Max Ernst made numerous pictures called La Forêt or with that word in the title. If we imagine Giacometti showing something of his acknowledgement of these pictures, how should we imagine his understanding of that connection? Looking at his own La Forêt, or La Clairière, we have next to nothing to go on – only a title, a flimsy connection which suggests flimsy meaning. Nonetheless, something in the forms is reminscent, to me at least, of the forms of Ernst’s La Grande Forêt of 1927, or of La foresta imbalsamata, of 1933.42 Something from the work of one artist shows in the other: the surfaces look the same, rough and untouchable. And there is a sense in both too of always looking from one place, not another, here and not there. There is some pre-eminence of the surface, made in looking. There is also the verticality of the compostions and the way of seeing it shows. At the same time, the forms and shapes Ernst produces with the title La Forêt are themselves highly diverse, and the media involved equally so. Paradoxically, this diversity contributes to creating a recognizable image of Ernst’s work as a whole, which for the same reason fails to coalesce. Nonetheless, the title La Forêt attached to so many different pictures from 1926 to 1933 creates the basis of a theme. La Forêt of 1933 is one of the largest of the treatments in oil paint of this theme; it is preceded by La Forêt, La Clairière, Forêt et soleil and Forêt pétrifiée, La Forêt et la colombe, all of 1927; and La Forêt of 1928. There are many more. Moreover, this thematic net is overlaid with another, consisting of an interference in the titling. La Forêt acquires attributes – metonymically: ‘grande’, ‘la nuit’: ‘big’, ‘night’ – and metaphorically: ‘pétrifiée’, ‘la colombe’: ‘petrified’, ‘the dove’. The titles move along expected lines – a forest is often big and dark – and unexpected ones – the metaphoric links between a forest and a state of petrification, or a forest and the peace200

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symbolism of the dove, seem arbitrary. Moreover the state of petrification extends from geology and archeology and attaches itself to a city. The metaphorical tendril of petrification is extended but its meaning increasingly obscure, arbitrary, thin, lacking depth of meaning or focus. But a ludic freedom with making sense and with the forms of sense is offered to viewers as well. The visual forms of La Ville pétrifiée, 1935, share the immediate impact and style of La Grande Forêt, 1927, and La Forêt, 1928 – but they are displayed on their side: they have been upended, they appear in the horizontal dimension rather than the vertical one which dominates the pictures with the word forest in their titles, or related words. The field of visual representation has been brought up to the verbal one only to show an absence of intersection between the two, on which the mobility of their interaction also depends. Perhaps the bands in between the broadly horizontal lines of La Ville pétrifiée (1935) contain visual forms, indications of meaning which differ from the forest pictures: more abstract perhaps? Less distinct in the possible association of ideas they offer? Nonetheless, all three project a dominant reminiscence of the tactile, especially the tree-like, although associations of the steel materials used in building are also included. The intimations of the tactile in La Forêt (1928) come not only from the look of tree-tops against the light, and from the absence of light further down in a thick forest, but also the visual feel of the bark. The tactile forms of La Ville pétrifiée (1935) suggest the cavities in ageing wood, as well as rock. On the other hand, La Forêt pétrifiée (1927) indicates a network of tree-tops and tree trunks too, but the darkness of the forest density gives viewers little room for the identification of objects; only textures seem to be offered, and offered visually. There is an indication of a ladder, but its purpose is lost, or at least obscured by the metonymic contiguity of ladder and the idea of wood manifest in all these pictures. Formally as well, the ladder is submerged in the visual mnemonics of wood and trees as much as it stands out against them. Wooden objects – ladders and branches – are lost in the background of wood; wood is lost in a dominance of visually inspired texture. Background and foreground are visual notions: texture is displaced in the literal, implacable visual-ness of any painting. Ernst’s tantalizing play of surface and depth, which extends over his entire work and the diversity of its themes and media, flattens representation and its power to reveal our position, as viewers, in relation to objects, ideas and symbols. Ernst’s ubiquitous practice of frottage illuminates – implicity, darkly – his visual practice at large. Frottage simply refers to the child’s play or the adult’s hobby of placing a sheet of paper on the surface of an object and rubbing it with a pencil or some other utensil. The surface impression of the object underneath is transferred to the paper. The result is a visual impression 201

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of a set of tactile and material impressions. The large or small bumps and depressions in the surface of the object have been transformed into a surface which is looked at, rather than both looked at and touched; the conventions of displaying art prolong the prohibition of touch. Nonetheless, in responding to the loss of touch, in dealing explicitly in surfaces, Ernst engages directly with the ambition of visual art to see surfaces differently. Surface appearance is unchained from its source. The frottages in Ernst’s collection Histoires naturelles of 1925, as the title suggests, uses this way of making images to address the natural sciences and interfere in restrictive conceptions of cause and effect. The images in the volume suggest the discoveries of geology, botany and zoology, they propose a confusion of these boundaries and an explosion of linear and progressivist approaches to evolution. The complexity of natural evolution is shown to interact with the complexity of human evolution and human ways of understanding. In a page entitled Les Mœurs des feuilles, which means the social habits of leaves, a leaf standing on the end of its stem might look like an up-ended mouth. The leaf with the lines and fibres of lips is flanked by rubbings suggesting the surface of planks of wood. The leaf-lips leaning slightly to one side might then suggest not just a mouth, or a vagina, but a human body: a posture, relaxed and languid. So a human form appears in amongst the botanical, though each is still cast in the same tree-like visual texture, confirmed in the witty anthropomorphism of the title, Les Mœurs des feuilles. The same unsettling and unfixed intermingling is suggested in Giacometti’s La Forêt, populated by female figures in indeterminate and multiple spacings under the umbrella of a natural setting evoked by the title. Metaphoric analogy flatters to deceive, however, in trying to work out if there is any relation between Giacometti’s and Ernst’s forests. We need to know not whether people are looking at the same things or comparable ones, but whether they look in comparable ways. Seen frontally, head-on, Giacometti’s figures appear a little flat, despite being highly textured. Their surface is reminiscent of the paradoxically visual, textured surfaces of Ernst’s forest pictures, his pictures of the surfaces of wood or fossilized wood with a whole range of culturally, rather than purely botanically inspired titles. Dadaville of 1924 springs to mind, perhaps: a vertical row of planks is seen, perhaps in a garden wall, but they are made of plaster and cork. This confusion in material and meaning is compounded by a formal one. Plaster and cork stick out from the canvas to which they are applied in a whole range of micro indentations and protrusions in the surface of the picture. Perhaps visual reminiscence extends beyond one person’s visual memory and reaches out to that of others – perhaps not. Perhaps that possibility of reaching out rests on projection, the 202

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assimilation of another’s experience into one’s own – perhaps not. Looking at Giacometti’s two groups, La Forêt and La Clairière, we stand or move on equally uncertain ground, poised between community and appropriation. In giving his La Forêt that title, Giacometti invites and suspends comparison with Ernst. In suggesting a community of art and of artists, Giacometti suspends recognition of it; in that way, perhaps, he offers the opportunity to imagine a community able to self-renew without stifling other communities or its own past. He offers such an opportunity from where he stands, as an artist in a suspended community of artists, in his own cage part visible to himself, part invisible; in a set of frames part imposed on viewers, part projected by them. Even in only imagining Giacometti reaching out to Ernst’s forest pictures, the terms of that reaching out are barely there at all. Giacometti has not offered a return to a theme, or common symbolic motif such as sexual awakening. The flimsiness of the connection Giacometti indicates, if he does, between his work and Ernst’s, allows him to show the element of forgetting in remembering and recognizing. The reminiscence of Ernst’s pictures in the surface of Giacometti’s figures in La Clairière and La Forêt is a matter of texture: the sensations of texture prompted by a material surface which, just like the surfaces of Ernst’s frottages, is not touched but seen. In La Forêt this loss of the sensations of touch in the medium which conveys them extends to the de-location of the figures in the space in which they emerge. The dimension of depth withdraws, its part in locating things visually is suspended. Depth seems actually overtaken by the optical adjustments of which it is a part, which allow us to capture what we see and move on. Those adjustments are ubiquitous, made in the operations of perspective as well as synthesis. Can we be sure of what depth means to any one of us as we look, and at the same time, of how we take part in ideas of society riding on visibility and knowability? The distinction between flatness and depth is momentarily, indefinitely, suspended here. Ernst’s frottages translate indentations and protrusions onto a two-dimensional visual surface. Taking a step further, in his oil painting he imitates the effects of rubbing, reproduces those effects in paint. Brush strokes will not produce the effects of rubbing – in painting those effects must be imitated, even though rubbing itself may be used as part of a mixed media picture. The rubbing transforms the surface underneath, produces a new surface showing something else, a different object – a wooden panel, a leaf, a rock, an insect – leaving the surface underneath behind, replaced by the new configuration on top. For what does the viewer see other than what she is given to see? The freedom of seeing differently is produced at a cost of seeing how what we see has come into being. But these continuous interruptions are 203

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also responsive to seeing, now it is their turn to replace organized depth and the self-fulfilling prophecies of perspective. Ernst’s oil painting of 1934 entitled Nageur aveugle imitates in paint the look of the grain in a wooden plank, its curved lines and knots. There is room for nothing else in the frame of the picture, which excludes and dominates: height and breadth rule to the exclusion of depth. Knots and gnarls are flattened, there is no trace of a splinter, only the graceful, immobilized movement of the waves in the grain. Just like a plank in a yard is cut away from a tree felled in a forest any distance away, the painting showing the surface of the plank replaces the woodiness of that surface with another surface, a painted one which looks like wood but which is not wood. In the same way too, frottage produces an impression of woody texture by losing it, allowing the woody texture to look like something else on the new surface: an insect, a leaf, the reflections of the sun on the surface of water . . . To name or describe something shines a

42. Max Ernst, Nageur aveugle, effet d’attouchement, 1934. Oil on canvas. Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Private Collection. 204

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light on the distances involved, temporal as well as spatial. People can and do understand each other, Ernst seems to remind us, in the light of the way they understand each others’ positions. That understanding is also a projection onto others of anyone’s own position, here and now. Moments of understanding dissolve in their own present, in their own time, and the coming of the next one. This dissolution of the moment in its own passing is itself easy to understand: part anyone’s own point of view, part of being absorbed in life, assuming a place in life, in that familiar combination of spontaneous knowing and unknowing characteristic of lived experience. Synchronic and diachronic understanding are confused in one another all the time; just like the ego struggles with the loss of everything while accepting invasion by the demands of you. This dark light of confusion is made of both ease and restriction of movement, and it is spontaneously understood by each one of us, and in turn allows understanding. The freedom to grasp the diversity of understanding as well as enforced understanding emerges in Ernst’s confusion of the dimensions of seeing, which interrupts their adjusted separation and targeted, synthetic interaction. We do not need to see how we are used to seeing. At the same time, what we understand and the way we understand are cast in a habitual, mobile confusion of the shown and the lost, the visible and the covered up. Ernst displays this mobility in the dimensions of seeing and understanding in his visual drama of the surface – in his play of rubbing and rubbing out, of overlay, of layer upon layer of image and ways of meaning, each beckoning to far-flung or close companions. A thematic relation between Nageur aveugle and the other forest pictures seems to have disintegrated, the elements of similarity stretched far too thinly and diffusely across a range of metaphoric as well as material associations. But not quite. Something is being related to something. Frottage relies and rests on the source of its effects, its source surface, while at the same time dismissing it from view in offering the different configurations to recognize. In Nageur aveugle, there is no residue of a surface below, more a kind of floating proximity. Right up to its frame, it shows wavy lines which, if we follow the title, are reminiscent of water, or of travelling over water; still the image is flat and immobile. The title and image move into proximity only to be denied a meeting point. Still, the flat-image representation of the knots and gnarls in the grain of the wood might, if viewers choose to follow the title still further, suggest swimming across the surface of water. Perhaps the title in relation to the picture is less arbitrary than appears at first. But connection falters once again: there is no swimmer to support the association of wood prompted by the image, or of water prompted by the title. Symbolism collapses as well as metaphor. The blind swimmer is now the viewer. 205

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Surface solicits interpretation, association, possible lines of thought, ways of making sense. But they are tied to a practice of the surface, a chain of surfaces, a metonymic continuum of surfaces in which the paths of verbal association, and visual association, are interrupted in their very proximity with each other. Interrupted, but continually re-directed too. Ernst’s forest pictures-and-titles, taken as a whole, evoke not only the forest but the city; the night; water; petrification; an indeterminate greyness; an over-determined Porte Saint-Denis (the northern entry into central Paris); a dove – the peace dove? The paths linking titles to pictures, titles to titles over self-flattening and self-displacing pictorial surfaces – these signifying tendrils are not purely ludic or anarchic. An understanding is offered of the way understanding itself is made: in indefinite moments of synthesis and disintegration; in the possibility itself of relation, or its collapse; of community, or its collapse; of society or the pursuit of dominance, and destruction. There are so many types of organized understanding in play in Ernst’s visual vocabulary: optics; engineering; biology, botany, zoology; architecture, urbanism; physical and cultural anthropology; psychoanalysis; mythology. The range of concerns emanating, perhaps, from Giacometti’s pieces in human form is similarly diffuse and floating: concerns with optics; witness, history; style, the body; deflecting pain, inflicting pain; responsibility. But where is the relation between the two, if any? The flatness in which Ernst pictorially displays these forms of knowledge undermines attempts to distinguish them and establish priorities. ‘Il s’agit de ne pas laisser s’embroussailler, derrière nous, les chemins du désir’: ‘it is vital not to let the paths of desire get tangled up in the bushes behind us.’ As I discussed in Chapter 1, in L’Amour fou Breton returns to the experience of chance to implore everyone never to let the paths of desire become embroiled in the complexity of censorship and permissible fulfilment. Approaches to relation can be found, he argues, in which desire is fulfilled in an open-ended flash of lightning and illumination: ‘l’ombre et la proie sont fondues dans un éclair unique’ – ‘the shadow and its prey dissolve in a unique flash of lightning.’43 The fulfilment of desire is not anticipated, targeted or repeated, but continually reformed in the paths of its own unique generation. Desire hovers between the obscurity in which we cast it and the brightness with which we reach out for it. In Ernst’s pictures as well, darkness and light, above and below, depth and surface cannot be kept apart; but the distinction between them is not resolved either. The dynamism of their relation is one of indefinite suspension rather than renewed explosiveness, as it is for Breton. In Ernst’s art, relation repels as much as it attracts. In the interplay of creativity and censorship, censorship can be renewed as much 206

