Collected French Translations: Prose

by Ashbery, John

  Although Giacometti is unable during these years to do what he really wishes, he can do everything else. The basic idleness to which he yielded gives him great technical ease and leaves the way open to imaginary creations. Out of curiosity he accepts and profits by numerous influences—the desire to see and to experience primitive and archaic art and that of the moderns, especially the Cubists, Laurens, and Lipchitz. He participates in the experiments of his contemporaries and generally surpasses them or anticipates their discoveries. Affective stimulations converge with problems of construction and the quest for space, leading to extremely varied realizations. To the primitive fascination of the 1926 Woman (known as The Spoon-Woman), in which the erotic mechanism of attraction-repulsion is suggested by the opposition of the body, an immense cavity, welcoming and auspicious, to the hard and angular masses of the head and the bust. Or, again, to the Couple of 1926, which juxtaposes the trapezoidal volume of the man and the fish-shaped ellipse of the woman in a rough and barbaric contrast. Most of the sculptures are thus transpositions and variations on the human figure, accomplished through vigorous oppositions of round or circular forms and angular masses, analyses and syntheses of structures in space in which it is difficult to locate the realistic point of departure. These assemblages of alternating forms, this rhythmic accentuation of the void lead Giacometti to the idea of the open sculptures of 1928–29 which he purposely calls “clear structures.” These are ideas rendered concrete in three dimensions, “forms in space; open, airy constructions, so as to slough off the mud.” He banishes closed masses which confront space. Vacancy traverses these sculptures and animates them, and it is by this means that the symbol catches fire, that oppositions and accords spring to life. The Reclining Woman Dreaming dreams in horizontal planes which undulate like waves and whose calm cradling motion is emphasized by the supple pilings which support her. In its simple and geometrical construction, Apollo rises like a harmonious diagram, a grill traversed by space as a messenger of light.

  Vacancy participates in the sculpture; it is visible, alive, sometimes disturbing. It takes over forms, separates and brings them together again, hollows them with its whirlpools or slips dizzily down smooth, profiled structures. It sometimes takes on an oppressive character of dreams and cruelty. Man and Woman, unlike the Couple of 1926 which juxtaposed two figures with contrasting forms, unites them this time in a rigorous image of murderous love. Almost forming a cage, the Three Figures Outside of 1928–29 reduces the men to straight verticals and the woman, who seems to evoke a lascivious dance between the two rivals, to a quadruple broken line.

  With the Cage of 1931, eroticism takes on a convulsive and agonizing character, as much through the aggressive modeling of the bars which enclose space as by the exasperation of the forms and their furious modeling. Giacometti was haunted by the inside of things, especially of the human figure. This Cage is like the inside of a thorax, and what is being torn and devoured there represents the functioning of the human organism in its implacable autonomy. If man cannot be seized on the outside, by interrogating his visible aspect, the temptation is strong to re-create him with the imagination when the imagination is stimulated and oriented by subjectivity’s obsessions and passions. The clear transparent structures are to represent organic visibility: They are mentally precise constructions capable of being executed from their imaginary representations.

  This same cage becomes, in Suspended Ball, a simple and clear geometrical construction and the same obsession expresses itself in an encounter of extreme and suggestive simplicity: a cloven ball, suspended by a thread, which can slide along a crescent shape. A perfect symbolic object, which fascinates by its elementary obviousness, but in which the possibility of an effective motion, an obsessive motion which is a swinging motion, disturbs its deceptive calm.

  Several sculpture objects between 1930 and 1932 also avail themselves of real or suggested motion. In Point with Eye, a movement which is suspended, halted in its paroxysm, gives the feeling of the lightning-like speed of a point piercing an eye. It is an atrocious mechanism which suggests both a child’s toy and a model conceived by a sadistic engineer. Other objects pose enigmas. In Circuit, a marble rolls endlessly in a circular track, while its place, its repose, are prepared elsewhere in a tiny cavity inaccessible to it. Motion as the expression of the vanity of all motion reappears in Man, Woman, Child, where the elementary forms which represent the figures move without being able to join each other. Hand Seized by the Finger is a horrible system of gears which draws the finger and the whole hand into the perpetual motion of its wheels and pulleys. Giacometti, who could no longer bear the illusion of movement in sculpture, reacted by introducing a real motion which could be identified in most cases with the perpetual motion of solitude, with the erotic and cruel mechanism of his profound dreams. He speaks in one text of “pretty, precise mechanisms which have no use.” His own, however, serve as vehicles for the mental imaginings he thus rids himself of. Dissatisfaction, revolt, bitter humor lead him to realize works of provocation and anti-sculpture: These are the Disagreeable Objects, to Be Thrown Away of 1932. These objects without bases, which one can place in various positions, all equally valid and equally absurd, are pure manifestations of undisguised aggressivity.

