Went to see that glorious show again this past Wednesday, the impact is as potent as during the first visit, even if I am extremely familiar with his work.
Here are a few photos we took Wednesday, an album with many more is available on my Facebook page.
The show is ending on the 8th of this month, it will then travel to NY, to the Guggenheim, where it will be on display from June 8 till September 12.
Alberto Giacometti was a modern Sisyphus, he undertook a task that he knew would fail, had to fail, but was so essential, vital, nothing else mattered: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” wrote Beckett, perhaps the friend whose vision of the world most closely resembled his own. “I do not work to create beautiful paintings or sculpture,” Giacometti explained. “Art is only a means of seeing. No matter what I look at, it all surprises and eludes me, and I am not too sure of what I see.”
This is an quote from a great article I wholeheartedly recommend, an article which stresses the enormous difference between fabricating chachkies (exemplified by Picasso and so many others) and the endless search for meaning, “to make the visible visible”, as personified by Alberto Giacometti (incidentally, the first photo in that Guardian article is by my old friend Herbert Matter who, with his wife Mercedes, was a very close friend of Giacometti. Alberto adored Herbert’s photos, he once told him that “your photos make me see my work differently”: http://herbertmatter.org/welcome/giacometti)
Giacometti's work is insane, it is so incredibly “simple”, so very “basic”, he does not try to express anything, he does not attempt to wow anybody, he “simply" wants to show how things appear to him (this is well portrayed in this movie, a movie I am looking forward to see soon, the trailer is fabulous).
It is still possible, no, make that necessary, to work like Giacometti.
As his friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty said, “Each one of us is a brand new point of view on the world”, and Art is (if it is Art) above all a privileged means to explore, discover, and share that point of view.
The rest is mere chachkies making...
Replies
Jean, thanks so much for this. I'm reminded that way back in England, I attended a traveling exhibition of Giacometti's sculptures. I left with a strong conviction that his works--unlike those of other European sculptors such as Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth--had to be seen in person to be fully appreciated. There is just something about the immediate, almost confrontational presence of these that can at best be evoked, but not fully realized, even in excellent photographs such as yours--would you perhaps agree?
In a similar vein, I've attended a fair number of art exhibitions by major artists, only to be frustrated at how grossly even the best photographs of the artworks in the exhibition catalogs would misrepresent almost everything that is important about the works. Thank goodness that we, as digital artists, don't have to suffer through these wrenching gaps!
John,
Many years ago (1974), I took a group of students from Calgary (at the Alberta College of Art where I taught for a number of years) to Montréal, in order to see another major Giacometti exhibition (that was my second, first one was in Paris in 1968, 2 years after his death).
That was a long journey (3.600 km), we were travelling non-stop (about 38 hours) in 2 cars and arrived in Montréal very tired.
As we entered the museum, the first Giacometti sculpture we saw was a standing figure, looking straight at us.
Now, I was/am extremely familiar with Giacometti's work, it is most likely the greatest influence I have been granted throughout my life as an artist, but being tired, I was probably more receptive to some aspects of his work than I would have been in “normal” circumstances, and I was struck by an amazing "fact”: each of his pieces, be they sculptures, drawings or paintings, have a “built-in” distance, the very distance at which he was looking at his model from.
Which means that if you are looking at a figure which was seen and done from a 10 feet distance, you can move closer or further away from the piece, but that distance of the initial seeing is “embedded” in the piece!
In essence, you can look at a piece from 30 feet away, but what you will see is a drawing/painting/sculpture of a figure seen and done from 10 feet away, looked at from 30 feet!
This distance became so obvious, I asked a student to stand in front of a painting and, holding him by the shoulders, I moved him to and fro the painting at about the distance I could see was the initial one, and all of a sudden, the student’s body “froze”, I knew he had connected with it.
I doubt photos can do justice to that (Herbert Matter's photos touch on that sometimes).
Furthermore, my old friends Mercedes and Herbert Matter were close to Giacometti, and he had given them a magnificent bronze bust (one of the many portraits he made of his brother Diego).
I spent much time at my friends’ place when I was teaching at Mercedes’ New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture and often had that bronze sculpture (a rare one, one of his few painted bronzes) in my hands, in my lap, or on a coffee table in front of me.
Now, I have been working on perception all my artist life, have done some deep diving into the pre-verbal “world”, so I am not easily spooked, but this piece was so “real”, I could not take it more than 15 minutes at a time.
This was a tremendous reenforcement of the fact that Art is much more than chachkies/trinkets making, there is a huge difference between searching for meaning and making “stuff” (today’s fads are mostly conceptual “art”, visual karaoke and/or photo-realism. Giacometti: “Realism is balderdash, the problem with it is that it’s got nothing to do with reality!").
If you have the time, read that article in the Guardian I added to my original post, it makes clear the difference between, for example, Picasso’s approach (chachkies), and Giacometti’s.
You are very kind to praise the photos above, they are not all mine, many are by my old friend and former student Maxine Marcovitch.
Maxine was of that initial trip from Calgary to the Giacometti show in Montréal in 1974, and she is also the one who made Mercedes Matter aware of my existence, which eventually resulted in my being invited (coerced would be closer to the truth;-) to NY to teach at Mercedes’ fabulous school (the best years of my life, and not just as a teacher).
But Maxine went bad, she abandoned painting and became a successful architect. ;-)
One last thing about Mercedes (and Herbert) Matter: Herbert had started to write a book on Giacometti based on the many magnificent photos he had taken of Alberto and of his work, but he died in 1984 and Mercedes eventually finished the book on her own.
Here’s an interesting article about Mercedes Matter, she had an incredible life, rich, intense, crazy, touching, generous, worthy of being set to film.
She was a formidable friend, in fact, she still is, “people die for real only when we no longer remember them".
As for digital art pieces escaping the tyranny of bad photographs and catalogues, having had a real life (with exhibitions and more) in the natural media world before being forced (health reasons) to move into the digital universe, I can assure you that we face the very same problems: just find a way to see you work on somebody else’s computer, or in festivals in a variety of movie theatres, and you will see that your colours and more can take one hell of a beating!
One of the main issues is that of monitor/projector calibration: most people set the brightness to make their monitor(s) work like searchlights, the subtle blue hue you worked hard to obtain on your system may turn out purple on somebody else’s monitor, if not totally bleached out on another’s.
It used to be “we are limited by the imagination of our viewers” to which we can now add “and by the calibration and the limitations of the hardware they use to see it”.
Jean, thanks for these fascinating reminiscences etc., and I've greatly enjoyed the articles!