Collected French Translations: Prose

by Ashbery, John

  11

  We walk in the street with our eyes closed. We see only through the deforming prism of contracted habits, of a blinding knowledge: We see those passersby only as we know they are. If I call this knowledge in doubt, if I purify my eye of all the mental correctives which dull and estrange it, everything changes. These same passersby issue from a wide lateral opening; the immense space which imprisons them makes them appear small, thin, nibbled by the void, almost undifferentiated and especially elongated, drawn out by the accentuation of their verticality. The eye does not distinguish, at first, the butcher boy from the office worker. Its spatial perception retains almost nothing of their peculiar natures, except the indications of their movements: This one walks, that one leans toward the ground, that other one holds out his arm. It is thus that the eye really sees and it is thus that Giacometti represents beings and things: in their distance, in their space, hence by depicting that space, by incorporating into his figures the distance which separates them from him. He represents what he sees and sees what one doesn’t dare see, because he has been able to effect a true liberation which is not that of reality but that of the vision. He has thus brought himself to the antipodes of the teaching of the Academy, anatomy, and the classical tradition, which disregard the distance of the subject and demand that one respect reality as it is and not as it appears. That reality, objective and measurable, is an object of science, not the subject of a work of art.

  The purified perception of Giacometti is equally opposed to the instantaneous and mechanical objectivity of photography. The lens does not transmit distance and does not know how to sort out and grade the messages it receives. It collects, and transmits to us a mass of information which the eye would in reality gather by repeated forays. It transcribes everything but the essential, our relation to the subject, that is, it sees nothing or it kills what it sees. Also the lens is at best an eye cut off from life, with no connection to the density of existence, to the experience and depth of a human being. The eye on the other hand plunges its root, its optic nerve, into a rich and active interior which intervenes strongly in the phenomenon of perception, projecting inner space into real space to modify its coloring. The visual distance is added and combined with an affective distance which, in Giacometti’s case, will move the person or thing looked at ever farther away. Finally the photographic lens operates instantaneously; the artist, in his relation to his model, establishes duration. The new, penetrating look which sees the model for the first time at every moment, with the freshness, intensity, and violence of the first meeting, must paradoxically be attained through the exercise of prolonged contemplation, through insistent questioning. The essential is not granted at first glance. This virginity of the sight, its power to lay bare and deepen a relationship, might even be the inaccessible goal of continual interrogation; one can but dream of it and work at approaching it. Thus the model is not represented the way she is, nor the way anyone might see her, but the way that a unique individual, with his particular memory and affectivity, patiently questions her and questions himself through her. In one sense the artist always creates a self-portrait.

  The characteristics of this vision are more clearly highlighted at certain stages in the sculptor’s experience. Thus, from 1940 to 1945, Giacometti, without seeking anything but life, the likeness of a head, or a figure, experienced with each try the same phenomenon: The figure’s size diminished progressively until it became tiny and often completely disappeared. The figurines which survive are astonishingly true in their distance and in the expression of their separate lives. Reduction obliges one to take a total view of oneself, hence to become strongly aware of all the space around one. They are small in size but big in proportion. For the first time Giacometti dissociates dimension and proportion in expressing size, and this discovery will have the most fertile consequences. As they become tiny, the figures call attention to the enormity of their pedestals, and this disproportion defines their distance. Soon Giacometti will translate the “remoteness” of the personage by playing with the relation of the figure to the pedestal: The larger the pedestal in relation to the sculpture, the farther away the figure appears to be. The precision of this quantitative measure contrasts with the inevitable but highly significant imprecision in the treatment of details. Obviously there can be no question of modeling the ear or the hand of a man no taller than a fingernail. But one sees that this forced imprecision contributes to the rightness and the truth of the ensemble. The impossibility of stopping at the part sends one back to the whole, communicates the sensation of the totality of the figure in space. This discovery too is decisive. It will allow Giacometti, around 1946, to return to sculptures of normal dimensions. The characteristics of the tiny figurines, inherent in their size, will survive in dimensions which no longer oblige them, this time expressing the distant totality of the personage. In addition, we find again in the sculptures of this period the imprecise construction, the disproportion of the volume of the pedestal. The determining of space will also be effectuated simply by boundaries in the form of rods which outline the edges of a cube, as in the Cages, or else by placing the figure between two rectangular opaque boxes, as in Figurine in a Box. Whatever their dimensions, the figures are large in their proportions; their thinning and lengthening communicate violently the feeling of an immediate presence. The lengthening is in a way the plastic translation of the words “he arises” or “he stands up” which correspond both to the pure perception of a man in space and to the feeling of incommunicability and separation which Giacometti experiences.