  More and more the contradiction between work (useless, gratuitous) and life tormented Giacometti, who, from 1932 on, is above all concerned with expressing what he lives and feels, his conflicts, passions, desires, and dreams. Like a chessboard whose squares have been replaced with circular cavities of different diameters, The Game Is Over presents a man and woman who gesture to each other from far away; between them is an empty zone comprising three rectangular holes, like tombs with their lids; one is empty, another shut, the third contains a skeleton. We find the same obsession in The Palace at 4 a.m., a kind of complicated cage in which are found a backbone, a bird’s skeleton, a phallic form and a female figure in a long skirt; but they are separated and some are shut up in a second, smaller cage. The orientation, placing, and respective heights of these objects seem very precise, as though they were the plotted equation of a nightmare. Here again we find the obsession with the cage and the skeleton, with the clear structure and the hard structure identified as man’s truth and the sign of his death. The cruelty and the fascination of terror are even more precisely the inspiration of Woman with Her Throat Cut and Taut Thread, which represent the temptation of communication through death and destruction. The Table, the materialization of a pure hallucination, supports the bust of a partly veiled woman between a severed hand and an enigmatic polyhedron. Giacometti approaches reality without leaving the climate of dreams in three versions of a long, thin, and very disturbing Walking Woman, whose proportions, but these alone, announce the future elongated figures. The sculptor was hovering at the time between abstract form, plastically and aesthetically satisfying, and the concrete realization of his dreams and obsessions; between the mysterious seated woman of The Invisible Object, predominantly affective, which he wanted to destroy because he found her too sentimental, and the polyhedric sculpture of 1934–35 which, in its limited perfection, is no longer anything but an aesthetic object without content. He strives to reach a synthesis in the Head-Skull of the same period. Actually the subject lends itself admirably to this treatment. It is first of all a powerfully suggestive reality to which Giacometti is extremely sensitive. Also, through its very structure, it calls for and facilitates a rigorous plastic interpretation. Concentrating closely on construction and expressing simply one of his deepest fantasies, the sculptor manages to reconcile geometrical construction and hallucinatory magic.

  But this contradiction, resolved for a day, returns to torture him. Imaginary and inner reality attract him, but clash with the formal demands of the constructor and the plastic artist. In 1 + 1 = 3, harshly derisive of woman, he does not escape the dilemma and is almost at the end of his nonrepresentational adventure.

  In all the work of this period one hesitates to say who is t
riumphant: the fantastic poet or the abstract constructor. Giacometti finds relative satisfaction in the creation of plastically rigorous sculptures, in the search for the abstract harmonies and flawless structures. He likes also to be invaded by the flux of images and unconscious imaginings in which, when he succeeds in grasping them, he discovers the profound mechanisms of emotional life and the constants of his being. But what stays with him more than anything else, no doubt, is despair of reality, and his nostalgia shows through the narration of dreams and the plastic experiments. When he evokes the human face, and this is almost always the case, it is to tell passionately again and again his powerlessness to attain it. A defeatist attitude, with which he tries to persuade himself to renounce reality without really breaking with it, all the while preparing unconsciously, deep within him, his return to the visible world.

  9

  In 1921 during a trip to the Tyrol made in strange circumstances, Giacometti spent a day alone in a hotel room with his traveling companion who was dying.

  I watched the head of Van M. being transformed; the nose became more and more accentuated, the cheeks grew hollow, the open, almost immobile mouth was hardly breathing and, toward evening, trying to draw his profile, I was seized with a sudden panic before his oncoming death.

