Giacometti destroys his statues, dozens of them. Giacometti’s aim, Sartre writes, is ‘not to glut galleries with new works but to prove that sculpture is possible by carving’. But how will be do this? It is as simple, Sartre says, as Diogenes proving the possibility of movement to Parmenides and Zeno by simply walking up and down. Yet that simplicity is hard to achieve. Giacometti: ‘If I only knew how to make one, I could make them by the thousands ...’
Giacometti's workshop is full of dust, everything is covered in the dust of his tenacious carving. Still, if he destroys his statues, this is the correlate of a desire to escape the heaviness of the material with which he works. ‘Never was substance less eternal, more fragile, more nearly human’, Sartre comments. ‘Giacometti's substance--this strange flour that slowly settles over his studio and buries it, that seeps under his nails and into the deep wrinkles on his face--is the dust of space’.
The dust of space: this is what remains as Giacometti resists the attempt to erect the monument, to fill space. ‘Giacometti knows that there is nothing superfluous about a living person because everything is function. He knows that space is a cancer that destroys being, that devours everything.’ Everything is function: reading these lines is to be reminded of the terms Sartre sets in motion in Being and Nothingness: projection, transcendence, the struggle to exist ...
Everything is function: this is why, for Sartre, it is necessary for the sculpture who would seek the true semblance of the human being to pare away all superfluity, to reduce what is sculpted to a bare frame. Giacometti’s intention ‘is not to offer us an exact image but to produce likenesses which, though they make no pretence at being anything other than what they are, arouse in us feelings and attitudes ordinarily elicited by the presence of real men’.
How is this possible? The classical sculptor is constrained by his own imitative practices. His temptation is to realise blocky substantiality, imposing presence: to concentrate in the sculpture every likeness to his model he can find. In this way, he seeks to eliminate his own perspective, to attain, with the sculpted form, an absolute semblance, but it is the absolute that is lost. For he carries with him the presumption that the human occupies perceived space as would any object.
Then how might one sculpt the absolute? When Giacometti accepts the relativity of a perspective – when he as it were pushes the sculpture back into an indefinite space, it is at the same absolute he aims. Sartre emphasises that for Giacometti, the human being is presented at a distance: ‘He creates a figure "ten steps away" or "twenty steps away," and do what you will, it remains there. The result is a leap into the realm of the unreal since its relation to you no longer depends on your relation to the block of plaster--the liberation of Art.’ The image is liberated from the material; it becomes art insofar as it is released into the indefinite.
What does this mean? For Giacometti, certainly, sculptors have been guilty in not sculpting what they see:
Even Rodin still took measurements when making his busts. He didn’t model a head as he actually saw it in space, at a certain distance, as I see you now with this distance between us. He really wanted to make a parallel in clay, the exact equivalent of the head’s volume in space. So basically it wasn’t visual but conceptual.
He goes on to claim that to model what is seen would lead to the creation of a ‘rather flat, scarcely modulated sculpture that would be much closer to a Cycladic sculpture, which has a stylised look, than to a sculpture by Rodin or Houdin, which has a realistic look’. Giacometti also outlines the dangers of monumentality – even large sculpture is, he claims, ‘only small sculpture blown up’. The five metre tall sculptures in front of the Egyptian temple only become sculpture when seen from a distance of forty metres. Compared to prehistoric art, or to that of the Sumerian or the Chinese, contemporary sculpture remains conceptual, cerebral: it depicts what is known rather than what is seen.
For Sartre, the point is more complex. ‘From mere space Giacometti therefore had to fashion a man, to inscribe movement in total immobility, unity in infinite multiplicity, the absolute in pure relativity, the future in the eternal present, the loquacity of signs in the tenacious silence of things’. The sculptor is able to close the gap between that great bursting forth, existence, and the rocky substance of his medium. What is seen is what we live.
Of one sculpture, Sartre writes:
The martyred creature was only a woman but she was all woman --glimpsed, furtively desired, retreating in the distance with the comic dignity of fragile, gangling girls walking lazily from bed to bathroom in their high-heeled shoes and with the tragic horror of scarred victims of a holocaust or famine; all woman--exposed, rejected, near, remote; all woman--with traces of hidden leanness showing through alluring plumpness and hideous leanness mollified by suave plumpness; all woman--in danger here on earth but no longer entirely on earth, living and relating to us the astounding adventure of flesh, our adventure. For she chanced to be born, like us.
Our adventure, our existence, our life: we see ourselves in his sculpted woman. What is doubled, what I see, is the springing forth of what, in me, is as yet undetermined. Would it be possible to say, for Sartre, that before Giacometti's sculptures I come face to face with my freedom?