If we admit of a diameter at the base equal to five kilometers, the surface of the dome will be approximately 60 km2. This approximate calculation is based on a cone truncated at a height of five kilometers and of bases of 0.5 and 2.5 km. Since the thickness of the shell supporting the city is 50 meters, the volume of the shell will be approximately 3 km3. Now, a city like Paris (which serves as our model), with a density of 500 inhabitants per hectare, forms a layer of a thickness of 22 m2, and 5,000,000 inhabitants occupy on the average, with their houses, their public buildings, their industries, and their parks and traffic areas, a volume of 2.2 km3 or a total of 10,000 hectares.
That is to say an average weight of 400 kilograms per square meter of floor (= ultralight materials, plastic or metal, of very slight volume, thanks to the spatial industries which will thus find outlets on Earth); seven stories. 400 kg/m2 = 2800 kg/m2 for the three-quarters of the city’s hectares, the remaining fourth being formed by streets and green areas. Consequently the total weight of the city will be of (3/4) 10,000 hectares 2800 kg/m2 = 210,000,000 metric tons to be distributed over a circular ring on the ground 250 meters wide and with a perimeter of 16 kilometers, with a pressure on the ground of 5 kg/mm2.
Here then is an aspect of an agglomeration, like the one stretching from Washington to Boston, with several tens of millions of inhabitants lodged in the shells of the cosmic cities, situated on a plain between the sea and mountains.
Art and Literature 10 (Autumn 1966).
JACQUES DUPIN
(1927–2012)
TEXTS FOR AN APPROACH
1
Each work by Giacometti is the looming of a separate presence which reveals itself as a totality, or rather as the movement and the demands of a totality that awaits only our consent in order to be finished, accomplished—and called into question again. It may initiate us, but it also deprives us at the same time of our instruments of analysis and investigation, our questionnaire and our references. It discourages and ruins any gradual accession to knowledge of itself. It subjugates us at once by a kind of silent commotion which keeps us, but at a distance, in the grip of a gaze whose intensity is almost unbearable. If we can bear this look, if we accept the fascination it exerts, we ourselves become the locus of an acute questioning which obtains no other reply than the same interrogative, fascinated space opening up inside us. Through this movement of our being, this unconditional acceptance, we supply a meaning, but an absolute one, to the sculptor’s activity; an outlet, but a fictive one, for his torment; a new object for his thirst to destroy. Through this act we accept to be changed into Giacometti’s people, that is, figures of petrified incompletion; and we reopen for him the space which he again closes around us. From this work which renders such a transmutation not only necessary but possible, I can speak only as a stranger, or at most as an accomplice with a faulty memory, a victim determined to keep up the misunderstanding.
And in fact the written word, condemned to deviousness, tries desperately to find the sudden approach again and is tormented by nostalgia for it. It tries to re-create the strangely active space of that work by attacking it from several sides, as one reconstitutes illusively the unity of a sculpture by multiplying one’s vantage points. In its fragmentary pursuit it takes the same path a dozen times, while certain areas remain inexplicably barred to it. Too close to its object, it petrifies and consumes it; too far away, it loses its way and disintegrates in a maze of expectancy that has no beginning. Entangled in lacunae and contradictions, it leaves behind nothing but the muddled traces of an approach, scattered fragments, the least significant debris, spared by the flames, of an imaginary edifice which had to be abandoned.
