'The appearance of his Things does not concern him: so much does he experience their being.'
The category which Rilke reaches for in explicating Rodin is Being: somehow, these works insist upon there own pure presence. Rodin makes Things, in the Rilkean sense of objects which represent nothing, which mean nothing – they simply, nakedly are, and their meaning is coterminous with their presence. They are 'full of themselves'. Every attempt to pass beyond a Thing to its meaning rebounds unerringly to its stubborn, radiant facticity. To be sure, this appearance of Things in Rilke’s Aesthetic may have been directly related to the emergence of a world of copies and counterfeits, as he himself intimates in some of his letters.
It is not that Giacometti’s sculptures are, by contrast, 'symbolic', referring us to a meaning which they merely embody or illustrate. Yet they do seem to point elsewhere, to invite us to pass on. Or they can appear like emissaries from teh unknown. The two key essays which I think help us understand this are John Berger’s and Jean Genet’s.
For John Berger, Giacometti’s figures seem always to look at us down a narrow corridor – no matter how close we are. If we walk down this corridor to meet them we remove ourselves from Life. Genet, curiously, had a not dissimilar experience:
“The beauty of Giacometti’s sculptures seems to reside in this incessant, uninterrupted oscillation from the remotest distance to the closest familiarity: this oscillation never ends, and that is how it can be said that the sculptures are in motion.”
The very act of approaching them causes them to recede, to shrink back into the unknown. As we come near, their strange familiarity becomes simply strange. Uncanny.
At this point, one thinks of the logic of anamorphosis. The most well-known example of actual anamorphosis in painting is the elongated skull at the bottom of Holbein’s Ambassadors. In order properly to see this skull we must place ourselves at an oblique to the image, remove ourselves from the customary frame. And when we truly see a Giacometti sculpture do we not stand at an oblique to life, do we not remove ourselves from its frame, in order to meet these elongated figures in the place that they abide? The elongation of these figures is brought about by a field of attraction emanating from a place radically eccentric to our everyday lives. Both Berger and Genet identify this place with Death and the Dead, with the terror and beauty of the negative.
“It appears now that Giacometti made these figures during his lifetime, for himself, as observers of his future absence, his death, his becoming unknowable.” (Berger)
“Giacometti does not work for his contemporaries, nor for the generations to come: he makes statues that ultimately delight the dead.” (Genet)
“Each statue seems to withdraw – or to advance – into a darkness so remote and dense that it merges with death […] I had the moving spectacle of a man who never made mistakes but who invariably got lost. He kept sinking deeper into impossible, ineluctable regions. His work is still shadowed and blinded by them.” (Genet)
There is no 'morbid' fixation with Death, with Death as object; rather Death is the only place from which life can truly be known and measured. At this point Rilke’s words, who sensed that Death was receding from us, are apt:
Experienced, yet not to be fully experienced by us in its reality, continually overshadowing us but never truly acknowledged, forever surpassing and violating the meaning of life – it too was banished and expelled, so that it might not constantly interrupt us in the search for its meaning. Death, which is probably so close to us that that the distance between it and the life-centre inside us cannot be measured, now became something external, held farther away from us every day, a presence that lurked somewhere In the void…
In another letter he states: “Death is the side of life that is turned away from us and not illuminated.” He would, I think, have approved of Giacometti's emissaries.