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as freedom, and new forms of censorship are created at every turn. Where is the intersection, the point of resolution, or the point of conflict, between what we know and see and what we do not? Metaphoric leaps from representations of forest to expressions of anxiety – The Age of Anxiety, 1928; or from forest to totem – Totem and Taboo, of 1941; or from forest to Europe – Europe after the Rain, of 1940–2; these leaps form a kind of transparent hermeneutic coating over Ernst’s pictures-and-titles: a surface tension which can be broken at any time. Formal and symbolic ways of reading the pictures are in a proximity to each other which is constantly changing, unresolved, but not free of restriction: they are bound together in a logic as obscure as it is apparent. Messages are not clarified in this tense relation, either in form or symbol. The true nature of an object will not be discovered, however closely observed; nor will our way of observing be revealed, nor the relation between the disciplinary or affective perspectives which we bring to bear. Passing moments of synthetic recognition capture, confuse and redirect the terms of recognition; but those given ways of recognizing are also confirmed, and beyond reach. Knowledge is institutionalized in banishing other ways of knowing, now totemized, awe-inspiring, terrifying. The titles of the forest pictures direct us to forests – in fact, to woody-looking surfaces, disembodied woody textures: a formal language. The titles also take us to cities, political ideas and taboos: a symbolic language. The common ground is the painted surface, but the formal and the symbolic do not meet there. Symbolism reaches past the bits of the material world from which a symbolic language is made. Ernst’s play of surfaces shows that displacement, that sense of the sources and the contexts of knowing wiped clean as new things appear, new surfaces to look at. His art of the surface shows understanding being formed, spontaneously, in its own suspension: poised between creativity and complacency. It offers images to viewers of their own ability to grasp their own thought hovering indeterminately, and terrifyingly, between mobility and conformism. Forêt grise of 1926, Forêt and La Grande forêt of 1927, Vision Induced by the Nocturnal Aspect of Porte St Denis, also of 1927, The Fragrant Forest of 1933 – all contain a version of one of Ernst’s visual leitmotifs: a simple light-yellow circle with a diameter of variable width. Widen the diameter still further and the circle is filled in, it is now a disc or the cross-section of a sphere; or a sphere itself in perspective. As a disc, the yellow circle also appears as the moon: Forêt, 1928; La Ville pétrifiée, 1935; La Ville entière, 1935–6. But the circle with a wide diameter also appears as the moon in Forêt grise of 1925. In this picture, additionally, the ironic subtitle of Nageur aveugle might come into play: effet d’attouchement. The subtitle alludes to frottage and the metonymic play of surface and supressed 207

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contiguity involved. In Forêt grise, that play facilitates the passages frozen on the surface of the picture from woody, botanical-looking surfaces to ornithological and zoological-looking ones. ‘Attouchement’, to touch up sexually, is different from ‘accouchement’, to give birth, only in the sound of a double consonant – but what will be given birth in this repeated absorption of touch in sight? The understanding of an idea and its generation, or the banishment of that understanding? Botanical and zoological elements are recognized in Forêt grise, without being understood, for the relation between them has been flattened. Transitions between the two have been immobilized, interrupted, and the relations which set meaning in motion have been suspended. Or is a meaning already in motion, ahead of, beside, underneath, above the very point of view in which it might become apparent to us, as viewers? Botanical and zoological allusion in Forêt grise may also involve the anthropological. Statues, masks, as well as human profiles may appear in the flatness of the fossil to which the style of the picture also alludes – which in fact it repeats and reincarnates. Unlike the temporality of the fossil, though, the temporality of the picture cannot be measured, flatness itself cannot be set aside from the depth it wipes from view; the relation between the two is eclipsed. Sense, it seems, is made in this unfettered but unstoppable interplay of proximity and substitution. Meaningful depth is cast in the brightness of its consumption, and the equally flat darkness of its incomprehension. The moon itself suggests light as well as darkness; it simply creates light in the dark. The light also symbolizes rationality, the sciences, thanks to which the moon is understood: astronomy; earth science, the cycle of the tides; the natural sciences: the cycles generally of life sustained and life destroyed. As well as symbolically, lightness and darkness can also be understood mythologically: the myths of the known and the unknown at large. These viewings of the moon are sustained in the pictures – sustained, but not resolved; the relations of sense are open-ended, but equally they do not appear at all. In its formal incarnations across this extended group of pictures, the different forms of the circle and the disc also appear in varying and equally unresolved relations to the other elements. Sometimes a circle– moon–circle appears in its entirety or near-entirety above the line of the tree-tops in the forest. Sometimes it might act as the backdrop to the trees – or the totems, or masked figures or masked hordes – as in La Grande Forêt of 1927. Sometimes part of this circle–moon–circle looms in the form of a distant arch over the symbolic density of the forest, which it ironically serves to flatten still further. Sometimes, as in La Forêt of 1928, it appears once again as an ordinary moon peeping through the thickets; but in the flattened wood-like environment of these pictures, the self-evident appearance of 208

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a moon is once again overtaken and overlain by the appearance of a hole in a plank. On the other hand, in La Forêt pétrifiée of 1935, the look of painted wood is transferred back up to the surface of a moon-disc in the sky. Disc-moon-wood appearing in flattened depth, as viewers look through; disc-moon-wood appearing vertically, as viewers look up and down. There is not only unresolved indeterminacy here. While remaining in incompatible visual dimensions, these alternative versions of the disc–moon–disc leads to the same outcome: de-location, produced in the efforts to locate. Viewers are offered in each case an image of an intersection which deprives them of the ability to locate their own point of view and identify their own vision. In the first oil-paint version of The Bride of the Wind of 1926, the circle-onthe-way-to-a-disc, or the disc-retracting-into-a-circle, is placed off to the side of a figuration combining human and equine anatomy; waiting, it might seem, to be dragged into the mobile/immobilized forest morphology of the forest

43. Max Ernst, La Grande Forêt, 1927. Oil on canvas, 114 x 146 cm. Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2013. Location: Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland. 209

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pictures to come. Indeed in the second version of The Bride of the Wind, the discs, now in the plural are integrated, like the singular one in La Forêt of 1928, in the main figuration, which is still not a forest, but visually whispers its anticipation of one. Once again the flat discs could equally and incompatibly signify holes, which might here lead in the direction of eye-sockets. Spatially – in the metonymies of form, and in the metaphors of association – the question arises repeatedly, and differently at each juncture: where? Suspended between enchantment and anxiety, the circle, the disc, offers freedom of interpretation, and any number of threads through the surface tension of the pictures, their visual beckoning to so many different disciplines and different ways of knowing. Equally, an understanding of the intellectual mobility we create in our own viewing is not offered to us. We cannot even characterize this viewing as ‘mobile’ with any certainty, given the restrictive repetition of the titles. But then again, similar forms also appear transported to different places under different titles and headings. The glory of metaphoric transformation and transcendence is captured in a cage without walls or depth. This is a cage of Ernst’s own making, and our own making as viewers. We share it, then, but without a common ground on which to share it. Such is the understanding, perhaps, Ernst offers of how we see. On a flat surface, what does a circle suggest, what does a disc suggest, other than itself? The circle invites thoughts of a centre shown on a flat surface, but also thoughts on representing depth. Filling in the circle might make it look like the representation of a sphere, but filling in the circle also suggests the immobility and flatness of a pictorial surface. Sphere, or disc? Does one suggest the other, or remove the other from view? The metonymic veneer of flatness and compression which seems to cover the pictures is not just an expression of the collapse of depth; nor an expression simply of mobility, and of every possible way of measuring depth in perspective; but an expression of the loss of perspective itself. Perhaps the circle suggests a targeting or a sighting device, like on a rifle, or a surveying implement? But each circle is on the way to being filled in, as though someone were putting a hand in front of the lens. Moreover, if the circle is imagined in retreat from the disc, its status as the representation of a lens remains compromised. In putting flatness on display, these pictures display the having-become flat of seeing. Indicating neither depth nor the collapse of depth, the flatness in which the pictures are styled indicates the collapse of the aspiration that surface and depth might work together to dominate the world and its viewing. Equally, the collapse of synthesis, the variable repulsion and proximity which characterizes the relation between the spatial dimensions and all 210

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the epistemological ones alluded to in the pictures, gives living form to the blindness in viewing to viewing itself. We see what we see and not what we do not. Les Hommes n’en sauront rien, of 1926, Men Shall Know Nothing of It, is the title of another of Ernst’s pictures. Though not part of the loose group of forest pictures, it shows a crescent moon, the tips of which are attached to the feet of a woman’s spread legs, the whole construction showing the wires of the invisible mythologies of sex and sight: mythologies unknown to men – the ones from within which they see blindly, the ones which are made unknown to them as they look. A frottage from 1925 is called She Guards her Secret. She guards it from men, apparently: the depressing male ideology seems to start up once again. But in the process itself of making this picture as a frottage, Ernst reminds that seeing projects its own secrets, encloses viewers in the unknown secrets of their own viewing. In L’Europe après la pluie of 1940–2, the rock-like figurations have lost the density which binds the wood-like ones together in La Forêt of 1933, for example. Geology, botany and ornithology once again combine with animal and human anatomy, as well as human culture, in Ernst’s visual vocabulary: combine, but do not coalesce, either in the picture as a whole or in its individual formations. Possibilities of metaphoric and metonymic movement appeal to and entrap one another once again. The expanses of sky in the picture create a dramatic impression of distance and space, but merely visible distance, nonetheless; the plain, lived and living inability to see other distances. The title of the picture is related to its forms only, but crucially, through the date. The actions of the Third Reich expose the inhumanity which arises so easily from the inability to be vigilant about how we relate ideas to each other and invent logic. Arbre solitaire et arbres conjugaux, also of 1940, although it shares the visual vocabulary and style of L’Europe après la pluie, differs in not showing any explicit pieces of the human form. There is a human-bird swinging from a gallows overtaken by plant life – dried algae? Or is it reptile skin? Nonetheless, formations suggesting plant life and coral life incompatibly rise with varying emphases on the vertical, which is the defining dimension of the human, walking upright on two legs. These formations suggest not only the upright human form but also the totems of human invention, of such varied and obscure significance. There is a very straight path shown as well, like the ones in an organized public park or garden. The absence of the human form shows only the inability of manmade light to illuminate human impulse, the creativity and aggression it brings together, obscurely, still unpredictably, but implacably. Perhaps those totem-like forms in Arbre solitaire et arbres conjugaux are in any case as much human as natural in the anthropology they project. And the mass to the left – rocks? the lichen on rocks? the shells of crustacia? – has two of the 211

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holes Ernst so consistently uses to show looking at, at the expense of looking through; now they look like eye-holes in a mask (quite an angry one, it seems). A tiny female figure emerges from it as well, looked at in a certain way; unless it is a further twist in the incompatibly animal and vegetable imaginary life of the picture. Patterns of seeing continue – unpredictably, but easily unnoticed. Looking repeats the masks of looking, the ones assumed in looking. The mask in the picture shows an epistemology of a viewing. It shows ways of recognizing all the compressed layers which suppress each other, as well as the relation of each to the others. Rock, lichen, coral, eyes, sky, human flesh, skeleton, slug – none is distinguished from the others or in relation to others. The straight lines of enlightenment and progress have been suspended. And in that suspension of perspective, those totem-like and human-like figures now appear simply as figures of different sizes, and not figures placed in relation to each other at all, in a constructed illusion of depth. There is still no pretension in the picture to escort that illusion from the visual stage. But as its grip on vision falters, the possibility of community hovers between emergence and collapse, and between solidarity and violence. Which is the solitary tree of the title, and which are the ones joined in marriage? Do the figures taken as whole approach or recede from each other? Either way, what violence or freedom from violence will emerge? If seeing is reconfigured repetitively, however surprisingly, in the compressed moments of seeing now, what can we know of our seeing or knowing? Another crescent moon, tiny this time, recedes from view in the ever-flat sky, or emerges; myths germinate again, or are repeated, or fade, along with our understanding as viewers of our part in creating them. This ballet of emergent or fragmented relation, of proximity and distance, is the one enacted in Giacometti’s own La Forêt, and La Clairière. Assumptions of depth collapse in viewing the groups as a whole, as well as in imagining the point of view of each figure separately. But the effort to find things is not interrupted, rather it produces interruptions in understanding the relation between things. Looking from here, not there, dissolves there in here; and it dissolves location in assimilation. The relation of here to there diminishes, diminishes still further, and further still, until it is a matter of compressed surfaces, each obliterating others in what each one shows, projects and hides. Is this a moment of awareness, or the lack of it? Such are the viewing spaces of Ernst’s forest pictures, taken together, taken singly. In Ernst, as in Giacometti, the compression of different sightings into a surface occurs in viewing things singly as well as in the relations between them. In La Forêt, and in La Clairière, the surface of figures in clay is altered, minimally suppressed in the bronze casting. Simply, materially, formally, we are looking 212

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at the disappearance of one surface in another. And what of the transition from looking at the surface materially, to seeing it as a style, one to which we respond associatively, symbolically, affectively? Form, affect: indistinguishable, as we look; indefinitely distanced from each other, as we look. The passages from one to the other are interrupted, indefinitely; relation itself is left hanging. Affectively, associatively, do the figures, individually, emerge from their materiality, their mortality, or are they being submerged? Are they drawn together under the regimen of the one place of your own viewing? Or are they drawn apart, each in her own space without place – one we know in the further interruptions of an analogy, indeterminately spatial, affective. Their spaces without place, each one singly, together, replicates the effects of our viewing from here, not there. Form, affect: what is the relation of the meaning of space to the meaning of community? Of cohesion to dislocation? Perhaps the conjugal is already absorbed in the solitary; or is the absorption going in the other direction? Which way unsupervised appropriation and violence; and which way unsupervised creative freedom? Immobilization, movement? War and peace? Seen from the front, the figures in Giacometti’s La Forêt are reminiscent of the forms and frozen textures of any of the pictures in the loose, indefinitely circumscribed group of Ernst’s forest pictures. This is not an intertextual relation made in particular allusions, apparent or hidden, to other works. It is more a testimony by Giacometti, made in making his own work, of the effects on him, evolving and disappearing over time, of Ernst’s way of making artforms. It is a silent witness, as silent as the germination itself of a style, anyone’s, made through that of others – silent: as much hidden as apparent. Imagine a surface beneath the surface of Nageur aveugle: it will be invisible and untouchable, it will have been lost in the visual surface of the pictures themselves. That is the message of frottage and of Ernst’s manifold references to it in his other practices. That invisible and untouchable texture emerges in the frontal appearance of Giacometti’s figures in La Forêt, equally unavailable to the sensations of touch in which they bathe viewers so powerfully – that loose community of viewers struck by Giacometti through his sculptures in human form. Similarity and comparability are dismantled, step by step: lost – or found? If the space of comparison is to be meaningful, it seems, its place and its placing must be allowed to pass. This formal loss of knowing in looking, and the open-ness to that loss offered by Giacometti forms, perhaps, the basis of a community made in generosity. I do not know what I am given to see; that is my offering to you. I see what I see, and know it shows what is lost to me, what is absorbed in my own seeing. I offer my un-seeing to you, and my loss of place in the space of my own seeing: a step towards humility and embrace. 213

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VII Être singulier pluriel 44 Jean-Luc Nancy Being singular plural

A photograph included in L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, taken in about 1950, shows Giacometti with the plaster model of La Forêt.45 There is a frankness and an honesty on his face, and an open-ness, something like the poetry of thought, and the confidence to accept it. Confronting from the depths of his feeling the relations imposed between people in lived moments, Giacometti offers his own art, made in partnership. This is not a partnership of outcomes, but of values; not respect for shared or different values, but of shared ways of arriving at them – a shared understanding of approach. Simply, Giacometti shows us, his viewers, that we need art, he and his viewers together. But he shows this only as an artist. The confident invitation Giacometti extends to his community of viewers is to respond, each one of us, in our own words and ways; appealing not to any authority, but to the experience and the understanding of each one of us, singly – together? Giacometti’s poetics allows what is given in his art to be responded to with a kind of literalness, a momentary selfevidence beyond any claim to permanence, an intimate, complex honesty of encounter which places artforms in the reach of anyone. That within-reach is left to each one of us, singly, to re-invent, with patience and vigilance. And the experience recorded in the photographs of exhibitions included in L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, and my own experience of that exhibition are moments of such ever-deflected, ever-renewed human interaction and mobility.46 In L’Europe après la pluie, in its forms and the processes of its creation, Ernst shows composition and decomposition on the way to each other, but never meeting. Architecture and civilization are in the closest proximity with geology and nature; and creativity with violence. Still they do not meet, and the distances between them might instantly enlarge, and seem insurmountable. This poetic not-knowing in knowing itself creates a disappearing platform, it seems, for reaching out to others, to a community, to the possibility of understanding. Giacometti has placed the figures in La Forêt at those distances from each other which defy, confirm and suspend the conditions of placing them, and of placing the viewer in relation to them. Reminiscent as they might be of the shapes and forms in Ernst’s forest pictures, those distances may also show the passages from not knowing to knowing, and back again: the effects of influence, 214