2
It begins with the painful awareness of solitude, a desire to communicate with others, with the world, and anguish before the recognized impossibility of that communication. No matter how near he may be, how affectionate, how understanding, that other person can do nothing for me and I can do nothing for him: We speak but do not hear each other; we touch without knowing each other. Or almost. But that almost is not enough, or is just enough to enrage the man who refuses to give up. A gulf separates us, a vacuum we secrete, a distance which our lucidity and our efforts to narrow it only make more painful. This distance, this vacuum which turns Diego into a stranger, which turns a chair into an incomprehensible, uncertain, dangerous object … Face to face with this vertigo and this fear, Giacometti seizes a pencil, a brush, a handful of clay … By copying what he sees, as his father taught him when he was a boy, he hopes to give consistency to the reality which eludes him, to see it, hold on to it, and hence to affirm himself in its presence. And as he copies it he advances toward the most exact portrayal of what he sees, but also toward awareness of the absolute impossibility of this attempt. The affective ordeal becomes identified with his experience of the perception which objectifies the inner drama. His procedure turns into a stubborn, furious pursuit of a prey which escapes him or of a shadow which he rejects. The closer he comes to the truth of the object, the more he deepens the gulf which separates him from it, the more he feels and communicates the acute feelings of his difference and his separation.
Have others succeeded in finding what he searches for in vain? In museums Giacometti hunts that truth, which is not realism but likeness, with the same avidity. By turns he imagines that he has captured it in Venice with Tintoretto, in Padua with Giotto, in the Cimabues of Assisi, in Corot, in Cézanne. As he draws he falls in love; he copies “almost everything that has been created since the beginning of time.” In Chaldea, Fayum, Byzantium, the Egyptians—especially the Egyptians—he imagines he has really found that unexpected likeness. But no matter how promising the trail is, the reality of a tree or of three girls walking ahead of him dissolves what was once again only the marvelous illusion of art. It is impossible to render, hence to know, reality; but the impossibility is fascinating and its temptation irresistible. Solitude closes in once more on man, but man’s fate is to strive without respite and without hope, to open a breach in the wall of his prison. Through series of trials, failures, leaps ahead which are but the varied moments of a single experience, Giacometti approaches the inaccessible goal he assigned himself, and at the same time expresses the lyric investigation of a conscience tortured by the impossibility of communication. This expression of a private drama, determining an aesthetic style, insures his success with the public, while the advance of his art on the level on which he himself places it, that of realistic representation, leaves his admirers indifferent. Yet these two aspects of his experience are inseparable, and the fertile ambiguity of his work is the direct result of his fierce attachment to the subject.
From this standpoint, Giacometti is today as far removed from abstract painters as from figurative artists. For the latter, with rare exceptions, reality is only a point of departure, a springboard. They use it and play upon it; it presents them with no problem; still less does it confront them with its refusal. Giacometti, on the other hand, does not interpret reality deliberately; instead he strives to copy what he sees, simply, “stupidly,” desperately. He plants himself in front of the model and works from life; he copies in a way that no one dares to. His attitude is in absolute contradiction to all the tendencies and experiments of his time and the theories which justify them. He is alone in his century and against everyone, clinging to his obsession, against the current in spite of himself. He opposes everyone and yet no one is indignant at this intransigent, insolent behavior. In museums and private collections his works are placed near paintings and sculptures whose meaning and basis they contradict, whose very meaning as works of art they contest. How is it that the scandal has not yet broken out? Why has no one rid our cities of these men who walk against time, of this woman who stands like a silent challenge, of the many insistent, haunted faces who emerge from the walls like proof of those depths whose name we no longer have the right to pronounce? How is it that we tolerate this single, inexorable question, we who open the door
only to answers?
3
In his studio, Giacometti seizes a handful of earth, mounts it on an armature, and kneads it for a few seconds. A standing woman has emerged, living and indomitable, fortifying and satisfying my expectation. But the moment I dream of taking her away with me, Giacometti’s work begins, that work which has no beginning continues. Abrupt and infinite birth, dizzying spectacle in whose presence I can hardly banish the strange feeling of being personally involved. Agility and sureness of those hands, running from the top to the base and from the base to the top, as though over a wild keyboard. Each isolated gesture here seems meaningless. Yet their rapid succession and the ease of their sequence gives the impression of a mysterious necessity. And this stratagem, this ballet, this struggle goes on for nights and for months on end. Furious and futile activity, necessary and tedious, in which the positive act and the destructive act join and become indistinguishable, weaving the same creative duration without beginning or end, from which the standing woman draws her authority, her grace, and her separateness.