  The rendering of movement in the sculptures, starting in 1947, is another consequence of distant, spatial perception. The movement, the attitude, the gesture disturb space, cut it up, sculpt it, and the eye records its slightest changes. Giacometti did several versions of the Walking Man, the Capsizing Man, The Hand, The Man with a Finger, because he was struck by signs of movement in his vision of space. But inversely he treats such subjects in order to communicate his distant vision and to render visible the space around a figure. To sculpt a walking man is also, in a sense, to depict space agitated and modified by the walker’s passing.

  Finally, the movement of one figure leads almost inevitably to depicting the movements, conjugated or not, of several figures. An immobile figure surrounds itself with closed space. A figure in motion opens space and attracts other figures there, without however meeting them; in open space, solitude is plural.

  From 1948 to 1949 date the Group of Figures and the Square; the pedestal widens, becomes the very precisely circumscribed place which permits walking men to pass each other by in mutual ignorance, to avoid without seeing one another. Impenetrable solitudes in motion, but subtly attuned by the unity of place and space which they reveal. A hidden organizer still directs the respective placing and orientation of the figures. The Square and Forest of 1950 are on the contrary free of this constraint. Looking at the floor of his studio arbitrarily strewn with figurines placed close to one another, Giacometti found that they “worked” just as they were, that they formed a whole as satisfying as the composed groups. And he had them cast. But one should not imagine that this result was a triumph of objective chance. If several isolated figures are right in actual space, the group they form by being brought together—whatever their differences of position, orientation and scale—will be necessarily right as well. Outside in the street, any group of passersby is as “true” as a single individual, because it is situated in actual space. A director is necessary only in conventional space—in the theater or in painting.

  12

  When I mention the anguish of communication in connection with Giacometti, I mean the impossibility of absolute communication and not the difficulty of being and living with others. For, since childhood, Giacometti always loved to charm, dominate, and fascinate, and his gifts, his intelligence, his charm and physical ascendancy, his cleverness and obstinacy, the force of his singular personality, apparent to everyone, did in fact enable hi
m to charm, dominate, and fascinate in all circumstances. At school in Schiers he was gifted in all branches of learning and passionately fond of literature, science, politics, and, of course, the arts. His precocious intelligence, his amazing memory, and his faculty of assimilation enabled him to take up any new studies and investigate them thoroughly without sacrificing the time necessary for conversation, games, and friendship.

  He so pleased his teachers that he was given permission to set up his first studio in an empty loft at the school. His friendships with classmates were as easy as his relationships with his parents and brothers had been; they have remained close, affectionate, understanding, and free. Since then, whether at the Grande Chaumière, among the painters of Montparnasse, or at the center of the Surrealist group, he never had any real difficulty in his relations with others. On the contrary, he attracts and charms the people he meets or seeks out, for he seeks contact with others with a passion and an avidity which one day caused him to remark: “I would give all my works for a conversation.”

  And yet … And yet an obscure and profound dissatisfaction subsists which he is all the more compelled to project into the absolute since he can scarcely nourish it with failures in ordinary human relations. Fully gratified, Giacometti remains essentially destitute. Surrounded, admired, he only experiences his solitude the more, and with it, the temptation of a total communication through murder or love but even more by an annihilation in love, or through the work of art, but in that case in the infinite pursuit of an impossible work of art. What he retains from childhood, what he writes of in any case, is not the games or rambles in the countryside but the memory of certain objects or certain places, “trees and stones more than anything,” in which he recognized a friendly, protecting presence. A shelter dug in the snow, for instance, or

  a golden-colored monolith with the mouth of a cave at its base: Water had completely hollowed it out inside. The entrance was long and low, barely as tall as we were at that time. Inside, certain places were deeper than others, and at the very back it seemed as if there were another tiny cave. It was my father who showed us this monolith one day. What a tremendous discovery. I at once felt this rock as a friend; it called to us, smiled at us, like someone you used to know and love and whom you discover again with infinite surprise and joy.

  He adds: “All the rest was vague and insubstantial, air which catches hold of nothing.”