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of images and their power; the germination in anyone of a way of responding. A style, then: restricting us like an invisible skin, allowing us to move as well and breathe the culture of our time; individually, but as a community too. In what relation? Somewhere in those distances a space with no place might emerge where the blindness in seeing intersects with freedom of movement. In amongst his female figures Giacometti has placed the bust of a man. As I said earlier, figures and bust could not be more starkly distinguished. The figures form a group, it seems; the bust stands alone. If the figures seem whole, the bust shows only part of a man. The whole figures stand higher than the head of the bust, and must, surely, as a group, see differently from the head placed so much lower down. How strikingly his seeing appears – the way of his seeing, even in the interrupted projections through which they come to me. Your way of responding and mine will meet, perhaps, only in that each is unique to you, to me. The bust and its way of seeing withdraws, further – imposes, further. There is a passivity in the eyes, but it is hard to avert them. The neck is so narrow, it seems hardly to have the density to support the head. It waves stylistically, perhaps, to the death mask impaled on a rod in Tête sur tige: a desperate allusion, perhaps, but passive too – barely there, distilled; silenced. However, the shoulders which support the neck and then the head seem heavy, and alien: not to be moulded to an individual human character or identity. Perhaps the head emerges from the shoulders, although it barely affirms that ability. Perhaps the head is on the verge of collapsing down into the shoulders, and into the materiality common to everyone and to every way of feeling. Still, the head stands and looks. This absorption in the textures and grains come to an end; it is shown coming to an end. Mortality is shown in this head, for that reason it reaches out to viewers in moments of separation and boundary. The bumps and grains of the plaster are still further fictionalized and fossilized in the bronze. The bust itself calls a halt to the rest of the body – literally, but also formally: there is a wide line along the bottom of the plinth. Still the eyes seem to look, so long as viewers look at them. The bust as a whole emerges, rather than withdrawing or collapsing, so long as viewers look. As viewers we see emergence, even though we know we might be looking at collapse. This living, formal reminder matters only in demanding honesty from the viewer. Eyes and mouth together, differently each time, speak silently of watching a suffering beyond the speaking: one I will never know. They speak also of having seen the pain of others, the pain which marks a man, and which is absorbed in his grieving. Watching them, eyes and mouth speak silently together of pain. The whole shape seems silently to plead for the generosity it shows from a distance. But it is too far away, viewers cannot see it, it is not there. 215

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Sympathy, empathy – the whole paraphernalia of ‘love thy neighbour’ is not enough, as Freud shows, to take love beyond the love of the self.47 Perhaps nothing is; perhaps nothing beyond should be imagined. Look at the eyes, they show looking; look again, the inwardness of looking seems to grow, and to submerge the searching look of viewers. Still we look, without seeing. The gift offered in the eyes of Giacometti’s figure is to see the suffering of others without seeing it, for we cannot; to understand the suffering of others without capturing it, for we cannot; nor can we prevent or even notice the everyday passing of suffering from view and memory. See oblivion in seeing itself; but see oblivion suspended, perhaps, for a moment. La Forêt, of 1950, La Clairière, of 1950: attached, detached – simply, wittily, comprehensively. Both suggest the woods. Both are bound by, and emerge from the style Giacometti is forging in these post-war years – paradoxically recognizable but unique to itself. Both show a standing group of female figures, facing forward. But in both, the figures might equally be facing away, depending on where you or I stand, as a viewer. They invite touch, they withdraw from touch. Even the differences within each piece, as well as between them, draw them both together: they are as much together as they are apart. In each group, figures withdraw from each other; they stand in different places, marked by plinths and feet: plinths of different heights in La Clairière; in La Forêt, different stages of emergence or disappearance in the figures’ feet. The most visually dramatic difference? There is no bust of a male figure, no male viewer in La Clairière. In drawing the figures closer together, in drawing them apart, Giacometti engages with lived viewing in individually lived spaces. Part of that lived space of viewing is the silent and flimsy allusion to Ernst’s forests: there too elements in a compressed visual vocabulary are pushed up against others, or drawn apart, indeterminately. These allusions and others may themselves be noticed, may not be; they may be not be there at all. Looking at the distances between the figures, might we imagine the distances between the style Giacometti is forging and a Surrealist aesthetic? These would be distances, not conflicts, and in that light we might imagine, at one extreme, everything that separates one moment from another, and at the other, everything that separates the understanding of life before and after World War II. Are Giacometti’s figures attached or detached from each other, and from viewers? Perhaps these would be the attachments of indoctrination, and the detachments of learning. But perhaps these detachments are also those which develop passively as an effect of time simply passing, and of individuals having stepped unaware into another place and another time. Equally, perhaps, the spaces between the figures would then show attachments being 216

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invisibly re-forged. Attachment, detachment; awareness, unawareness – each is a step away from the other, and a step closer. Looking at these figures, individually, in a group, in two groups, in different moments – looking at them too in various photographs and through various discussions and the mnemonics created there: looking at these figures is always a step, a space, an interval, a pause, a hiatus, a flash and a lapse away from seeing them. The space of their standing is separated from .  .  . itself: from a context in which to see it and place it. A space without place, then. A space separated from itself, intransitively, but also simply. La Clairière does not have the bust of a man looking at pain, any pain, any suffering. In La Forêt, that bust is simply there, and the violence of gender difference could not be more implacably shown. The women stand, the head of the man is much closer to the ground: the lines of viewing might simply never meet. Still, viewers can see that non-meeting here: as viewers we can see the blindness seeping into each one of us, separating us. Although the bust has gone from La Clairière, we may still remember its eyes. In being that indeterminate step away from them we may be closer to understanding what we see in them there, in La Forêt – what we still might see there, or here, in La Clairière, each one of us separately, in Giacometti’s community of viewers. The purity of knowing another person, a new idea, able to surprise with its joy, or pathos, or the simply with the unknown: is that a nostalgic idea? Any such purity is contaminated in the imagining of it. But there is also a naked, unreachable but palpable optimism, untouched but passionate, in the paredaway figures of these two pieces, La Clairière, La Forêt. That optimism lies not so much in the figures themselves – where would that be? – but in the way Giacometti has invited viewers to see them. The male eyes in La Forêt observe with despair, perhaps, their own part in violence and gender violence; but the eyes cannot make out what they are given to see, or their part in making what they see, and the viewer is not given to see it either. The impulse to identify with what you see has been suspended, its grip has been loosened. Understanding is a matter of position. Viewers of the head in La Forêt see an unseeing seeing. They see their own seeing as well, they see that they cannot see anything in one look, or put it together, or synthesize what they have seen. The standing figures can be recognized as female; that identity is not only fractured but also created in the indefinite number of horizons, unseen perspectives and objects created in each one, in their different stages of emerging from their ground or being submerged in it. Viewers have their own part in that. Giacometti shows figures being made as much as pared away in the partial viewing of anyone within their own immediate or symbolic community. Our way of seeing is both visible and invisible, shown and not 217

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shown, both in La Forêt, with the head looking, and in La Clairière, where there is no head looking. What is hidden from our seeing is offered to us, in La Forêt, in La Clairière. In one, we see eyes that cannot see what they see; still we need to see that this blind seeing is our own. In the other, there is no single head or single pair of eyes to symbolize our way of seeing from here, and not there; we need still to learn our power to reach out to others from within the invisible frames of our own seeing. Beyond the pathos of its truncation, the bust in La Forêt is neither an incomplete form nor a complete one. Giacometti uses the bust, simply, to remind his viewers of the truth of any seeing and thinking: individuals make the objects of their own reflection and watch them dissolve into different ones. The tension this bust creates between surfaces, planes of viewing, stylistic allusions to other pieces in its community – all the tensions in the bust between contiguities, veils and transparencies are maintained in the relation between La Forêt and La Clairière. Whether we see a man seeing or not, and whether we see him complete or not, is part of our own seeing, as viewers. The pain we might see in the way Giacometti has fashioned this man’s head, the slope of his shoulders and his unborn arms; in his thereness and his farewells, we may discover what we are able to see, and what we are blind to: an intimate discovery, but one made with others too. The title La Clairière suggests a ray of light. Perhaps it is a clearing in the density of superimposed surfaces in Ernst’s pictures; and in the there-and-here, then-and-now drama of all seeing. But that ray of light does not appear. Nor does it shine in La Forêt. The relation of style to experience, form to content remains undisclosed. The seeing of our seeing, as viewers, the seeing of our witness, of our compassion, of our inhumanity, is given to us by Giacometti in what he gives us to see: a style; the spaces between figures, between figures and ourselves as viewers, spaces growing larger, diminishing, growing larger again, still unmeasured, their meaning nothing other than . . . there, never here. Signification is interrupted, no symbolism is offered, and certainly no transcendence; none is needed. We may see blindly; we may learn that humility. Perhaps that is our freedom.

VIII Je-t-aime 48 Roland Barthes I-love-you 218

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J’aime à toi 49 Luce Irigaray I love to you. L’attente, l’oubli 50 Maurice Blanchot Waiting, forgetting

There is no certainty on offer. Those who engage with the forms of Giacometti’s work are still left poised between creativity and alienation. In La Place of 1947, which was not exhibited in L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, Giacometti offers viewers another sort of frozen ballet: movement in sculpture is the allusion to movement, as Rodin had shown before. Sculpture offers an anticipation of gesture, also the fading of gesture, and of living human contact. ‘La place’, a square in a city – familiar to anyone, one might think. But would it be to a nomad as well? Or to someone who has never left poverty and the desert? Perhaps as urban viewers, if we are, we see only what we see; we are left poised in the midst of another by now familiar question: do these figures stride towards life or tremble in their own emaciation? Here, the grace of the figures seems to offer life. Even looking at a reproduction it is possible, perhaps, to imagine walking around the piece in lived time. The length of each walking figure will grow and shorten as anyone steps to and fro, and from side to side. As a viewer, your walking and mine, individually, will fall into step with the walking each one of us makes in the sculpture as we look at it. Still, what is offered to viewers are standing figures, immobile ones: bronze and not flesh. Brought tantalizingly close to seeing our own way of seeing, suddenly the question arises again: how is my seeing made? In love to you or in blindness to you? The walking figures stand, cast in bronze. The allusions to Egyptian art as well as the art of Rodin are immobilized too in the present moment of making, then casting, then viewing – the present moments of living. The female figure stands, does not walk; in bronze her immobility is also an allusion to movement. But viewers cannot reach out to that allusion, establish mobility in the tiny, febrile, fragile, still unstoppable and plain to see shifts in her lines as you might walk around. What is the nature of her restricted mobility? Is it the manner of the figure’s transformation into an emblem, a totem around which the male figures wander statically, blind to their own asphyxiating attachments? Or by looking away, and away from each other, do the male figures invite viewers 219

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44. Alberto Giacometti, La Place II, 1948–9. Bronze, 23 x 63.5 x 43.5 cm. Photo: Jens Ziehe.© 2013. Photo Scala, Florence/BPK, Bildagentur fuer Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin, Giacometti – © The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Museum Berggruen, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

to imagine an ability to reach out all the more – all the more intransitively, unguardedly, disinterestedly? And then, does the immobility of the female figure fall away as an illusion, after all, and reappear as the skin of her own unique movement? On the other hand, is quietism the only language left to her? Such questions and more are given by La Place. In the responsibility he takes for his forms, in his responsibility-in-form, Giacometti gives his viewers to wonder on the power to understand without imprisoning; to embrace and allow embrace to loosen; and to allow the entwinement of generosity and violence to collapse, for a moment, to be reconfigured, for a moment. Trois hommes qui marchent poses these questions of relation and projection, the affirmation of a place to live the imposition of one, and the ability to see the difference. In each of the two versions Giacometti made, one in 1947, the other in 1948, which I became involved with before, three men stride with ease, confidence and optimism. (See Figure 17, page 104.) They seem to walk away 220

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from each other, though, once again. Though, once again they also stand, they are cast, their suggestion of walking comes from their immobility. In the same way, they might equally suggest walking towards each other as walking away: are they about to change direction? Simply, as you might walk around the piece, the directions suggested by the way the figures stand do continuously change. The rhythm of this static ballet is constantly on the move in a partnership of a viewer’s own making. There is no magic; sculpture is static, just like a painting is: movement is made by the viewer, individually, and the movement you see will not be the one I do. As viewers, singly, together, will we learn mobility of thought and relation from the grace of the static figures Giacometti offers us here? In either of its incarnations, Trois hommes qui marchent stands in some proximity to La Place. That relation is formal, stylistic – metonymic rather than metaphoric. A platform on which to build a thematic or symbolic consistency, to do with the urban, solitude, or an existentialist attitude, does not appear. Significantly, Giacometti describes this relation between the two by beginning at the heart of one, Trois hommes qui marchent – are the figures looking at each other or not? What are they looking at? Ils se croisent, ils passent à côté, non? Sans se voir, sans se regarder. Ou alors ils tournent autour d’une femme. Une femme immobile et quatre hommes qui marchent plus ou moins par rapport à la femme.51 They’re walking past each other, or to the side, aren’t they? Without seeing each other, or looking at each other. Or otherwise they are walking around a woman. A motionless woman and four men walking more or less in relation to the woman.

