Gargoyles
I lived in a rent-controlled apartment on the upscale, Upper West Side, of New York City. One day, as I was gazing out the flat's single window at the building opposite, I was overcome by the oppressive ugliness of it all. The irony was that neighbors living in six-figure condominiums gazed upon similar, grim scenery. It was not simply drab, to my mind, but deliberately grim. It looked Gothic, steep, mysterious, implacable. I guess that's why it's called "Gotham City."
A banal observation, I admit. What I should also admit is a liking for the effect. It's in no way classical. It's a perverse taste, and I'm in good company with the decadents of the fin de siè·cle, who rendered deviance in art to perfection. They were outspoken defenders of the Neo-impressionists, those not-Impressionists, the renegades of art. They were all ahead of their time. They would have been partisans of Giacometti, post World War II, if the timelines were reversed.
Giacometti is nakedly Gothic. Europe is in ruins, Gothic. Gothic runs in Europeans' blood. The spleen of the Decadents was an expression of Gothic religion gone sour, of an uneasy conscience, weakened faith, shameful desires. Aesthetics being their ultimate criteria, only enjoyment remains to redeem, to sanctify, to bless. The tenacity of the deviant artist was a quest for the Holy Grail, legendary quintessence, non plus ultra, etc., which was steeped in sincerity which, today, would be laughable in an artist.
European art was never classical. The sooner that conceit is relinquished the better. That which is European, as such, is contrary to everything classical -which is not to be taken, ipso facto, as an exception to the rule. European art is a rich culture, proud, robust. What European art cannot claim is the heroic humanism of the ancient Greeks. The struggle with the culture of Greece by European intellectuals is characteristically European, defining itself by what it is not, which is to say, everything Greek.
What Europeans have that the Greeks did not is conscience. Truth was not highly esteemed by the Greeks. Europeans are sensitive, feeling. Here is Jean Paul Sartre on the post-war Giacometti's sculptures, excusing them for their inherent European-ness, for their Gothic aesthetic. From his essay titled The Search for the Absolute:
"It is to give sensible expression to this pure presence, to this gift of the self, to this instantaneous coming forth, that Giacometti resorts to elongation. The original movement of creation, that movement without duration, without parts, and so well imaged by these long, gracile limbs, traverses their Greco-like bodies, and raises them towards heaven. I recognize in them, more clearly than in an athlete of Praxiteles, the figure of man, the real beginning and absolute source of gesture. Giacometti has been able to give this matter the only truly human unity: the unity of the Act."
Sartre is referring to the miraculous, grace received, the sublime in art. Giacometti is more than good. His statues rise above art. They are Crucifixes. They are better displayed in cathedrals than in a profane museum. Giacometti knew nothing of this, of course. In Sartre's postwar world view, Giacometti was as a humble stone mason of the middle ages, doing the work of the Creator. Sartre continues:
"At first glance we seem to be up against the fleshless martyrs of Buchenwald. But a moment later we have a quite different conception; these fine and slender natures rise up to heaven, we seem to have come across a group of Ascensions, of Assumptions..."
Sartre remembers that Christian and Jewish eschatology are irreconcilable, even as the Giacometti figures are a manifest synthesis. Why not both man and God? The God of the victims of the Holocaust is the same God of everyone. But with no explicit mention by Sartre of God in his essay, his intention may be taken as metaphysical.
The transformation of Giacometti's style was concurrent with the defeat of Hitler, and the Nuremberg trials, for crimes against humanity. I am not aware of an explicit affirmation by Giacometti that his postwar sculpture is tribute to the Holocaust. Sartre is unwilling to assert what he does not know. Giacometti, perhaps, maintains a respectful silence.
My interest in Giacometti, and in particular the emotion of his mature sculpture, is over the radical transformation that can overcome an artist. The homeless, as such, have had that effect on me. That, and the dystopian aesthetic of Giacometti's transformed style, is a reassuring precedent for an artist following his example of suffering with the suffering.
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