  “This event,” Giacometti continues, “was for me a kind of breach in my life. Everything became something else, and this trip obsessed me continually for a whole year.” And will obsess him, perhaps, for a whole lifetime, considering that this revelation has not yet exhausted all its consequences. It announced what the sculptor would discover much later, scrutinizing with a scalpel-sharp gaze the appearance of a human face. Before the insistence of such a look, the model is metamorphosed, gives way to the human being in its terrible stony nakedness. The eyes become black excavations. The perfection of the skull, the frightful tongs of the jawbones, and the grooves of the teeth show through the skin. Doubtless the primordial need for a sculptor to discover structures makes him come forth to touch with his hand the mineral hardness of the skeleton and the skull. But this explanation is insufficient. One must also take into account the feverish passion with which Giacometti perseveres in his pursuit of truth, of a likeness, and tracks it down to its final lair. He will remain haunted by the idea of death and overwhelmed by the signs of its manifestation. He will seek to rid himself of the obsessive image of Van M., dying, his mouth open, when he models the hallucinatory Head on a Stem of 1947, whose impalement seems to wrest a silent scream from it. It is terrible in a much different way than the Skull painted in 1923, which Giacometti finds “in one sense as perfect and as living as anything alive.” Again, evoking the sight of a corpse: “I looked at this head become an object, a little box, measurable, insignificant.” The head is measurable and an object only when it is dead. We must return to that which lives, to the presence of death in it, to the active presence which sustains it and is its framework, which rears it above things but at the same time rejects it beyond recall from the world and from others and walls it up in its solitude. Thus, in different moments and works, the human face seems stricken with stupor, halted in its drive, wrenched by surprise from the convulsions of death agony, or more often torn from tranquil contemplation, beyond the emptiness which assails it from every side.

  This revelation penetrates the sculptor’s vision so strongly, around 1946, that he experiences its effects constantly in the most ordinary circumstances of his life. “At that time,” he writes,

  I began to see heads in the emptiness, in the space which surrounds them. When for the first time I perceived clearly the head I was watching grow rigid and motionless in an instant, forever, I trembled with terror as never before in my life and a cold sweat ran down my back. It was no longer a living head but an object which I looked at like any other object, but no, in another way, unlike any other object, but like something simultaneously alive and dead. I cried out in terror as if I had just crossed the threshold, as if I were entering a world never seen before. All the living were dead, and this vision was repeated often, in the Métro, in the street, in a restaurant, with my friends … That waiter at Lipp’s who became motionless, leaning over me, mouth open, with no relation to the preceding moment or the next, his mouth open, his eyes fixed in an absolute immobility. But at the same time that men underwent a transformation, so did objects—tables, chairs, suits, the street, even trees and landscapes.

  This morning as I woke up I saw my napkin for the first time, that weightless napkin, in an immobility never seen before and as though suspended in a terrifying silence. It no longer had any relation to the bottomless chair or the table, whose legs no longer rested on the floor, barely touched it; there was no longer any relation between these objects separated by immeasurable chasms of emptiness.

  The phenomena which affected his seeing brought a complete change to the outer appearance of beings and things. Giacometti discovered only silence and immobility around him. Even in a noisy and bustling scene, the world seemed totally silent, totally immobile. He had an acute sensation of inertia, of silence, of the death of things. Time seemed abolished, reduced to a succession of discontinuous moments, stopped (as sculptures and paintings actually are, silent and immobile in relation to the movement which they express, or to the creative lapse of time from which they issue). This perception of arrested, suspended life was for Giacometti an experience as overwhelming as that of the mystics, but that modestly affected only the appearance of everyday reality. As though death had come down all around him. Or rather as though he had been transported to a place beyond death where the spectacle of life was like a hideous simulacrum. A frightening sensation, as the quoted passage shows, but at other times an exalting dizzying discovery of a reality completely transformed, saved from all erosion, restored to its virginity. One day in 1946, leaving a movie the falsity of whose images had tormented him, Giacometti thought his eyes had opened for the first time. The Boulevard Montparnasse with its café terraces, its trees, its passersby, plunged him in a daze and a wonder of which he had hardly until then anticipated the possibility. Reality appeared to him suddenly of a richness and beauty superior to all dreams, artistic creations, or the imaginary world of poets. He trembled with emotion before a table or a glass, before reality which is “terribly superior to any surreality,” as Antonin Artaud remarked. At the same time his work with models, particularly Colonel Rol-Tanguy, provokes in the sculptor analogous sensations, but in fortunate circumstances which allow him to explore them more deeply. Returning to the human head, he does not stop at the hard structure he had laid bare and which displayed the motionless presence of death. Rummaging deeper in the face, penetrating the wall of bone which death had applied to it like a mask, he sees and gives to be seen the living depths which inhabit it. For life is within, walled up in the skull and the bones, filtering through the slits of the eyes, circulating in the vertebrae like that pillar of fire which, according to the science of the pharaohs, sustains and irrigates the human edifice. Life gushes forth from death and takes refuge in it. Through an invisible presence, it attracts and retains the eye by acting on the outer appearances of which it is a prisoner, in changing what I see. The vision, simultaneously purified and enlarged by the revelation of the internal dimensions of beings and things, suffices to change the aspect of the world. The latter, finally seen (and not imagined, interpreted, reinvented), is a prodigious, fantastic spectacle, infinitely rich, since everything in it simultaneously reveals and hides its unknown face. The overwhelming effect which depth has on real appearances at these moments must then be seized and expressed by the painter and sculptor.