‘Ou alors’ – ‘or otherwise’: quite easily, on the basis of how the figures look, Giacometti in conversation with Pierre Schneider is passing from one sculpture to another, Trois hommes qui marchent to La Place, which has the four men on show; or should I say made visible? In the displacements in which Giacometti styles his figures, the female figure is as visible in Trois hommes qui marchent, where she is not shown, as she is in La Place, where she is. In the same way, the male head and its unseeing eyes is there, not there, both in La Forêt and in La Clairière – in the relation between them. The invisibility of the male seer here or the female emblem there does not make them absent in either piece. The seer, the emblem – each continues to impress and constrain even while they do not appear, or while as viewers we may overlook them. Equally, in these unmeasured moments of forgetting, as viewers we may see differently. In Chapter 1 I wondered whether the shapes of Homme et femme 221

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of 1928 might transform from the shapes of enforced sexual violence to . . . not to anything else, a salvation; but trans-formed nonetheless into the shapes of a new moment, a new engagement with sexual difference, an emerging awareness. But where is a line to be drawn, stepped over or back again, between attachments passing, and attachments passing into further inhibition and entrenchment? That line does not appear. Somehow the responsibility-in-form through which Giacometti lives affective, gendered, cultural relation rests on that non-appearance. He offers no transcendence, but rather an ethic. There are any number of divergences and refractions along the border-line between seclusion and community where Giacometti places his figures: as viewers, how are we to position ourselves? Metaphoric categories and abstractions may only serve the tyranny of the point of view. And yet Giacometti does not seem to dismiss them – ‘they’re walking past each other, or to the side, aren’t they? Without seeing each other, or looking at each other.’ He describes three men walking as though at any time they become four, or more, or less. In the same way, they might show or not show the object of their fascination, or its fading, and they might also suggest, or not, any general concern ranging from urban solitude to man’s inhumanity to man. But the experience of engaging with Giacometti’s pieces, singly, or together, makes an intimate space, as well as its collapse – a space where we might observe the way we make sense of what we see. Attention drifts to how we see, and recognize, and away from purely what we see. His ethic is one of waiting – waiting for the adjustments of targeted perspectives and viewing to fall away, or to re-emerge with all their force. In inducing waiting from the experience of looking and of trying to see, Giacometti offers moments in which to understand the ways of attachment, of entrenchment, and of their passing – the displacement of attachments, their dispersal and oblivion. Poised in that way between knowing and not knowing, what it is we are looking at, how should we respond to the difference between the two versions of Trois hommes qui marchent? A model of progress or improvement from one to the other is not supported by either one of them; each beckons and dismisses the presence of the other from within itself. In one the platform supporting the three figures – none meeting, as we know, each perpetually on the way to a meeting – is flat. The platform in the other comes up slightly at each of the four corners. It is further supported by an imposing though not dominant block, from which the platform with the figures on top is separated by a further supporting column. The formal features which the eye can creep around in search for a response build up a mobile set of mediations in this version which offer seamless transition as well as implacable interruption. But 222

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will entrenched attitudes of violence, complacency or ignorance be shifted in this subtle process of response, or left intact? The block, the column and the platform are all in proportion with each other; I feel comfortable with the combination, aesthetically pleased, even free. And the colour of the bronze is indeterminate and changeable, volatile, receptive to the moment of viewing, to the light and shade of inner and outer vision. Geological colouring as well as the colour of flame seem to flicker associatively over the surface. As ever, Giacometti seems to plant his pieces in the moment of looking, and that range of associations is an indication of the living complexity of such moments – affective, intellectual and also cultural. But how is an engagement to be made between an artefact and a viewer? How might the wish for reciprocity reach beyond wish-fulfilment, beyond the illusion lived in the moment of a complete match of inner desire and the outer circumstance? Perhaps chance will help – the intransitive complexity of chance, its ability to escort complacency and narcissism from the stage. The block is not specifically urban in its associations, but nor does it exclude the urban. The associations and allusions embedded in it seem not to need any resolution in the conflict between them. Rather their generation seems to have slipped from view in the general anonymity of Giacometti’s style, each time different, and different in each of the two versions of Trois hommes qui marchent. Approaching them as well as La Place, viewers might almost be in the same position as the hands Giacometti has fashioned in L’Objet invisible (mains tenant le vide).52 As viewers, we seek to grasp the meaning of an object whose becoming, whose context of living, is now invisible. But this invisibility, this oblivion, is itself a living thing, it produces the terms, the unique light of viewers’ seeing now. To me, the block in the second version of Trois hommes qui marchent looks Oriental, reminiscent of a percussion instrument. That association emerges in the disapparance of others, and of its relation to others. It emerges by chance; it may not emerge at all. A homologous process might occur in the mind of another viewer trying to open herself out or himself out, rather than an analogous outcome being produced. Rather than a community made in coherence, agreement and global certainty, individual viewers might imagine a community of values emerging from the process of interpreting, of trying to make and receive. Poised as they seem to be between alienation and confidence, the figures in both versions of Trois hommes qui marchent may yet reach beyond the patterns of response they show and which seems to engulf them. But do they? ‘Sans se voir, sans se regarder. Ou alors ils tournent autour d’une femme’ – ‘without seeing each other, or looking at each other. Or otherwise they are walking around a woman’: the men walk blindly, then, without concern 223

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for each other, spontaneously following the dictates of their ideology and their psyche. The prospect of shifting damaging attitudes seems unrealized. And the male figures, standing now on nothing but their flat stage, and in the most provisional comparison with the other version, may show the incapacity of people to see other than in the light of their own space, the complex spaces of their own spontaneity. Still, walking around the version with the block in the MOMA in New York, the shadows the figures cast exuberantly on the floor give rise again to the joy of discovery. As viewers we see incapacity; also we see discovery. But there is no choice between the two on offer, no salvation, no hope of keeping diversity and immobility apart. Still, from within the status quo of our own making, and in that in-capacity to see beyond, Giacometti has allowed us, for a moment, to see differently: to see our own self-enclosure, differently – on the move, waiting for anyone to enter it, differently. The totemized female figure is not there, but human relation still waits for its own reinvention. The confidence of the three people and their walking, the grace of their stride and their balletic shadows allows us, as viewers in the process of such a thought, to experience life, movement, self and other free at last, for a moment, from the twin catastrophes of aggression and the many returns of the same.

IX Le pas au-delà 53 Maurice Blanchot (No) Step Beyond On a tendance à penser, et Diderot le pensait aussi, que la postérité, que l’avenir mettent toutes les œuvres d’art une fois pour toutes à leur place. Où? Quand? 54 Alberto Giacometti We have a tendency to believe, and Diderot thought so as well, that posterity, that the future puts works of art in their place, once and for all. Where? When?

Tentativeness, temporality, transience, vulnerability: all seem still to be important. Sameness, difference; anonymity, identity; giving and taking, receptiveness and defensiveness – how can the line be drawn without re-imposing the tyranny of the point of view? Each draws on the other, and provisionality gives form to that dynamic. Form itself, as in Ernst, shows the inseparability of seeing and not seeing, discovery and repression. For what do we see, as viewers, if not the forms 224

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in which things appear to us? Giacometti continues to wonder about that unseen generation of the way things appear, and our inability as viewers to stabilize spatially, affectively, symbolically, what we are looking at. Seeing, once again, is made of emergence and disappearance, sighting, re-sighting and oblivion, each in the others, each taking the place of the others. Figurine dans un boîte entre deux maisons of 1950, which I was drawn to earlier in this chapter, shows the last walking female character Giacometti made before separating his figures into male walking ones and female standing ones. This female figure walks; but the temptation is powerful still to see her secluded, isolated, out of reach: L’enfermement entre les maisons et les parois de verre rendent la femme inaccessible, comme dans une cage fermée.55 Confining her between houses and the glass walls makes the woman inaccessible, like in a closed cage.

Inattention to form, over-attention to the title and even to Giacometti’s own description of the blocks either side of the glass box as houses – all this inattention and over-attention limits the power of the piece to reach out. The boxes either side of the viewing space with the woman inside are houses only by the affirmation of a mimetic metaphor. They do not look like houses. Moreover the piece as a whole stands on legs, and is reminiscent of a piece of designer furniture as much as an urban scene. Perhaps the two are connected, giving us to wonder about the cultural history of, say, 1945–50. And the figure herself – out of reach, but to whom? Or what? The male gaze, perhaps? But why has Giacometti added plexiglass to the transparent walls of this particular cage, but to none of his others? Does it perhaps mark the illusion of transparency which comes to viewers in their own seeing? But still, the woman is seen to walk; our seeing allows mobility into the stillness of our own making. We cannot place her, she eludes our placing. Life, and her life, begins again. Such a thought is given to the viewer in his, in her own loss of the place in which to see. What can we understand of the projections in which our seeing is cast? As much as a piece of furniture, the piece is perhaps also reminiscent of a television set in the designs of the early 1950s; or perhaps Giacometti is simply imagining a television set as part of the contemporary cultural furniture. But this would be a television we can see straight through; or can we? Through to what? Where is the line drawn where we see past our own seeing? Let me imagine for a moment that what is offered on television, at any given time, can be described through Giacometti’s experience of a car showroom. Like 225

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Benjamin’s film-viewer, emerging in the wake of Freud’s psychopathology of everyday life, for Giacometti the visitor of a showroom is essentially distracted: D’ailleurs on ne sait pas très bien ce qu’on regarde [. . .] Telle voiture évoque le souvenir d’une traversée de Paris dans une voiture pareille avec un tel personnage à un tel moment précis du passé, avec tous les souvenirs que ce souvenir réveille, telle autre évoque un instant d’une promenade à la campagne il y a tant ou tant d’années. On regarde le plafond de la salle immense et on pense à la gare de l’Est, à la Tour Eiffel, à Zola.56 Moreover we don’t really know what we are looking at [. . .] Such and such a car calls to mind crossing Paris in the same car with a such and such a person at a particular moment in the past, along with all the other memories which that one arouses, and another car calls to mind a drive in the country however many years ago. You look at the ceiling of the vast show-room and think of the Gare de L’Est, the Eiffel Tower, or Zola.

This is a knowingly distracted, associative response, one without qualities other than a hyper-subjectivity common to anyone in any cultural moment, the features of which which may never become apparent. Cars and machines generally, as well as non-mechanical objects are all different from sculpture. In Giacometti’s account, responses to cars lurch from a vague experience of dispersal covering everything, to a flat, clearly placed, competitive vision of perfection and dominance: Mais la voiture, pas plus que les autres machines, pas plus que tous les objets prémécaniques, n’a rien à voir avec la sculpture. Tout objet doit être fini pour fonctionner ou pour servir. Plus il est fini, plus il est parfait, mieux il fonctionne et plus est beau. Un objet plus perfectionné détrône l’autre qui l’était moins. Aucune sculpture ne détrône jamais aucune autre.57 But the car no more than other machines, no more than any premechanical object, doesn’t have anything to do with sculpture. Any object needs to be finished to work or be useful. The more it’s finished, the more perfect it is, the better is works and the more beautiful it is. An object that’s more perfected dethrones the other that’s less. No sculpture ever dethrones any other.

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partial revelation, which they also reveal – partially: for the incomplete cannot be made whole. ‘Une sculpture n’est finie ni parfaite. La question ne se pose même pas’ – ‘A sculpture is neither finished nor perfect. The question doesn’t even arise.’ Now, as then, I see darkly; now, as then, I am partially known to you, to myself. That is the light of my understanding, Giacometti seems to say, which I extend to you. It cannot be accepted, for it is not whole. It has no place of its own, so it cannot be given or taken. Perhaps it remains as much mine, and dark, as it may become yours. Or perhaps between me and you there is only the disappearance, continuous and interrupted, of someone’s place in another’s. Une voiture, une machine cassée devient de la ferraille. Une sculpture chaldéenne cassée en quatre: cela donne quatre sculptures, et chaque partie vaut le tout et le tout comme chaque partie reste toujours virulent et actuel.58 A car, a broken machine becomes scrap. A Chaldean sculpture broken in four: that’s four sculptures, and every one is as good as the whole and the whole like all the parts is still virulent and present.

Giacometti may be thinking of any piece of Chaldean or Babylonian art, or simply the effect on him of any ancient ruin. There seems to be no analogy for Giacometti between spatial and temporal distance, they do not come together nor make anything whole. A fragment of a broken ancient pot may act like a complete work of art now, in the virulence of present living and acquisitiveness. Anything may be fractured or about to become whole, just as anything may appear small simply because it is far away. But in Giacometti’s domain, something far away may actually be small, or large; at the same time, anything small may certainly be small, but also just far away. Anything large may also be small, and simply appear large because it is close. Surely though, something is just small, or just large. Surely something is either broken or whole. But in relation to what? and to whom? The relation is incomplete, partial. Open? Perhaps, but enclosing too. Optical confusion thrives in the hysteria of perspective. Giacometti may reveal the acquisitiveness and fixatedness of the point of view in his attempts to abandon the optical adjustments on which it depends. But the virulence of our attachments remains invisible to us as we live them. ‘Où? Quand?’, ‘where? when?’ Giacometti writes of art from the past. Making space into a question, and time, and the relation between them, suspends the power of our attachments. It also reveals our partial understanding of them. In that not-knowing of attachments, beyond the appropriateness of perspective, beyond the pacts of intellect and the market economy, and beyond sentimentality 227

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too, there is love. There is the worked for and worked at tolerance offered by Giacometti’s approach to his viewers. Watching the television, wandering in car showrooms, in the present or in the bygone arcades of the appealing and the useful – as we wander distractedly in amongst our various likes and dislikes, spontaneously we accept that our bodies are different from each other and sense the complexity of flesh and sensation. In reaching out to another time from within our own time, to another place from within our own place, love may come to us in the unfinished interruptions of which our own time is made. Sculpture and the consumer durable walk the same stage, after all, for where is the line separating one viewing place from another? Between assimilation and revelation? The woman is walking in the street; or she is walking in a television image, one we can see through – but through to where? In that space with no place of our attachments, the spaces of sculpture and art, love may come to us even from within our inability to see any place other than our own. In the blindness Giacometti has discovered in seeing, the catastrophic separations of mind and body are at once exposed and averted. Like Homme qui marche II, whose enclosure is gloriously, for a moment, invisible, the woman wrapped invisibly in the transparent box of her time is shown walking with confidence, blindness and love in a direction which may at any time become our own.

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Epilogue: The More You, The More Anyone Plus je travaille, plus je vois autrement, c’est-à-dire tout grandit jour par jour, au fond, cela devient de plus en plus inconnu, de plus en plus beau. Plus je m’approche, plus cela grandit, plus cela s’éloigne . . .1 Alberto Giacometti The more I work, the more I see differently, in other words everything is getting bigger day by day, essentially more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I am, the bigger it gets, and the further away . . . Aint nothing too discreet Bout the disease of conceit.2 Bob Dylan

Just now there was a suggestion of love. But there is also alienation and violence. Optically, a point of view is made in pushing out the others. Affectively, culturally, historically, spontaneously, intimately, publically, in remembering and forgetting, my understanding of you and others still appears to me in my own way of seeing, and in my own blindness. ‘Plus c’est vous, plus vous devenez n’importe qui’, Giacometti counters, to himself and his viewers.3 ‘The more you, the more anyone.’ But what sort of meeting with others will be achieved by being oneself, and assuming one’s self to the utmost? Where is the point where an offering can be accepted? In his interview with André Parinaud, Giacometti recalls his time in the inter-war years working for the interior decorator Jean-Michel Franck making attractive everyday objects.4 Even though he devotes the same energy to making vases as to making sculptures, and perhaps carries the same associations of antiquity in his eye and hands, still he finds he is making objects rather than sculptures. The work is predictable, without mystery, without the creativity needed to discover that his own understanding of the world as he sees it escapes him. He tells us he came once again to the understanding of what there is still to understand on the back of forgetting that it had come to him once before. He tells us that having forgotten that he had already abandoned trying to depict things from the natural world – 1925 is the date he gives here 229