Abrupt and infinite birth, and, rather than a finished work, a continual work. The essential purpose of the sculptor’s gestures seems to be to keep up a dialogue between the figure and himself, to perpetuate a living exchange, to unite them both in an intimacy and an expectation which little by little would take the place of that communication whose impossibility fascinates him. As I look at them, the figure and the hand begin to form a single being, at once self-contained and in perpetual gestation, a being which never ceases to live and yet is always beginning to live, to perpetuate itself and to become visible.
With any other artist it would be theoretically possible to determine exactly what a single touch of color or a stroke of the chisel brings to the work in progress, for each gesture adds itself to the preceding one, modifying the part and the whole, causing the work to advance toward its end (the end proposed or supposed from the beginning). Giacometti’s gesture is of another sort. His repeating, his reexamining contradict the deforming brutality of each particular intervention. To make and unmake incessantly is to diminish, to deaden each gesture, to drown it gently in sequence and number, as the sea absorbs its waves. Thus the figure I am watching him model seems to me at first indifferent to the cruel attentions the sculptor inflicts on her. Kneaded with an imperious, violent touch, so fragile an apparition must, it would seem, inevitably return to the chaos from which it came. Yet it resists. The destructive assaults it endures modify it only imperceptibly. Their repetition immunizes and protects it, allowing it to live its life on the sidelines. It accepts them and grows accustomed to them; soon it can no longer do without this rough, rude caress. In fact its autonomy and its identity spring out of this torture, on condition that it be limitless. From the exact distance which it needs in order to subjugate us, it calls with its desire for this punishment which fashions it and strips it bare, which detaches it and strengthens it, to surge at each moment out of the void. Immediately this standing woman erects before my eyes her fierce, mysterious presence. With the promptness of lightning she strikes me without giving herself. But at the same time, because she yields nothing of herself—nothing but her totality—she does not drain my desire and her refusals paradoxically develop an enduring power of attraction. I obtain all of her at first glance—that is, her distant, separate being—and losing her so quickly makes her newly desirable to me, with a desire no sooner fulfilled than renewed. Simultaneously she attracts me, pinions me, and keeps me at a distance. Because she is both the looming of a presence and the inexhaustible possibility of communication by default, she advances on me and recoils at the same moment, or rather outside of time. There is in her structure as well as in her unfurled power a resolved conflict which remains conflict. That is, a tension which submits and does not destroy itself. An integrity which reestablishes itself incessantly in the perpetual motion of the opening and the destruction which it provokes. Every work of Giacometti, like this figure, draws its sovereign affirmation from the interrogative space which it renders visible, from its refusal, its withdrawal, from that menacing and nourishing lived period of time which makes and unmakes it.
4
There is, or at least there was, an instinct of cruelty in Giacometti, a need for destruction which closely conditioned his creative activity. From earliest childhood the obsession of a sexual murder provoked and directed certain imaginary performances, like the cruel, darkly romantic reverie he recounts in Hier, sables mouvants. He was fascinated by accounts of battles. The spectacle of violence intrigued and terrified him. Formerly, with chance acquaintances or friends, especially women, he could not refrain from imagining how he might kill them. Many of his early drawings are illustrations for the bloodiest episodes in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, which were his preferred reading. Certain of the sculpture objects from his Surrealist period stem directly from his attraction to scenes of horror linked with erotic obsessions, torture, and madness. Man and Woman of 1928–29 is an almost abstract portrayal of a sexual murder or rape. The man is slender, bent like a blade for the terrible pickaxe blow he is leveling at the round, concave, half-inverted form of the woman’s body, which is surmounted by a broken line, like a scream or a flash of lightning. In The Cage of 1931, the forms tear and devour each other in a climate of convulsiveness. Another sculpture is Woman with Her Throat Cut. In Point with Eye of 1931, a kind of long, sharp point, held in equilibrium by a nail which pierces it, menaces the eye of a tiny skull-like head fastened to a stem. The suggestion of a destructive act, halted at the fatal moment of its accomplishment, appears again in Taut Thread, in which a kind of flower-woman, graceful and delicate, is about to be crushed by a curved rod, like a spring which only a very thin thread holds in check.