  All the rest, that is, the outside, the distance from the others, that immeasurable and foreign space for which Giacometti tried to substitute an enclosed, auspicious place, the monolith, the studio, and above all the often-pursued space of the work itself. At this price, proportion becomes real, entrenchment fertile, and the approach to another, to the unknown, a fantastic adventure to be undertaken. But the privileged space is obtained only for an instant, to vanish and spark the pursuit once again. The interior is as threatening and as fleeting as the exterior. The studio is only a fragile transparent prison suspended in the void and enclosing it. At each moment one must lay its foundations, rebuild it again. Four walls, or any other boundary, against the dispersal, loss, or change of something essential whose growth and chances must be safeguarded against external aggression and internal disintegration. But above all to prepare oneself to face under less precarious circumstances that aggression and disintegration which inevitably occur. Thus Giacometti leaves the studio and himself only the better to return to them; he does not leave. He is the opposite of an escaped prisoner; he is a recluse. Is he immobile, halted? Quite the contrary, but he has chosen once and for all to do without the illusory aid of open space and so to travel more freely, that is with extreme difficulty, in the only dimension in which he hopes to advance: depth.

  Giacometti shuts himself up, concentrates. He remains faithful to his friends, his passions, his obsessions. He has occupied the same studio for thirty-five years, haunts the same neighborhood, the same cafés, and has changed nothing in his way of life, as singular as it is regular and almost ritualistic. In the same way he doesn’t attempt to vary his subjects, the attitude of his models, the lighting in his work, the colors of his palette. He is capable of shutting himself up for a hundred nights on end with the same model, of tracking the same face a hundred nights on end. He detests change and disdains travel.

  The only journey which Giacometti regularly allows himself is not a journey but a return. Just as, in the studio, he will step back so as to tear himself away from a sculpture, to recapture it and regain control at a distance, so he returns periodically to be with his mother in Stampa, in the mountain valley where his roots are. A high, narrow valley, where the mountains are Swiss but the dialect Italian. This is all I know of the place. Of his mother I know only a few portraits and the almost sacred feeling of admiration and piety her son has for her. Yet it is impossible to come near Giacometti without turning toward her. She personifies the presence and the permanence of that deep-rooted fire which sustains the sculptor’s work and his existence, that source and that foundation to which he is attached by an essential bond. A nutritive bond which allowed him to leave home without expatriating himself, to expose himself to the dangers of an extreme adventure without breaking with his beginnings. She is the pole, the fixed center that assures the orientation and the tension of this spiritual experience. A watchful and silent guardian, she seems by her presence alone to nourish a tradition, not a repertory of obsolete forms but an inexhaustible lode of energy. Through her mediation, Giacometti’s link with the earth, with the substratum, with depth, is as powerful as it is invisible. One feels behind each of the sculptor’s gestures, each of his words, the impulsive force and the subterranean echo of a back country which he does not need to reveal, that is, to verify, so secretly active is it within him. His mother seems by her demeanor alone a proof of this. In addition, her great age, to whose trials she seems immune, gives her an almost mythological dimension. One is tempted to evoke some inaccessible and benevolent mother-goddess, firmly entrenched in her mountain, and, like the monolith, destined to conjure away dangers. Outside of her, of what she personifies, illuminates, and permits, “all the rest is vague and insubstantial, air which catches hold of nothing.”

  13

  It is arbitrary to separate Giacometti’s paintings from his sculpture. His first picture, Apples, dates from 1913; his first sculpture, a head of Diego, from 1914. Since then the sculptor has always painted, the painter has always sculpted. The two means of expression are nothing for him but the tools of the same research and the same experiment. They complete each other, support each other mutually; the exchanges between them are constant and each advance in one has immediate repercussions on the other. It may happen that color brings a confirmation or an indication to the expression of a modeled figure, and Giacometti has in fact often dreamed of painting all his sculptures. Inversely, the subject of a picture is often a figure on its pedestal or sculptures in the studio. In these cases the remoteness of the figure is increased by this figuration twice removed, which locates it on the inside of a double transparent enclosure. For the problems of distance with which we have seen the sculptor struggling pose themselves in identical terms and with the same intensity to the painter. Only the circumstances differ: Deprived of the faculty of playing with real space, Giacometti has to find in the two dimensions of his canvas other means of creating distance than those he uses in sculpture.

  Hence he almost always surrounds his compositions with a false frame of neutral color or rough drawing. This tangible limit traced by hand attenuates first of all the geometric rigidity of the stretcher. Above all it allows us to see the subject through an indefinite and ambiguous opening which at once creates the illusion of remoteness. This false window plays the role of the “cages” in the sculpture, tightening space and increasing its density as one might compress a gas. The painter will still determine the measurement of the distance with precision by effecting the dimensions, the proportions, and the construction of the false window. But he does not resolve
this problem in the abstract, through some mental operation; on the contrary he seeks his “distance” on the scene of the action, the canvas, by successive estimates and gropings whose traces remain visible. So that the manifestation of this blind search for a distance at once tactile and metaphysical also has the character of an anxious appeal, a wait, an entreaty as though the favor of the gods would confirm the surveyor’s ungrateful task.