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of that forgotten crossroads – he started working from a model again, the same one from 1935 to1940; each day he began again trying to capture his visual understanding of a human head. In this deft account of a development made in obliterating the steps involved, and of a history made in stages of oblivion, Giacometti gives narrative shape to the living dimensions of seeing, the stations of the point of view, the relation itself between people. From the way the human form eludes our own seeing of it, what can we learn of our capacity to understand others, receive their point of view, witness its distances from our own, even as we mistake relation for absorption? Tête sur tige, its starkness: head impaled on a stick; the there-ness of suffering, ever-present, whether in this moment or another; whether mine, or yours; suffering I have witnessed or suffering you have, or neither of us has; suffering undeniably there, but not there either. The there-ness of Tête sur tige confirms mourning, and our witness to our own mourning: those we miss, those we honour and those we loved are not of our time, they cannot hear our mourning, we confirm their loss even in our grieving, we cannot bear witness, or only to our own loss. This is a living loss, there can be no other, it is made in taking over the voices of the dead. The rod impales the head, and nails the suffering of others to the spot, our spot: our place of seeing, invisible to us, without the dimensions in which we might discover it. The cubes of Giacometti’s creation, see-through boxes to put things in, might as well not be there as there. Four uprights or one, or none: each viewing-stage shows the invisibility of our own way of seeing, each one of us. Seeing is made, Giacometti shows, in the displacement of others’ seeing; seeing the place of others is part of the mobile and partial seeing which is our own: each of us, individually. Is that alone-ness among others enough to help us reach out to others? ‘Plus c’est vous, plus vous devenez n’importe qui’ – ‘the more you, the more anyone.’ Perhaps in an increasing understanding of what is still there for anyone individually to see, there is a place, a place without the shared spaces of empathy, comparison or endorsement, to imagine tolerance. But that place of tolerance, and of a cultural ethics, might lose the enclosure only to be absorbed again in the appeal of the moment. Fashion? Design? Decorative art? Such are the associations that come to my own mind in looking at the various versions and castings over time of Tête sur tige. The block in which the rod is planted – rough, instrumentally violent, formally showing its impenetrability to the eye, to memory, you will not know how this has come about, or where or when, or what the stains are, or why there are none after all . . . – the block gives way to a series of stepped plinths or daises of various shapes and sizes, loudly emphasizing their conventional function, which is to pass unnoticed and to display the object on top, the exclusive object of 230

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interest. Uniqueness, as ever, gives way to ways of seeing it, and from there to variations on a theme. ‘Plus c’est vous, plus vous devenez n’importe qui’ – ‘the more you, the more anyone’: so Giacometti had wished, but repeating without replicating can easily become a method. Thinking of Giacometti, the more his style is his own, the more it seems to make a platform from which to reach out to others – to your own and my own sense of living and thinking in a style, one that is naturally our own. But my sense of ease in a style of living and responding, which might even cleanse me of the impulse to compare, can just as easily be given over to a style of recognition belonging to anyone at all. Tête sur tige is made of its own dispersal too, its uncharted but implacable passage into an emblem. Sometimes we need nothing other than simply to enjoy the look of something. This is the message offered by the figure in the glass walls of her television set, the Figurine dans un boîte entre deux maisons. We see what we see and not what we do not, there is no redemption. Each of us assumes like an invisible skin the enclosures of our own present viewing, in which our own past is indefinitely absorbed: all the events that have demeaned us, overjoyed us, and made us. Something has happened to Tête sur tige: it has simply been consumed. The work holds no more terror; perhaps that is its destiny, one which Giacometti has been able to show. It is no less authentic for that. I grieve only for loss I know; I know only my own joy. La Cage of 1949–50 can show the situation of being caged moving in any number of directions, into and out of any number of dimensions. The angel, as I have called her, though only with Benjamin and with Nooteboom, waves to anything outside her transparent cage, she makes her cage into a stage pleading for notice, for uniqueness. But from her stage others may also be insouciantly waved in, figures in other sculptures, other incarnations of herself, of her society and her viewers; or other families entirely of association and experience. Comparison seeps in, invades, and having invaded, interrupts, secludes and invisibly encloses: the curtain rises again, and the next . . . Revelation is unending and incomplete. Along with David Sylvester, you might say the contours of Giacometti’s sculptures in human form seem loose, unstable, unfixed; but the relations between them are even more so. Each piece impresses with its own uniqueness; recognition is re-born, it seems, in the viewing of each one. But in that bit of time, the perception of a style has also begun; the contours of a moment of viewing spill over to others. Mobility of thought sets off recognition, sets off oblivion too. In the way I have made the comparative spaces of this book, I have tried to create a critical form for this process of knowing, of understanding in forgetting. Seeing is to push other seeing out, and in that way to begin the process of seeing. In my own efforts to reach out to Giacometti’s pieces, in 231

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responding to my own understanding of their invitations to reach out, I have discovered interruption and suspension – always; but in that always, there is beginning – the beginning of an understanding of what is lost in catching sight of something, and not something else. Max Ferber’s studio in Sebald’s story might be a reincarnation of Giacometti’s studio, it might not. Giacometti’s Le Chariot might wave into view the Charioteer of Delphi, or the quadriga on top of the Brandenburg Gate, or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; or it might not. That uncertainty is not only a sign of art and of Giacometti’s art, but of the critical, self-challenging humility of artworks and texts. Art, and Giacometti’s art, turns towards – or away from? – the finite, cultural and psychic dimensions without contours of the point of view. From within the aura of the question where? and the collapsing ability to locate and remember, Giacometti invites relation with others, invites community. In 1950 Giacometti made the further version of La Cage. The angel’s hands are by her sides, anticipating Giacometti’s later female figures to come, the Femmes de Venise among so many others, standing as a group in the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vance. There is a photograph showing Giacometti standing next to them with his companion Annette, perhaps he is about to move one of them. Perhaps he is reminiscent there of the bust of a man among women in La Forêt; or of the man who looks in the second version of La Cage – so different from the one I wrote about to begin with. The woman stands with her arms beside her, her arms have been incorporated in her body, they no longer reach out, we can now only guess at them, at the shape of her head too, or her hair, all outline and contour streamlined – gracefully streamlined, perhaps, as the eye follows the line up and over and around; but threateningly too. As the woman disappears in her own streamlined or purified style, and into the terms of her own recognition, the man looking – and looking at her, this time – has grown. The two figures – one whole, one a bust – have just about the same height now. Not quite; still the two do not meet. But the seer and the seen have assumed, or they begin to assume, the same dimension, and the long line of his neck echoes, anticipates, but also confirms the line of her body. And finally the whole symphony of sameness now extends to the bars of the cage and down along the uprights supporting it. There is no escape, it seems, from the emerging dominance of the point of view: in that emergence, the seer is himself submerged in the terms of his viewing. Such is our situation as viewers. Our recognition spills over everything, taking everything in its stride. Perhaps both versions of La Cage encage the figures of La Forêt: one woman from the group, and the seeing male head. But whether that seeing head is there or not there, and whether or not the cage is there, who will chart the moving waters of recognition? Of blindness growing in the familiar? 232

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45. Alberto Giacometti, Femmes de Venise, 1963 or 1964. Photo: Archives Galerie Maeght, Paris (France). © Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris, 2013, licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence.

All the elements of La Cage share their destiny with Tête sur tige. The special pursuit of awareness they offer – of the invisible cages and dense transparencies of our own seeing – will always have been consumed at some time. Vulnerable to comparison, and subsumed in it, Giacometti’s cages are transformed into platforms, moments of distinct awareness which are also dissolved in communal and shared understanding, like a film over the eye, and like an ideology spontaneously accepted. Irony cannot remove this film, nor can it be removed from any point elsewhere. Just as Tête sur tige passes into an emblem, perhaps, so the angel of the earlier La Cage, made of plaster and wire, has found its way from a chandelier that Giacometti designed, and no traces are left of its route back and forth.5 There Giacometti has allowed her immobile ballet both to withdraw from and extend towards other members of his visual vocabulary, including the figure in her television set. The anxiety about relation, about comparison, about whether or not to place things and people together, to think them together at all, can always be overtaken, it seems, 233

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in the easy pick’n’mix pleasures of any one cultural moment: moments of window-shopping for appealing objects, ones we sense will acquire sentimental meaning for us over time. The time of writing this book has been characterized by a sustained discussion about the purpose of art and especially of studying it. Discussion of purpose has been steered towards the generation of wealth, and practitioners have sought to respond defensively or critically or both. The study of art has been bracketed with the idea of study for its own sake and made suspect: study should be focused on training and the needs of businesses. As I write we in the UK have also been told that such training needs to begin ever earlier within the school age range, in a kind of ‘earlier for earlier’s sake’ mentality which abdicates from the thought that the young as well as the old need to find their own ways of avoiding the mistakes which only they can make, as well as those landed on them by their elders. Such an approach abdicates too from the thought that training without training in awareness demolishes all the platforms of creativity. Giacometti comments that a special and perhaps rather perverted mentality is needed to persevere with trying to account for the ways an object or a person is actually seen, perceived and understood; and an oddly tangential mentality. In the time of writing this book, of the wars and individual acts of brutality integral to our way of living, and even in writing this sentence which distracts me from that violence, such a mentality, such an approach to a truth that escapes any one of us individually, appears to be suffering its own twilight. Giacometti, from within his own time, shows that too. Yet the process is by no means irreversible – how could it be? Now or at any other time. The relation of the chandelier to the cage is not resolved. Lustre, the cage-chandelier, is stylistically trapped between the decorative and the decomposing. Individual figures are neither alone nor placed together, exclusively; Giacometti’s hesitation about whether to place figures together or not is unending. In the dissolving spaces occupied by each of his figures, a figure standing on its own may suggest waiting for others, perhaps seeing them, perhaps remembering them. And larger groups may be imagined diminishing, imagined losing communal identity as much as being immersed in it. That continuous suspension might remind us, as viewers, of blindness in seeing; but also of an understanding about to begin, in blindness. In the suspension of place Giacometti discovers in fashioning his figures, he offers spaces for the unresolved drama of community and assimilation; of engagement with others and their exploitation; of the hand of friendship and peace turning into invisible indoctrination. As viewers we take steps further towards knowing what we are looking at, take steps further away; the step in each direction is part of the other, partially revealed in the other. Our difference from each 234

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other, individually and culturally, is enacted in this unresolved relation of the alienating and the recognized. In that relation, an ability to understand takes shape. Giacometti exposes the attachments of anyone carried in anyone’s point of view, attachments to the way things simply look and feel, and to the way events appear. He points towards the imperative, the ability beyond the choosing, to see others ethically, without losing sight of our own blindness to our own way of seeing. It never ceases to surprise me how much poetry there is in the world. Leaving aside the everyday occurrences and gestures of life, appeals to the imagination are generated by the industries of art seemingly without end or boundary: literature, music and film streaming, spaces and venues of all kinds drawing attention to performances of other people there. An equal accumulation of understanding and misunderstanding occurs, which Giacometti addresses in calling a ‘farce’ the way his figures are received and bought by art lovers, who see them as part of the modernist project aimed at presenting the world differently, rather than as it is actually seen by Giacometti himself.6 Recognition is partial, once again – affective, incomplete. The unknown, the out of reach can illuminate the present, brightly or darkly, at any time. In any moment of looking we may discover new sightings. But the farce of arbitrary appeal and consumer enjoyment is part of that illumination too. Giacometti’s knowingin-the-partial makes lines which never stay the same between otherness and separateness, being alone and being together, the unique and the consumed. We see masks and through masks. At the end of Mother Courage and her Children, Mother Courage sings that we all live to buy and sell. Brecht may assert that the only way to come to terms with the complacent inhumanity of the markets is to ignore their webs of depth, complexity and subtlety. He famously turns the stage inside out and invites his spectators to watch themselves watching. As spectators, we may see something more of the identifications we make as we enjoy the songs, and see something of the mechanisms prompting us to recognize what is put before us. On the other hand, we may also sense critical resistance dissolving into sympathy as the mother survivor turns into mother collaborator, or the priest into the lover, and as the children are eaten up by the vested interests of war. Ever further as spectators we may step back. But as distance supersedes distance the illusion of distance is reaffirmed – the illusion that we know our distances and our way of measuring of them. Yet any understanding always brings us closer to something, or so we might sense. Ever new configurations arise of closeness and distance. In the spectacle of Mother Courage, the illusion comes to life again, bright and energetic, flexible as skin, that we can detach 235

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ourselves from the attachments which press our responses into shape and service. Step closer, in space or in the mind, step further away: the affirmation of a step offers something that can barely be known at all, so natural has it become. There is no stepping away either. Perhaps Giacometti’s message of distance and closeness, each lost in the other, substituting itself for the other, producing the other, absorbing the other – perhaps that message is too bleak. Perhaps his belief in new life, re-birth, new seeing and new knowing arising from the ever-present where? is itself merely a passive affirmation of enclosure, and the failure to begin anything. But the irony of the ever-further step back, the step ever-closer too, shows the way to the lyricism of individual living, suffering, loving and knowing coming from your voice in the dark: yours and not mine. In writing about it and stopping, in showing and failing to show, Giacometti’s art has allowed him, in his hand and eye and from the voiceless intimacy of himself, to tell untold stories of the distances between each one of us. Even when something is touched, touch itself comes over as a mask: not just a projection, but a sense of enclosure. The more enclosing they are, the more our own cages and others’ begin to move. Their mobility comes from elsewhere, a space and a time not our own. Still, that mobility is transported into a closeness, the intimacy which makes my own understanding: of distance; of you and me apart in a time we know we can share. In the flat surface given to the portrait artist, in working away at the conditions of his art, failing to understand his place in art, Giacometti discovers the flatness of the Byzantine icon, and rediscovers the struggle he senses there to step out of flatness, to stand somewhere in front of it.7 Formally, in showing without showing, in refusing to show, refusing to step out, in showing there is nowhere to step, in still stepping towards you, and me, singly, Giacometti rediscovers the mission of any one of us wanting to know: humility. Time runs up to him and propels him back. The flatness of the portrait is not the flatness of the sculpture. Still flatness runs up to him, envelops me in the question, where is the place for hands and bodies and voices to touch? In an astonishing open page in L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, there is a photograph of Giacometti working away at the plaster Homme assis [Lotar III].8 Nothing could be more clear: he cannot see his face as he works; is it only a moment of my own projection, or does his face seem to show him willing himself into the one he is making; and into the space of an understanding, the space of what he sees, the space of looking and reaching out? The pressures of money and war weigh down on him as on anyone. And you will have better words for the weight I mean and see here. I wish I had words now for what was being told to me as I saw Homme assis [Lotar III]. I am not there now, like anyone I have 236

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epilogue: the more you, the more anyone 46. Alberto Giacometti, Homme assis [Lotar III], 1965. Bronze, 65.7 x 28.5 x 36 cm. Edition 1/8 Cast 1969, Susse Fondeur. Collection Fondation Giacometti, Paris, inv. 19940081 (AGD 971) © Alberto Giacometti Estate/Licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, 2013/The Bridgeman Art Library. Location: Collection Fondation Giacometti, Paris.

had to transform myself, let myself be transformed into something else, over time, just to get by, but I can feel now as then something offered me, a material thing humanly looking out at me. Wouldn’t you be better off just looking for yourself? But I have been propelled, stopping and starting, to respond to Giacometti myself, knowing I can’t but feeling I can. Since I cannot resolve the tensions which I have come across, I have resorted, it seems, to trying to perform them. My efforts at comparison, in some sense so infantile, to make things the same, to make them be like each other, to have people like each other, together again – these efforts have also been an attempt to learn and re-learn that the reign of Narcissus, of deafness and violence, is mine alone to learn and unlearn. ‘Plus c’est vous, plus vous devenez n’importe qui’; the more I try, the more I can try again in my life out there. Disappear and begin again. Giacometti has hacked 237

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away at the plaster version of Homme assis with a pen-knife. What better marks of civilization than to offer marks of violence rather than actually to hurt us? A pen-knife, hacking away; the structure of the skeleton appears, like a cross, the man is criss-crossed with the symbolism of the cross, it is embedded on him, it emerges from him, he cannot see it, no-one can see their own face as they live, will we ever be free of the need to be saved? Still he cannot see what is on him; neither can I for sure, I have imposed my comparison, I could do that any time again, unaware. Giacometti lives those impositions on his figures, as he does upon himself as well, and as anyone does. Suffering and humiliation of kinds that reach well beyond my own knowing are criss-crossed all over this figure. One of his eyes is slit; not even both of them. Trapped in masks, in untold models and distances, Giacometti together with anyone tries to honour life. And to honour the crouching man he has made, what answer is there to the question, where is he? Crouching, he has the shape and the profile of the massive feet of so many of his women standing separately, or together. Crouching, he has the dimension of the busts, the men shown waiting, in the middle of being born. The women wait to be born too, each in their own dimension of aloneness, of shortness or elongation, waiting for them to meet. The lost wait to meet. They do meet. Maybe they don’t. With his fingers and a knife, however did Giacometti make that expression? The question where?, where are you?, now appears as the question what good am I? And yet the man does seem to hear, to have heard soft weeping and distant cries: he seems to have heard, and to have seen, and to know his own forgetting. Each one of us moves on the invisible stage of our forgetting, each one different. We will have to imagine Giacometti silently hacking away. He has made someone looking, cleansed of conceit, wondering about conceit, giving his viewers to wonder about the conceit of the point of view, which flattens each one of us, our sense of others, our sense of self. And still Giacometti has made his crouching man look, reach out; and he has made us, his viewers, re-discover the desire to reach out. Giacometti has us reach out; in a moment of beginning, suspended: on the shattered cusp of beginning and disappearing – beginning. And the bronze freezes it all insouciantly: we will have to start again, on our own. Giacometti has made the image of a face and of a man watching society supplanted by catastrophe; the last chance to hear has slipped away; and still he tries to begin again; and to reach.

