APPROACHES - In The Words Of . . . .
From: Ferrier, Jean-Louis, Director and Yann le Pichon, Walter D. Glanze [English Translation]. Art of Our Century, The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present. New York: Prentice-Hall Editions. 1988.
Giacometti's work makes our universe even more unbearable for me, so much it seems that this artist was able to distance what was troubling to his gaze and discover what would remain of man when the pretenses had been removed.
Beauty has no origin but the hurt, unique, different for each of us, hidden or visible, that everyone keeps inside himself, which he preserves, and where he retreats when he wants to leave the world behind for temporary but profound solitude, it is therefore very far removed from that brand of art that we call "Miserabilism." Giacometti's art, it seems to me, wants to discover that secret hurt in every being and even in every thing, in order to illuminate them.
His statues evoke that curious feeling in me: They are familiar, they walk in the street. And yet, they go back into the depths of time, to the origin of everything, they draw near and pull away ceaselessly. In sovereign immobiity. As my gaze attempts to tame them, to draw near to them, they--but without fury, without wrath or condemnation, merely because of a distance between them and me that was so con pressed that I had not noticed it and so small that it made them think they were very close-fade from view: For that distance between them and me has suddenly opened up. Where are they going? While their image is still visible, where are they?
It is hard for me to understand what they call an innovator in art. Is it by future generations that a work is to be understood? But why? And what will that mean? That they can use it? For what? I don't understand. But I understand much better--albeit very dimly--that every work of art if it hopes to attain grandiose proportions, must, with infinite patience and application from the time of its creation, go back through the millennia and re-enter, if it can, the immemorial night peopled with the dead who will recognize themselves in this work.
No, the work of art is not meant for the generations of children. It is offered up to the innumerable people of the dead. Who approve it. Or reject it. But those dead people of whom I have been speaking have never been alive. Or I am forgetting. They were alive enough to be forgotten, and for the purpose of crossing that tranquil shore where hey await a sign--from here--that they recognize.
Jean Genet, "L'atelier d'Alberto Giacometti" [Excerpt] L'Arbalète, 1958
[An Exerpt From: Ferrier, Jean-Louis, Director and Yann le Pichon, Walter D. Glanze [English Translation]. Art of Our Century, The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present. New York: Prentice-Hall Editions. 1988. p. 627]
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