  10

  To build a wall, the mason adjusts his stones one after the other in a logical order, in this case beginning with the bottom and finishing with the top. Similarly the artist’s labors are subordinated to finishing the work, each of his movements is directed toward that realization and has its own function as does each of the mason’s stones, within the limits of his project. But
because his vision of the world and the meaning of his undertaking command it of him, Giacometti must on the contrary immediately seize and express the whole of the object he is depicting. No one can force a head more quickly out of clay or onto canvas. But having made it appear, he must continue indefinitely to seek it, to approach it, since what he has set out to represent is the distance and the refusal of that head, the impossibility of absolute communication which it means to him. From the first moment, the diabolical mechanism is in operation. Giacometti’s eye and hand never stop. He smokes, chats, thinks of something else, but at the same time in a kind of hypnosis or second state, the eye and the hand continue to come and go, to do and undo, while on the sidelines the painted face or clay figures rise up with haughty intensity, as though detached from the wild effort, the incessant torture which are creating them. When will Giacometti stop? He cannot stop. When he lets a sculpture leave the studio, it is because of an arbitrary, insignificant decision. He does not stop, he interrupts the work in progress. Throughout all the sculptures, paintings, and drawings, he pursues one and the same attempt to approach reality. The work is single, unfinished, impossible.

  His not stopping means that he never stops looking at and depicting what he sees, in any circumstances and at each minute of his life, even if he is not “working.” In the café, he draws on his newspaper, and if he has no newspaper, his finger still runs over the marble top of the table. If his hand is occupied, his eye still draws. He draws as he walks in the street, and when he sleeps. His not stopping means too that Giacometti can only present us the rough draft of an unaccomplished, unfinished undertaking. A reflection, an approximation of reality—of that absolute reality which haunts him—and which he pursues in a kind of amorous or homicidal fury. He pursues it and approaches it. That the end is inaccessible does not as a matter of fact exclude the possibility of progress. And Giacometti places himself in a perspective of progress which seems to him even to obey a law of continuous acceleration. According to this Mallarméan arithmetic, a future minute could represent a year of past work. In a month he could go through as many stages as he once did in ten years; and in front of him seems to stretch the perspective of several lifetimes of work. The fantastic acceleration of the time necessary for creation would thus be the equivalent of a slowing down, a progressive spinning out of the actual duration. His optimism is thus as disproportionate with regard to the relative as his pessimism is categorical with regard to the absolute. Yet people readily accuse him of repeating himself, of marking time, especially when he neglects works (such as The Chariot, Figurine in a Box, The Nose) whose affective, experimental, sometimes anecdotal nature resulted in a seeming diversity. In returning untiringly to the bust of Diego, the standing woman, the walking man, the portrait of the same model, he may discourage the inattentive spectator, but his austere research allows him to concentrate his ways of approaching. The slower his walk toward his goal appears, the more rapid it actually is. Each acquisition is definitive, each progress irreversible. But progress plays only with imponderable elements. A single line can stop it a whole night and hold up the whole work with the question of the exactness of its inflection. Giacometti’s not stopping means also that he does not stop advancing.