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Notes

Prologue 1 Alberto Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Pierre Dumayet’, in Écrits, presented by Michel Leiris and Jacques Dupin, prepared by Mary Lisa Palmer and François Chaussende (Paris: Hermann, 1990), p. 283. Unless otherwise stated, all translations from the French in this book are my own. 2 Georges Didi-Huberman, Le Cube et le visage: autour d’une sculpture d’Alberto Giacometti (Paris: Éditions Macula, 1993), pp. 153–68; Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968), pp. 8–14. 3 Roland Barthes, S/Z, (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970), translated by Richard Miller, with a preface by Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). 4 Giacometti, ‘Mai 1920’, in Écrits, pp. 71–3. 5 Giacometti, Écrits, pp. 202–5. 6 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Georges Charbonnier’, in Écrits, p. 244. 7 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec David Sylvester’, in Écrits, p. 287 8 Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Face des têtes mortes’, in Didi-Huberman, Le Cube et le visage. 9 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec André Parinaud’, in Écrits, p. 277. See also Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Pierre Schneider’, in Écrits, p. 264, where Giacometti recounts the same kind of experience and says once again that 1945 was the turning point. 10 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec André Parinaud’, p. 269. 11 Ibid., p. 276. 12 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Pierre Schneider’, p. 266. 13 Giacometti, Écrits, p. 117. See Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Pierre Schneider’, p. 264, and ‘Entretien avec André Parinaud’, pp. 271–2, where Giacometti talks of his failed attempts in 1925 to capture reality as he saw it, and his renewed attempts to do so, starting in 1935, omitting that he had abandoned once before the project of creating representations of life-size and living dimensions. 14 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Pierre Dumayet’, p. 283. 15 Ibid., p. 282. 239

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16 ‘Sans penser que toutes les sculptures du passé qui me touchaient étaient, comme par hasard, des sculptures de cette dimension! [.  .  .] enfin, plutôt minuscules [. . .] (en tous cas, toutes sculptures qui n’étaient pas rattachées à une architecture ou un endroit précis)’: ‘Leaving aside that all the sculptures from the past that I was touched by as though by chance all had that same dimension! [. . .] or rather minuscule, at least [. . .] (in any case, all sculptures that weren’t attached to a piece of architecture or a particular place)’, Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Georges Charbonnier’, p. 243. 17 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Pierre Schneider’, p. 268. 18 ‘Je ne puis parler qu’indirectement de mes sculptures’, in Giacometti, Écrits, p. 17. 19 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Georges Charbonnier’, p. 249. 20 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘La Recherche de l’absolu’, in Situations III (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 302. 21 Ibid., p. 289. 22 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec André Parinaud’, p. 275. 23 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec David Sylvester’, p. 291. 24 ‘Giacometti a choisi de sculpter l’apparence située et il s’est révélé que par elle on atteignait à l’absolu. Chacune [de ces figures] découvre l’homme tel qu’on le voit, tel qu’il est pour d’autres hommes, tel qu’il surgit dans un milieu interhumain, [. . .] à distance d’homme; chacune nous livre cette vérité que l’homme [. . .] est l’être dont l’essence est d’exister pour autrui’: ‘Giacometti has chosen to sculpt situated appearance, and it emerged that through situated appearance the absolute is reached. Each one [of his figures] unveils man as he is seen, as he is for other men, as he erupts into an interhuman environment, [. . .] in the distances of man; each one delivers this truth that man [. . .] is the being whose essence is to exist for others’, Sartre, ‘La Recherche de l’absolu’, p. 302. 25 David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), p. 45. 26 Michael Peppiatt, Alberto Giacometti in Postwar Paris (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, in association with the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, 2001), p. 68. See also Chapter 7 of this book. 27 Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, pp. 45–7. Sylvester is making a reference to Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy ‘As If’: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, translated by C K Ogden (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner; New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1924 [1911]). 28 See Chapters 1 and 7. 29 Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, pp. 45–6. 30 Didi-Huberman, Le Cube et le visage, p. 152. 31 Ibid., pp. 25–6. Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: biographie d’une œuvre (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), p. 243. 32 Didi-Huberman, Le Cube et le visage, p. 44. 33 Ibid., p. 64. 34 Ibid., p. 66. 240

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35 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Pierre Dumayet’, p. 283. 36 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Georges Charbonnier’, p. 247. 37 Didi-Huberman, Le Cube et le visage, p. 127. 38 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Georges Charbonnier’, pp. 243–4. 39 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec André Parinaud’, p. 279. 40 Didi-Huberman, Le Cube et le visage, p. 122.

Chapter 1 1 Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: biographie d’une œuvre (Paris: Flammarion, 1991); Jacques Dupin, Alberto Giacometti: textes pour une approche (Paris: Fourbis, 1991); André du Bouchet, Alberto Giacometti, dessin (Paris: Maeght éditeur, 1991). 2 Alberto Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Georges Charbonnier’, in Écrits, presented by Michel Leiris and Jacques Dupin, prepared by Mary Lisa Palmer and François Chaussende (Paris, Hermann, 1990), p. 244. 3 Ibid., p. 245. 4 Ibid., pp. 246–7. 5 Ibid., p. 247. 6 Ibid., p. 247. 7 Ibid., p. 283. 8 Ibid., p. 249. 9 Ibid., p. 249. 10 Ibid., p. 249. 11 Ibid., pp. 17–19. 12 Ibid., p. 44. 13 Ibid., p. 17. 14 André Breton, L’Amour fou, in Œuvres complètes, edited by Marguerite Bonnet with Philippe Bernier, Étienne-Alain Hubert and José Pierre (Paris: Gallimard/ Pléiade, 1992), vol. 2, p. 699; André Breton, Mad Love, translated by Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1988). 15 ‘Le rôle catalysateur de la trouvaille’: ‘The catalysing function of the trouvaille’, writes André Breton in L’Amour fou, p. 701. 16 Giacometti, Écrits, pp. 18–19. 17 See Whitney Chadwick (ed.), Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and SelfRepresentation (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1998). 18 Giacometti, Écrits, p. 17. 19 Ibid., p. 19. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid.

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23 See Michael Brenson, ‘La Réception critique de Giacometti aux États-Unis, 1934–1965’, in L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, directed by Véronique Wiesinger, with Johanne Legris and Cecilia Braschi, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti/Centre Georges Pompidou, 2007), pp. 309–30. 24 Giacometti, Écrits, pp. 45–50. In ‘Sculpter sans relâche’, Véronique Wiesinger comments that ‘Giacometti a régulièrement dressé des listes des sculptures qu’il avait produites [. . .] avec des dessins et des dates. [. . .] Il semble qu’il s’agisse pour l’artiste de faire le bilan du passé pour comprendre où celui-ci le projette [. . .] Nulle surprise donc que ces listes soient incomplètes, voire contradictoires ou fautives dans les dates qui varient avec les listes, puisqu’elles reflètent la perception de son œuvre par l’artiste au moment où elles sont dressées’: ‘Giacometti regularly drew up lists of the works he had produced [.  .  .] with sketches and dates [. . .] It seems that for the artist this was a way of weighing up the past so as to understand where it was sending him [. . .] No surprise, then, that these lists are incomplete, even contradictory or wrong when it comes to the dates, which vary according to the list, since each of these lists reflects the artist’s perception of his work at the time of compiling it’, in L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, p. 106. 25 Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti. 26 André Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, revised and corrected edition, 1928– 65 (Paris: Gallimard, 1965 and 1979 [1928]), p. 11. 27 Paul Éluard, Œuvres complètes, with preface and chronology by Lucien Scheler; text edited and annotated by Marcelle Dumas and Lucien Scheler (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1968), vol. 1, p. 140. 28 For more on Éluard’s life in revolt, see Jill Lewis’s introduction to Paul Éluard, Unbroken Poetry II/Poésie ininterrompue II, translated by Gilbert Bowen (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1996). 29 Paul Éluard, ‘L’Invention’, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 104. 30 Giacometti, Écrits, p. 51. 31 Ibid., pp. 51–2. 32 See Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996). 33 Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS, exhibition catalogue, edited by Dawn Ades and Simon Baker (London: Hayward Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 34 See Giacometti, Écrits, p. 249. 35 Breton, L’Amour fou, pp. 697–709. 36 Giacometti, Écrits, 51-2. 37 Alberto Giacometti, sculptures, peintures, dessins, directed by Suzanne Pagé, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1991), p. 222. 38 Giacometti, Écrits, pp. 43–4. 242

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39 Jean Clair, ‘La Pointe à l’œil’, Cahiers du MNAM, 1983, quoted in Alberto Giacometti, sculptures, peintures, dessins, exhibition catalogue, p. 142. 40 See Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 1993), chapter 1. 41 André Breton, Nadja, in Œuvres complètes, edited by Marguerite Bonnet with Philippe Bernier, Étienne-Alain Hubert and José Pierre (Paris: Gallimard/ Pléiade, 1992 [1928]). André Breton, Nadja, translated by Richard Howard, with an introduction by Mark Polizzotti (London: Penguin, 1999). 42 Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, p. 15; Breton’s italics. ‘La beauté sera convulsive ou ne sera pas’: ‘Beauty shall be convulsive or shall not be’. Breton, Nadja, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 753. In L’Amour fou Breton develops the thought: ‘La beauté convulsive sera érotique-voilée, explosante-fixe, magiquecirconstancielle ou ne sera pas’: ‘Convulsive beauty shall be erotic-veiled, explosive-fixed, magical-circumstantial or shall not be’, Breton, L’Amour fou, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, p. 687. 43 Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, p. 15. André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, translated by Simon Watson Taylor (London, Macdonald, 1972), p. 4. 44 Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, p. 14. 45 Ibid., p. 72; Breton’s italics. 46 Ibid., p. 25. 47 Ibid., p. 14. 48 Ibid., pp. 11, 12. 49 Ibid., p. 40. 50 Ibid., p. 72. 51 Ibid., p. 39. 52 Ibid., p. 21; my italics. 53 I am simply thinking of the Greek etymology of the word ‘metaphor’, to carry over. 54 Again, I am thinking here of the Greek etymology of the word ‘anamorphosis’, ‘ana’ and ‘morphosis’: to form again. 55 ‘La Crète, où je dois être Thésée, mais Thésée enfermé pour toujours dans son labyrinthe de cristal’: ‘Crete, where I am to be Theseus, but Theseus trapped forever in his crystal labyrinth’. André Breton, ‘Introduction sur le peu de réalité’, 1934, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, p. 265. 56 Breton, L’Amour fou, p. 697. 57 ‘Georges Braque’, in Giacometti, Écrits, p. 89; a piece published in Derrière le Miroir in 1964. 58 Giacometti, Écrits, pp. 91–3; Paris sans fin (Paris: Éditions Verve, 1969). 59 A conversation with Sarah Kay allowed me to hear this. 60 Giacometti, Écrits, p. 294. 61 Giacometti, ‘Mai 1920’, in Écrits, pp. 71–3. 62 Giacometti, ‘Gris, brun, noir’, in Écrits, pp. 68–70. 63 Breton, L’Amour fou, p. 697. 243

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64 Giacometti, ‘Mai 1920’, p. 72. 65 Maurice Blanchot, L’Attente, l’oubli (Paris: Gallimard, 1962).

Chapter 2 1 Milan Kundera, Immortality, translated by Peter Kussi (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), pp. 8, 225. 2 Jean Genet, ‘L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti’, in ‘Lettres Nouvelles’, September 1957, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 2007[1957]), vol. 5, pp. 51, 73. 3 Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere (Paris: Bayard, 2003), p. 29. 4 George Steiner, ‘The Hermeneutic Motion’, in After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 300; also in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 193–8. 5 Nancy, Noli me tangere, p. 42. 6 For a further discussion of death and community in Genet’s play, see Timothy Mathews, ‘“Des Milliers de Parisiens”: Conflict, Community and Collapse in Jean Genet, Les Paravents’, in Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay in TwentiethCentury France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 153–91. 7 Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 2nd edition (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1990); Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communauté affrontée (Paris: Galilée, 2001); Maurice Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980); Maurice Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1983). 8 Michael Holland, ‘État Présent: Maurice Blanchot’, French Studies, vol. 58, no. 4, pp. 533–58. 9 I am drawn to many of these books in the Prologue and mention them again here: Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: biographie d’une œuvre (Paris: Flammarion, 1991); Jacques Dupin, Alberto Giacometti: textes pour une approche (Paris: Fourbis, 1991); David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), p. 175; Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘La Recherche de l’absolu’, the first of Sartre’s two essays on Giacometti, in Situations III (Paris: Gallimard, 1949 [1948]), pp. 289–305; James Lord, Giacometti: A Biography (London: Orion, 1996). 10 Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre, p. 58. 11 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. xvii, 75–92, 204–83. 12 Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre, p. 182; my emphasis. 13 See John Elderfield, Manet and the Execution of Maximilian (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006) for reproductions of all these works by Manet and an illuminating critical account of the series. The final two versions resonate particularly strongly here.