And if Giacometti admires Callot’s engravings to the point of devoting a text to them, it is because he finds striking similarities with his own obsessions in them. “There is nothing but scenes of massacre and destruction, torture and rape, fire and shipwreck,” he writes. But at the same time, in Callot as in Goya, the scenes of horror and the figures of monsters or madmen are strangely linked to the same insistent evocation of emptiness, the same treatment with incisive lines which seem to rend space.
The sensation of the void which separates beings, isolates them from the world, and plants an obstacle to communication is at the origins of Giacometti’s instinct of cruelty. One does not violate the creature who consents but the one who refuses. The recourse to violence is nothing but an extreme, desperate means of provoking the impossible encounter. Giacometti’s relation to reality, and his relation to his sculpture or his canvas are tinged with violence in proportion to the dissatisfaction to which they drive him. It is not compensation for defeat but an instrument designed to combat the fatality of failure, reverse situations, penetrate the fortress. Giacometti cares little about caressing things, playing with their external appearance, the light which enfolds them, the color which diversifies them. He never shows us matter at rest, a smooth structure, a polished surface. He does not linger over appearances, but he destroys them, breaks into them by force. Hence the grinding motion when he sculpts: He kneads the earth in a rage, as though to question it incessantly and grasp its secrets through torture. In his painting he never works over all the parts of the canvas equally. The manner of a tranquil promenader in a garden is utterly foreign to him. He creates a sensitive zone on the surface (determined by the subject), focuses desperately on it and devotes all his energies to it, attacking a single point as though he wished to open a breach in a wall. He must penetrate, force his way into things, into beings, and into himself, and violence should enable him to enter by surprise, overturning the barriers in a single stroke. But whatever the depth holds, it also withholds and defends the access to it with ferocity. It does not surrender after a single assault. And each refusal provokes a new violation. One must repeat the attempt continually, endlessly keep up an act of murderous interrogation and dispute. Giacometti advances only
through a havoc of canvases, a hecatomb of statues. He seems to raise destruction to the level of a method. At certain times not a single work finds favor with him. And he mistreats his life as fiercely as he does his work. In his studio a rubble of broken plaster, naked armatures, abandoned or mutilated sculptures are so many vestiges of massacres, fêtes of exasperated fury.
5
In the center of the tiny, cluttered studio, lit by a skylight, Diego poses, sitting immobile and resigned on a stool: He is used to it. But Alberto, in spite of having examined his brother’s face for almost fifty years, is not yet used to it. He is just as astonished as he was on the very first day before this unknown, immeasurable head, which defies and refuses him, which offers only its refusal. If he approaches his brother, the latter’s head grows out of all proportion, becomes gigantic and threatening, ready to topple on him like a mountain or the angry face of a god. But if he backs away a few paces Diego recedes into infinity: His tiny, dense head seems a planet suspended in the immense void of the studio. In any case, and whatever the distance, it forbids him to approach. It looms abruptly, a separate, irreducible entity. The pure questioning of the eye, purged of all the habits which impede it, transforms Diego’s familiar head into something unknown. “We know what a head is,” exclaimed André Breton one day, disappointed and irritated that Giacometti preferred reality to the imaginary. We do indeed know what a head is. But the knowledge, precisely, is what Giacometti is struggling against. This false knowledge, the unverified heritage which our laziness accepts and passes on, this pretend knowledge which is the opposite of knowing and the real obstacle to the eye. The mental figuring of reality has expelled true, living perception. We do not know what a head is, and we need only look a little closer to see that we do not.
Collected French Translations: Prose Page 37