We know why Giacometti was drawn to Surrealism: like Breton and his friends, he was fascinated by alchemy and by its conjunction with psychoanalysis – in the general claim, which both practices shared (as Silbere’s studies brought out): the sexualisation of matter (it is in this context one might understand Breton’s call for an occultation of Surrealism in the second Surrealist Manifesto – if he expelled Bataille, this was to keep a place only for those evolved individuals who were sufficiently pure. The early Giacometti, abandoning the naturalism of his father’s paintings, would mix occult symbols with personal symbols in his work.
But Giacometti broke away from Surrealism. By 1947, he became one of Sartre’s circle, no longer allying himself with Breton. But what precipitated this change? Laurie Wilson provides several indications. There was the influence of Egyptian art – Giacometti’s fascination with Akhenaten, the young Pharoah who called for a new religion of the sun. The physical similarity is unmistakable: both had a long chin, thick lips, splindly legs, long arms; but there are also other parallels – both had dominating mothers, close relationships to beautiful young sisters; both attempted to turn over their father’s way of understanding the world.
More specifically, Egyptian art, according to Schaefer – an authority with whose work Giacometti was familiar – was not realistic, but an attempt to depict the essence of a person rather than real appearance. Schaefer attacked the Greek discovery of the artistic representation of perspective because it breaks with the way in which we remember images – frontally or as a profile. Giacometti says enthusiastically: ‘no other sculptures as closely resemble real people as Egyptian sculpture’; but resemblance to what? Not simply to the sculptor’s models. True, the portraits of Diego, Giacometti’s brother, are noticeably portraits of this and not another individual. But it seems Giacometti has another kind of resemblance in mind.
Perhaps the sculptures allow something else to emerge, bringing the model into proximity with what Blanchot calls the image.
In an interview Giacometti claimed he always turns familiar models into strangers: ‘You are no longer the person I though I knew. You no longer have any particular characteristic. As for individuality, you become a generalised head, the head of everyone.’ Such impersonality was already a practice in Egyptian art: it is difficult to tell a sculpture of Akhenaten from his wife Nefertiti, for example. Wilson speculates that this was to provide a political stability in maintaining the appearance of an unbroken continuity in the royal line. Perhaps, too, it was a way of keeping something from death, and some speculate that Egyptian sculptures are ‘doubles’ or ‘ka’ figures, depicting an ethereal replica of the body. The aim of sculpture was to preserve the double, the soul from its own ‘second’ death. Were Giacometti’s post-surrealist figures likewise a way of keeping something alive? Perhaps, as in Blanchot’s analyses of the corpse, death reveals something which was never alive:
He who dies cannot tarry. The deceased, it is said, is no longer of this world; he has left it behind. But behind there is, precisely, this cadaver, which is not of the world either, even though it is here. Rather, it is behind the world. It is that which the living person (and not the deceased) left behind him and which now affirms, from here, the possibility of a world behind the world, of a regression, an indefinite subsistance, undetermined and indifferent, about which we only know that human reality, upon finishing, reconstitutes its presence and its proximity.
This is why, according to Blanchot, funeral rites are performed quickly: the horror of the corpse is of what it reveals in the body which was once familiar to us. But what is this ‘world behind the world’? To what does the cadaver join us?
Presently, there will be — immoveable, untouchable, riveted to here by the strangest embrace and yet drifting with it, drawing here under, bearing it lower — from behind there will be no longer an inanimate thing, but Someone: the unbearable image and figure of the unique becoming nothing in particular, no matter what.
The cadaver joins us to a kind of impersonality. No longer is the cadaver that of anyone we know; it has already drifted from our world and from those relationships which bound us to the one whose body it was.
It is striking that at this very moment, when the cadaverous presence is the presence of the unknown before us, the mourned deceased begins to resemble himself. Himself: is this not an ill-chosen expression? Shouldn’t we say: the deceased resembles the person he was when he was alive? "Resembles himself" is, however, correct. "Himself" designates the impersonal being, distant and inaccessible, which resemblance, that it might be someone’s, draws toward the day. Yes, it is he, the dear living person, but all the same it is more than he. He is more beautiful, more imposing; he is already monumental and so absolutely himself that it is as if he were doubled by himself, joined to his solemn impersonality by resemblance and by the image.
It is not something which survives death which a sculpture must preserve, but something hidden by life. ‘… no man alive, in fact, bears any resemblance yet’, Blanchot writes. Animation, liveliness, the friend we know through her gestures or his laughter, all the particularities which allow us to recognise our singular companion as the unique being she us – all of this conceals a kind of material presence which foregrounds itself only after she dies.
Perhaps what Giacometti’s sculptures bring to the surface is precisely this presence. This is why he praises Egyptian statues for their resemblance to the living. No longer, then, is it a question of allegory, of metaphor, of that great sexualisation of the world in which Surrealism placed its faith. It is upon a kind of materiality that Giacometti draws – a substance of which we are made, a solidity which remains even as he makes his figures almost impossibly fragile.
Why, then, are his sculptures stretched so thinly? And why, for such a long time, was Giacometti unable to stop his sculptures shrinking? Giacometti’s answer to the second question: ‘If I made them larger you would recognise who it is’. And to the first? Perhaps a similar explanation could be given. Stretching, thinness, smallness: all a way of passing the resemblance of the model through a great detour. Who, now, do the sculptures represent? But they represent nothing; they are.
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