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Chapter 3 1 Georges Didi-Huberman, Le Cube et le visage: autour d’une sculpture d’Alberto Giacometti (Paris: Éditions Macula, 1993), p. 112. 2 Alberto Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Pierre Dumayet’, in Écrits, presented by Michel Leiris and Jacques Dupin, prepared by Mary Lisa Palmer and François Chaussende (Paris: Hermann, 1990), p. 282. 3 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History, VIII’, in Illuminations, edited with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana/Collins, 1983), p. 259. 4 See Michael Worton and Judith Still, ‘Introduction’, in Michael Worton and Judith Still (eds), Intertextuality, Theories and Practices (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 15–17. Mikhail Bakhtin extols in the following way the capacity he sees in the art of Dostoyevsky to show the inherently dialogic nature of the human condition: ‘La conscience humaine et le domaine dans lequel elle se manifeste dialogiquement sont inaccessibles au regard artistique monologique. C’est dans les romans de Dostoïevski que, pour la première fois, ils purent faire l’objet d’une véritable représentation artistique’ :‘human consciousness and the domains in which it arises dialogically are inaccessible to a monologic artistic gaze. They received sustained artistic representation for the first time in the novels of Dostoevsky’, Mikhail Bakhtin, La Poétique de Dostoïevski, translated by Isabelle Kolitcheff, presented by Julia Kristeva (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970), p. 346. 5 Jacques Derrida, Monolinguisme de l’autre, ou, La prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996). 6 For one example among many, see Roland Barthes, ‘Décomposer/Détruire’, in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975), pp. 67–8. 7 Samuel Beckett, En attendant Godot (Paris: Minuit, 1952). 8 Walter Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death’, in Illuminations, p. 116. 9 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by E F N Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), p. 153. 10 Benjamin, Illuminations, p.  116. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, translated from the 2nd edition of 1930 by William W Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970). 11 Ibid., p. 120. 12 Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 121–2. 13 Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: biographie d’une œuvre (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), p. 345. 14 Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, translated by Anna Bostock, intro­ duction by Stanley Mitchell (London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 110.

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15 In Ronald Taylor (ed. and trans.), Aesthetics and Politics: Debates between Bloch, Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, with an afterword by Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 1980), pp. 128, 129. 16 Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, pp. 107–8. 17 Bertolt Brecht, He Said Yes/He Said No, Collected Plays, vol. 3, part 2, edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen, 1997), pp. 45–61. 18 Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 124–5. 19 Ibid., p. 125. 20 Ibid., p. 254. 21 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 153. 22 Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti, pp. 294, 299. 23 Ibid., pp. 409, 410.

Chapter 4 1 Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, in Œuvres complètes, edited by Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), vol. 1, p. 11; Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, translated by James McGowan, edited with an introduction by Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008). 2 Roland Barthes, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’Écriture?’, in Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1972 [1953]), pp. 12–13; Roland Barthes Writing Degree Zero, translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Cape, 1967). 3 Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: biographie d’une œuvre (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), p. 332. 4 All quotations taken from Samuel Beckett, Watt [1953] (London: Calder & Boyars, 1970), pp. 69–72. I am using Beckett’s English version in this chapter. 5 See Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti, pp. 318–19, 411. 6 See ibid., p. 293. 7 See ibid., chapter 6, ‘Époque surréaliste’. 8 Giacometti narrates the genealogy of this piece, and confirms this alternation between the emergence and submergence of meaning, in ‘Je ne puis parler qu’indirectement de mes sculptures’, which I was drawn to in Chapter 1. 9 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History, VIII–IX’, in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana/ Collins, 1982), pp. 259–60. 10 See Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti, pp. 269–72. 11 ‘Ill-told, ill-heard, and more than half forgotten’. 12 ‘There is a certain part of us all that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.’ Milan Kundera, Immortality, translated by Peter Kussi (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), p. 4.

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Chapter 5 1 W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, translated by Michael Hulse (London: Harvill Press, 1997), originally Die Ausgewanderten (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vito von Eichborn GmbH & Co. Verlag KG, 1993). Page numbers will refer to the 1997 paperback edition of the English translation. 2 W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, translated by Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 16–17, Originally Austerlitz (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2001). All page references are to the Penguin edition of the English translation. 3 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, edited with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana/Collins, 1983), p.  254, originally in Walter Benjamin, Schriften (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955). 4 Sebald, The Emigrants, p. 153. 5 Ibid., pp. 154–5. 6 See D W Winnicott, Between Reality and Fantasy: Transitional Objects and Phenomena, edited by Simon A Grolnick and Leonard Barkin, in collaboration with Werner Muensterberger (New York: Aronson, 1978). 7 Sebald, The Emigrants, pp. 159, 168. 8 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955–74), vol. 4, p. 48. 9 Sebald, The Emigrants, pp. 158–60. Marion Gymnich pointed out to me a feature of this passage redolent of Sebald’s general way of indicating the unconscious at work in daily life by including layers of association of which he indicates no awareness, nor seems to invite any. Sebald at this point is walking past the former Ordsall Slaughterhouse in Manchester, whose Gothic look is in fact reminiscent of the picture on a tin of Nuremberg Lebkuchen, although this remains unstated. Moreover, the makers of the Lebkuchen are Häberlein & Metzger, the latter name being also the word for butcher, which takes us back to the slaughterhouse, not only the one in Manchester but those of the concentration camps as well. So the chance, ‘absurd’ rising of this idea to the surface of Sebald’s mind is not absurd at all, in the sense of lacking an explanation. By formal analogy with this feigned and maintained unawareness of the workings of his own text, or possibly unfeigned, Sebald shows forgetting as it lives and breathes in everyday thought. 10 Ibid., pp. 232–3. 11 Ibid., p. 183. 12 Ibid., p. 184. 13 See Jacques Lacan’s reading of Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’, ‘Le Séminaire sur la lettre volée’, in Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966). 14 ‘S’il le pouvait, Giacometti, il se réduirait en poudre, en poussière, comme il serait heureux!’: ‘If Giacometti could reduce himself to powder, to dust, how 247

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happy he would be!’, writes Genet in his extended meditation on watching the symbiosis of Giacometti and his studio. Jean Genet, ‘L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti’, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 5 (Paris: Gallimard, 2007 [1957]), p. 70. 15 Sebald, The Emigrants, pp. 161–2. 16 Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 190. 17 Alberto Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec André Parinaud’, in Écrits, p. 268. See also Thierry Dufrêne, Le Journal de Giacometti (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2007), pp. 150–5; Thierry Dufrêne, ‘Giacometti’s Geneva Period (1941–45): The Birth of a New Sculpture’, in Peter Read and Julia Kelly (eds), Giacometti: Critical Essays (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), pp. 113–28; and Véronique Wiesinger, Giacometti: la figure au défi (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), pp. 55–7. 18 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘La Recherche de l’absolu’, in Situations III (Paris: Gallimard, 1949 [1948]), which I was also drawn to in the Prologue. 19 Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 1–2, 228. 20 Sebald, The Emigrants, p. 176 21 Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 398. 22 Stendhal, The Red and the Black, edited by Ann Jefferson (London: J M Dent, Everyman, 1997), book 1, chapter 13: a quotation Stendhal attributes to Saint-Réal.

Chapter 6 1 Michel Leiris, Pierres pour un Alberto Giacometti (Tusson: L’Échoppe, 1991 [1949]), p. 9. 2 Georges Didi-Huberman, Le Cube et le visage: Autour d’une Sculpture d’Alberto Giacometti (Paris: Éditions Macula, 1993), p. 153. 3 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 168; Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard (London: Macmillan, 1977). 4 Cees Nooteboom, Allerzielen (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Atlas, 1998); Cees Nooteboom, All Souls’ Day, translated by Susan Massotty (London: Picador, 2001). The page references that follow are to this English edition. 5 Nooteboom, All Souls’ Day, p. 13. 6 Ibid., p. 13. 7 Ibid., p. 34. 8 Ibid., p. xiii. 9 Ibid., pp. 116–17. 10 Roland Barthes, Le Neutre: notes de cours au Collège de France, 1977–1978, edited, annotated and presented by Thomas Clerc (Paris: Seuil/IMEC, 2002), p. 35, Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, 248

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translated by Rosalind E Krauss and Denis Hollier, text edited, annotated, and presented by Thomas Clerc under the direction of Eric Marty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 11 Nooteboom, All Souls’ Day, pp. 118–19. 12 Ibid., p. 543.

Chapter 7 1 Alberto Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec David Sylvester’, in Écrits, presented by Michel Leiris and Jacques Dupin, prepared by Mary Lisa Palmer and François Chaussende (Paris: Hermann, 1990), p. 295. 2 Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1954 [1943]), p. 17. 3 Taken from a note made by Alberto Giacometti in 1932; in Écrits, p. 133. 4 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 68. 5 André Breton, L’Air de l’eau, in Œuvres complètes, edited by Marguerite Bonnet with Philippe Bernier, Étienne-Alain Hubert and José Pierre (Paris: Gallimard/ Pléiade, 1992), vol. 2, p.  402. Giacometti made four etchings to accompany this collection of love poems: p. 1544. 6 Gérard de Nerval, Aurélia, with a preface by Gérard Macé, edited by JeanNicolas Illouz (Paris: folio/Gallimard, 2005 [1855]). 7 Breton, L’Air de l’Eau, p. 405. In this sequence Breton also evokes what he calls ‘la barbarie des civilisations’: ‘the barbarism of civilization’. 8 For example: ‘En 1925, l’année de la Revue nègre, l’art africain est à la mode à Paris et son influence est surtout formelle, superficielle et décorative’: ‘In 1925, the year of the Revue nègre [when it was first performed at the Music-Hall des Champs-Elysées], African art is fashionable in Paris and its influence is mostly formal, superficial and decorative’, Véronique Wiesinger, ‘Sculpter sans relâche’, in L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, directed by Véronique Wiesinger, with Johanne Legris and Cecilia Braschi, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti/Centre Pompidou, 2007), p. 86. 9 André Breton, L’Amour fou, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, pp. 699–709. 10 By contrast, in L’Air de l’eau, p. 402, Breton writes: ‘je chante la lumière unique de la coïncidence’: ‘I sing the unique light of coincidence’. 11 L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, exhibition catalogue, p. 87. 12 Ibid., p. 87. 13 The 1936 version was displayed in L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti. In the main body of the catalogue, the piece in its plaster version is again shown photographed from the front. However, in the list of exhibited works, the bronze casting is shown photographed from an oblique angle, allowing viewers a different understanding. The photograph by Pierre Matisse taken from the back is also shown in the main body of the book, and also those of Brassaï: one from 249

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the front, one from the back, both from an oblique angle. L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, exhibition catalogue, pp. 108, 110, 111. 14 Giacometti, Écrits, p. 49. 15 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec André Parinaud’, in Écrits, p. 271. 16 Georges Didi-Huberman, Le Cube et le visage: autour d’une sculpture d’Alberto Giacometti (Paris: Éditions Macula, 1993), p. 67. 17 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Georges Charbonnier’, in Écrits, p. 245. 18 L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, exhibition catalogue, p. 405. Grande Tête de Diego, also of 1954, was exhibited in L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti as well. Danielle Molinari also relates the busts of Diego to the sculptures in the manner of Tête qui regarde in Alberto Giacometti, sculptures, peintures, dessins, directed by Suzanne Pagé et al, exhibition catalogue (Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris: 1991), p. 307. See also Bust on Plinth (Amenophis), in Michael Peppiatt, Alberto Giacometti in Postwar Paris (London and New York: Yale University Press, in association with the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, 2001), p. 90. 19 Wiesinger, ‘Sculpter sans relâche’, p. 108. 20 Ibid., p. 284. 21 Ibid., p. 92. 22 ‘Les têtes dites tranchantes, en lame, sont posées sur une autre lame qui est celle des épaules sans jamais former entre elles un angle droit; l’axe des cous ou des corps n’est jamais au centre’: ‘The heads known as “cutting” heads, in the form of a blade, are placed on another blade which is the blade of the shoulders, without the two ever making a right angle; and the axis of the neck or the body is never at the centre’, Wiesinger, ‘Sculpter sans relâche’, p. 92. 23 In comparing this bust to another, and both of them to the sculptures in the manner of Tête qui regarde, Danielle Molinari describes in this way the various pressures the planes in all these pieces exert on each other: ‘La tête, lame de couteau étirée vers le haut, rappelle la Grande Tête de Diego [1954] et retrouve, de profil, sa matérialité. Le buste subissant une pression inverse devient comparable aux sculptures plates de 1928–9, une simple plaque dont la tranche n’inscrit dans l’espace qu’une vertical’: ‘The head, like the blade of a knife stretched upwards, is reminiscent of Grande Tête de Diego [1954] and seen in profile it re-engages with the latter’s materiality. The bust is put under the inverse pressure and becomes comparable to the flat sculptures of 1928–9, which take the form of a simple plaque whose cutting edge inscribes nothing but a vertical line in space’, in Alberto Giacometti, sculptures, peintures, dessins, exhibition catalogue, p. 307. See also p. 205, and L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, exhibition catalogue, p. 405. David Sylvester describes the experience of this sculpture in the following way: ‘though its shape, of course, changes somewhat, the contour does not change as that of a form fully in the round would, and, as I move through an angle of, say, 120 degrees, watching it, I have the illusion

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that it is keeping pace with me, turning away.’ David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), pp. 42–3. 24 See Chapter 2. 25 Jacques Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle: l’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1990), p. 72, Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 26 Giacometti, Écrits, p. 82. 27 See Chapters 3 and 6. 28 St Paul, I Corinthians, 13:12. 29 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Georges Charbonnier’, in Écrits, p. 249. 30 Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière (Paris: folio/Gallimard, 1985 [1923]), p. 311. 31 L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, exhibition catalogue, p. 142. 32 Ibid., p. 142. 33 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Pierre Schneider’, in Écrits, p. 266. See also Alberto Giacometti, sculptures, peintures, dessins, exhibition catalogue, p. 236. 34 L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, exhibition catalogue, p. 43. 35 Giacometti, Écrits, p. 267. 36 St Paul, I Corinthians, 13:9–13:12. 37 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec André Parinaud’, in Écrits, p. 273. 38 Proust, La Prisonnière, p. 332. 39 Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953 (1972)), p. 12. 40 Didi-Huberman, Le Cube et le visage, p. 157. 41 L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, exhibition catalogue, p. 41. 42 Max Ernst, rétrospective, directed by Werner Spies, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou/Prestel, 1992), pp. 170, 202. 43 André Breton, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, p. 697. 44 Jean-Luc Nancy, Être Singulier Pluriel (Paris: Galilée, 1996). 45 L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, exhibition catalogue, p. 360. 46 See especially the photograph by Eric Pollitzer of the exhibition Albert Giacometti, Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1961, in L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, exhibition catalogue, p. 329. 47 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, translated by David McLintock, with an introduction by Leo Bersani (London, Penguin Books, 2002 [1930]); Jacques Lacan, ‘De l’Agression en psychanalyse’, in Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996); Timothy Mathews, Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press, 2006), chapter 2. 48 Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977); Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2002 [1979]).

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49 Luce Irigaray, Être Deux (Paris: Grasset, 1997); Luce Irigaray, To Be Two, translated by Monique M Rhodes and Marco F Cocito-Monoc (London: Athlone Press, 2000). 50 Maurice Blanchot, L’Attente, l’oubli (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). 51 Giacometti, Écrits, p.  266. See Alberto Giacometti, sculptures, peintures, dessins, exhibition catalogue, p. 192, where Danielle Molinari offers a thematic reading of the kind I have just evoked. 52 See Chapter 1 as well as the earlier pages in this chapter. 53 Maurice Blanchot, Le Pas au-delà (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). The title suggests both the step beyond and the no beyond. 54 Giacometti, Écrits, p. 82. 55 Danielle Molinari reminds us, crucially, that ‘Ce personnage féminin marchant sera le dernier. Dès 1952, la femme sera toujours représentée immobile’: ‘This is the last walking female person. From 1952, women are always represented as motionless’, in Alberto Giacometti, Sculptures, Peintures Dessins, exhibition catalogue, p. 236. 56 Giacometti, ‘La Voiture démythifiée’, 1957, in Écrits, p. 78. Giacometti’s original title is ‘La Voiture démystifiée’ – ‘demystified’, rather than ‘de-mythified’. Walter Benjamin, ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, edited with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana/Collins, 1983), pp. 242–3, 237. 57 Giacometti, Écrits, p. 79 58 Ibid., p. 80.

