Alberto Giacometti is a horrid man whom I wholly adore. I think my first moment meeting a pair of his eyes, was that of his wife’s: particularly, his 1962 rendition of her bleak face. Annette Giacometti is no Barabas; no one will spare her, and, in fact, she will be nailed beside Jesus. Despite her lack of divine birth, her eyes are as holy as the spear mark imposed on the hanging Christ. Her eyes melt forth with desperation: she cannot bear the solitude of her suffering; the memory of bloodshed, and hoping to wash her hands of the innocent lives poorly crucified in trenches and mud, she invites you. And yet, her misery is incomprehensible: all that we may do is stare back, leaving her isolated, beyond the gravity of language, floating about with nothing to draw her back: the death of God, the birth and further propagation of ideology, iconoclasts run rapidly and rampantly and no one can do a thing about it. Our priests are all dead; our shepherds have perished. No one is left to prepare a table before our enemies; and Jesus Christ is not returning.
We are left with her eyes alone. Searching through and through, her spirit upon the waters of the earth, and no reflection arrives to meet her: every apparition is a stranger, and one involved in their own unique dismal weather. The war imposes itself differently upon each mind: one remembers a flying arm, another a meat pie blown apart and steady upon the wind. Another set of eyes entertains the hope of never again seeing a visibly ribbed child facing the dirty floor of broken cities, whose walls and ceilings scattered about look like broken marble cups, like shattered vases of antiquity, whose stories are now incomprehensible and obscure: their dark figures against orange borders will be forgotten, just as easily as Annette’s nightmares with their tenebrous spirits, will never again be remembered or seen by another.
As I understand it, Giacometti is not concerned with realism foto per foto, but, with the thumbprints of experience left over and the labored angles as well. Above all else, he seeks to display the human face as it is, and as it is interwoven with the anxiety of the age; the fear of death, both its gradual descent as the dew of the morning, and its alternative presence, made manifest by the immediacy of destructive warfare. Giacometti is all too familiar with the morning that comes: it will fail to meet his open eyes: it will fall on him, and he will not see it, nor will there be a self to recognize it. Giacometti’s greatest achievement was in presenting the innate fear of eternal darkness, of weeping and gnashing of teeth, awaiting all and arriving soon (here on earth in its ineffective form).
Even his darling is not excused from his blunt execution. And where art might have contained her beauty in resin, perpetual youth, it draws out the horror of her humanity: and then, I think, that is love: to affirm the horror. To destroy illusory veils of the sublime: to care only for nakedness; to refuse to robe it in fig leaves: to defy Godly disdain, which urges all to clothe that which has been rudely declared abominable and repugnant. Meat for meat, descending with age: to will over and over again the defiled body, with its decay and descending melody.
Giacometti allows dread physical manifestation: his portraits and sculptures, their slender limbs and sharp features, conquered by trembling patterns in the likeness of ocean waves disturbed by the flowing of warships. Giacometti is emperor satanas, in that, he calls humanity to eat forbidden fruit as a means of viewing the unadulterated, suffering body. Pape satan, pape satan alape.
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