Epilogue 1 Alberto Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Pierre Schneider’, in Écrits, presented by Michel Leiris and Jacques Dupin, prepared by Mary Lisa Palmer and François Chaussende (Paris: Hermann, 1990), p. 267. 2 Bob Dylan, ‘The Disease of Conceit’, on Oh Mercy (CBS: 1989). 3 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Pierre Schneider’, p. 262. 4 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec André Parinaud’, in Écrits, p. 272. 5 Lustre, 1949, in L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, exhibition catalogue, p. 145. 6 Giacometti, ‘Entretien avec Pierre Dumayet’, in Écrits, p. 285. 7 David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), p. 154. 8 L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, exhibition catalogue, pp. 372–3.

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Bibliography

This is not an exhaustive list – how could it be? This is a book with elastic boundaries, and my sense of where I am in relation to it is still uncertain as I write this sentence. So this is a distillation of works that accompanied me as I wrote the book. I have worked with books in French – that is where I was when I began – and I have listed English translations when I am familiar with them, although, unless I have said otherwise, all the English translations of quotations in French in the book are mine. Where I engage with books in languages other than French, I have only listed English translations and translators. Adorno, Theodor, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by E F N Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978) Bakhtin, Mikhail, La Poétique de Dostoïevski, translated by Isabelle Kolitcheff, presented by Julia Kristeva (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970) —— Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, with an introduction by Wayne C Booth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984) Barthes, Roland, Writing Degree Zero, translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Cape, 1967) —— S/Z (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970) —— Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972 [1953]) —— Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975) —— Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977) —— Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard (London: Macmillan, 1977) —— S/Z, English edition, translated by Richard Miller, with a preface by Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) —— A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2002 [1979]) 253

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—— Le Neutre: notes de cours au Collège de France, 1977–1978, edited, annotated and presented by Thomas Clerc (Paris: Seuil/IMEC, 2002) —— Œuvres complètes, edited by Éric Marty (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002–) —— The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, translated by Rosalind E Krauss and Denis Hollier, text edited, annotated and presented by Thomas Clerc under the direction of Eric Marty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) Baudelaire, Charles, Les Fleurs du mal, in Œuvres complètes, edited by Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975 [1857, 1861]), vol. 1 —— The Flowers of Evil, translated by James McGowan, edited with an introduction by Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008) Beckett, Samuel, En attendant Godot (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1952) —— Watt (London: Calder & Boyars, 1970 [1953]) —— Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 2006) —— Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition, edited by Paul Auster, with an introduction by Colm Toibin (New York: Grove Press, 2006), vol. 1 Benjamin, Walter, Understanding Brecht, translated by Anna Bostock, introduction by Stanley Mitchell (London: New Left Books, 1973) —— Illuminations, edited with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana/Collins, 1983) Blanchot, Maurice, L’Attente, l’oubli (Paris: Gallimard, 1962) —— Le Pas au-delà (Paris: Gallimard, 1973) —— L’Écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980) —— La Communauté inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1983) —— The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) —— The Unavowable Community, translated by Pierre Joris (Red Hook, NY: Barrytown Ltd, 2000) Bois, Yve-Alain and Rosalind E Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996) Bonnefoy, Yves, Alberto Giacometti: biographie d’une œuvre (Paris: Flammarion, 1991) —— Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of his Work, translated by Jean Stewart (Paris: Flammarion, 2012 [1991]) Bouchet, André du, Alberto Giacometti, dessin (Paris: Maeght Éditeur, 1991) Brecht, Bertolt, Mother Courage and Her Children, edited and translated by David Hare (London: Methuen Plays, 1995) —— He Said Yes/He Said No, in Collected Plays, edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen, 1997), vol. 3 Breton, André, Surrealism and Painting, translated by Simon Watson Taylor (London: Macdonald, 1972) —— Le Surréalisme et la peinture, revised and corrected edition 1928–65 (Paris: Gallimard, 1979 [1928]) 254

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—— Mad Love, translated by Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1988) —— L’Air de l’eau, 1934, in Œuvres complètes, edited by Marguerite Bonnet with Philippe Bernier, Étienne-Alain Hubert and José Pierre (Paris: Gallimard/ Pléiade, 1992), vol. 2 —— L’Amour fou, 1937, in Œuvres complètes, edited by Marguerite Bonnet with Philippe Bernier, Étienne-Alain Hubert and José Pierre (Paris: Gallimard/ Pléiade, 1992), vol. 2 —— ‘Introduction sur le peu de réalité’, 1934, in Œuvres complètes, edited by Marguerite Bonnet with Philippe Bernier, Étienne-Alain Hubert and José Pierre (Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1992), vol. 2 —— Nadja, 1928, in Œuvres complètes edited by Marguerite Bonnet with Philippe Bernier, Étienne-Alain Hubert and José Pierre (Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1992), vol. 1 —— Nadja, translated by Richard Howard, with an introduction by Mark Polizzotti (London: Penguin, 1999) Brooks, Peter, Realist Vision (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005) Catling, Jo and Richard Hibbitt (eds), Saturn’s Moons: W.G. Sebald – A Handbook (London: Legenda, 2011) Chadwick, Whitney (ed.), Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1998) Clair, Jean, Le Nez de Giacometti: faces de carême, figures de carnaval (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1992) Derrida, Jacques, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968) —— Margins of Philosophy, translated with additional notes by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) —— Mémoires d’aveugle, l’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1990) —— Memoirs of the Blind, the Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, translated by PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993) —— Monolinguisme de l’autre, ou, La prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996) —— Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, translated by Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) Didi-Huberman, Georges, Le Cube et le visage: autour d’une sculpture d’Alberto Giacometti (Paris: Éditions Macula, 1993) Dufrêne, Thierry, Le Journal de Giacometti (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2007) Dupin, Jacques, Alberto Giacometti: textes pour une approche (Paris: Fourbis, 1991) Dylan, Bob, Oh Mercy (CBS: 1989) Elderfield, John, Manet and the Execution of Maximilian (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006)

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Éluard, Paul, Œuvres complètes, with preface and chronology by Lucien Scheler, texts edited and annotated by Marcelle Dumas and Lucien Scheler (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1968) —— Unbroken Poetry II/Poésie ininterrompue II, translated by Gilbert Bowen, with an introduction by Jill Lewis (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1996) Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub, Testimony (London, Routledge, 1992) Flaubert, Gustave, L’Éducation sentimentale, with an introduction by Stéphanie Dord-Crouslé (Paris: Garnier/Flammarion, 2013 [1869]) Foster, Hal, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1993) Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955–74) —— Civilization and its Discontents, translated by David McLintock, with an introduction by Leo Bersani (London: Penguin Books, 2002 [1930]) Genet, Jean, The Selected Writings of Jean Genet, edited and with an introduction by Edmund White (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1993) —— ‘L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti’, in Lettres nouvelles, September 1957, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 2007 [1957]), vol. 5. Giacometti, Alberto, Écrits, presented by Michel Leiris and Jacques Dupin, prepared by Mary Lisa Palmer and François Chaussende (Paris: Hermann, 1990) Holland, Michael, ‘État Présent: Maurice Blanchot’, French Studies, vol. 58, no. 4, pp. 533–58 Irigaray, Luce, Être deux (Paris: Grasset, 1997) —— To Be Two, translated by Monique M Rhodes and Marco F Cocito-Monoc (London: Athlone Press, 2000) Krauss, Rosalind, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977) —— The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1993) Kundera, Milan, Immortality, translated by Peter Kussi (London: Faber & Faber, 1991) Lacan, Jacques, ‘De l’agressivité en psychanalyse’, in Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966). —— ‘Le Séminaire sur la lettre volée’, in Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966) —— L’Éthique de la psychanalyse: le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, edited by JacquesAlain Miller, (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973– ), vol. 7 —— The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by JacquesAlain Miller, translated by Dennis Porter (New York: W W Norton & Company, 1997), vol. 7 Leiris, Michel, Pierres pour un Alberto Giacometti (Tusson: L’Échoppe, 1991 [1949]) Long, J J and Anne Whitehead (eds), W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion (Edin­ burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004) Lord, James, Giacometti: A Biography (London: Orion, 1996) Mathews, Timothy, Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay in Twentieth-Century France, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 256

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Musil, Robert, The Man without Qualities, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (London: Secker & Warburg, 1954 [1943]) Nancy, Jean-Luc, La Communauté désœuvrée, 2nd edition (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1990) —— The Inoperative Community, edited by Peter Connor, translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney, foreword by Christopher Fynsk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) —— Être Singulier Pluriel (Paris: Galilée, 1996) —— Being Singular Plural, translated by Luca Dosanto and David Webb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001) —— La Communauté affrontée (Paris: Galilée, 2001) —— Noli me tangere (Paris: Bayard, 2003) —— Noli me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body, translated by Sarah Clift, PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008) Nerval, Gérard de, Aurélia, with a preface by Gérard Macé, edited by Jean-Nicolas Illouz (Paris: folio/Gallimard, 2005 [1855]) Nooteboom, Cees, All Souls’ Day, translated by Susan Massotty (London: Picador, 2001) Peppiatt, Michael, In Giacometti’s Studio (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press: 2010 Proust, Marcel, La Prisonnière (Paris: folio/Gallimard, 1985 [1923]) —— The Captive and The Fugitive, translated by C K Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D J Enright (London: Random House, 1999) Read, Peter and Julia Kelly (eds), Giacometti: Critical Essays (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009) Rosenzweig, Franz, The Star of Redemption, translated from the 2nd edition of 1930 by William W Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970) Sartre, Jean-Paul, Situations III (Paris: Gallimard, 1949 [1948]) Schneider, Pierre, Alberto Giacometti: ‘un pur exercice optique’ (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2007) Sebald, W. G., The Emigrants, translated by Michael Hulse (London: Harvill Press, 1997) —— Austerlitz, translated by Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2002) Steiner, George, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) Stendhal, The Red and the Black, based on a translation by C K Scott Moncrieff, edited by Ann Jefferson (London: J M Dent, Everyman, 1997) —— Le Rouge et le Noir, edited by Anne-Marie Meininger, with a preface by Jean Prévost (Paris: Folio Classique, 2000 [1830]) Sylvester, David, Looking at Giacometti (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994) Taylor, Ronald (ed. and trans.), Aesthetics and Politics: Debates between Bloch, Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, with an afterword by Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 1980) 257

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Vaihinger, Hans, The Philosophy ‘As If’: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, translated by C K Ogden (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner, and New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1924 [1911]) Venuti, Lawrence, (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2004) Wagstaff, Emma, Writing Art: French Literary Responses to the Work of Alberto Giacometti (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011) Wiesinger, Véronique, Giacometti, la Figure au défi (Paris: Gallimard, 2007) Winnicott, D W, Between Reality and Fantasy: Transitional Objects and Phenomena, edited by Simon A Grolnick and Leonard Barkin, in collaboration with Werner Muensterberger (New York: Aronson, 1978) Worton, Michael and Judith Still (eds), Intertextuality, Theories and Practices (Man­ chester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990)

Exhibition Catalogues Alberto Giacometti, edited by Christian Klemm, with Carolyn Lanchner, Tobia Bezzola and Anne Umland (New York: the Museum of Modern Art; Zürich: Kunsthaus, 2001) Alberto Giacometti in Postwar Paris, edited by Michael Peppiatt (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, in association with the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, 2001) Alberto Giacometti, sculptures, peintures, dessins, directed by Suzanne Pagé et al (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1991) L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti, directed by Véronique Wiesinger, with Johanne Legris and Cecilia Braschi (Paris: Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti/Centre Georges Pompidou, 2007) Max Ernst, rétrospective, directed by Werner Spies (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou/ Prestel, 1992) Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS, edited by Dawn Ades and Simon Baker (London: Hayward Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006)

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Index Ades, Dawn, 58 Adorno, Theodor, 106, 110, 113 Baker, Simon, 58 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 105 Barthes, Roland, 2, 105, 113, 117, 147, 155–6, 164, 197, 218 Bataille, Georges, 11, 58, 63, 117, 155 Baudelaire, Charles, 30, 33–4, 80, 110, 116–17 Beckett, Samuel, 105, 116, 118–19, 121–3, 125, 127, 190 Benjamin, Walter, 29, 103, 105–15, 126–7, 134, 147, 150–51, 157, 159, 187, 226, 231 Blanchot, Maurice, 70, 87, 96–100, 219, 224 Bois, Yve-Alain, 155 Bonnefoy, Yves, 10, 22, 31, 49, 73, 97, 117–18 Bouchet, André du, 10, 31 Brancusi, Constantin 11, 168, 176, 178 Braque, Georges, 11, 82–4, 86–7, 154 Brecht, Bertolt, 29, 109–11, 235 Breton, André, 11, 42–5, 49, 58, 63, 65–6, 72–81, 86, 117, 164–6, 206 Brooks, Peter, 143

Didi-Huberman, Georges, 1, 5, 10, 11, 21–3, 25–8, 103, 147, 175, 197 Dupin, Jacques, 10, 13, 31, 97 Dylan, Bob, 229 Egyptian, 3, 4, 17, 37–8, 86, 219 El Greco, 107 Éluard, Paul, 52–6, 74, 88 Ernst, Max, 11, 33, 64, 124, 200–7, 209–14, 216, 218, 224 Etruscan, 159 Fautrier, Jean, 11, 87 Felman, Shoshana, 98 Flaubert, Gustave, 88, 117 Foster, Hal, 73 Freud, Sigmund, 65–6, 138, 143, 216, 226 Genet, Jean, 10, 11, 26, 89, 95, 157, 197 Giotto, 86, 87 Goya, 115 Holbein, Hans, 79 Holland, Michael, 96–7 Irigaray, Luce, 219

Cézanne, Paul, 3–4, 11, 85–86, 107 Clair, Jean, 71–3, 75, 78–81 Cycladic, 17, 60 Dalí, Salvador, 44, 59–60 Derrida, Jacques, 105, 185

Kafka, Franz, 25, 106–13, 187 Klee, Paul, 126–7, 159 Klein, Yves, 87 Krauss, Rosalind, 10, 152, 154–6 Kundera, Milan, 88–9, 95, 129 259

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Lacan, Jacques, 13–14, 141 Langhans, Carl Gotthard, 152 Laub, Dori, 98 Leiris, Michel, 10, 31, 147 Lord, James, 10, 97 Manet, Édouard, 36, 101–2 Matisse, Henri, 159 Musil, Robert, 164 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 91–2, 94–6, 214 Nerval, Gérard de, 165 Nooteboom, Cees, 147–60, 231 Peppiatt, Michael, 10 Picasso, Pablo, 52, 152–6, 176 Plato, 11, 89, 200

Proust, Marcel, 33, 151, 188, 197 Rembrandt, 91, 94–5 Rosenzweig, Franz, 106–7 St Paul, 195 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 10–16, 97, 142, 192 Schneider, Pierre, 194, 221 Sebald, W. G., 29, 132–42, 144–6, 148, 196–7, 200, 232 Steiner, George, 94 Stendhal, 145 Sylvester, David, 5, 10, 11, 16–19, 85, 97, 231 Wiesinger, Véronique, 178 Winnicott, D W, 137

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