GIACOMETTI AT THE GUGGENHEIM

Giacometti liked to draw.  That was my takeaway from the current show of his work at the Guggenheim.  Are his drawings transparent?  Not quite.  Yet there is a wider sense of time about them.  For when he drew, each line remains distinct.  It is almost as if he was drawing contours with a wider timeframe:  at least that it one feeble attempt to describe the imprint of his drawings.

His love of the line is also evident in his paintings.  When you see some of the paintings on the wall, you are not quite sure at first whether it is a painting or a drawing.  This example, called Interior, demonstrates this lineness in his works.  Although this is a painting, he was definitely drawing, or putting down drawing type lines, with his paintbrush.  And I like this example also because it hints at a geometry with a wider time window.  Yet it is not representational.  I used this painting as a basis for my form generation drawing at the top.  I tried to apply both lines, and tones as lines,  in a Giacometti way.

And then, of course, the sculptures.  The sculptures reveal this particulate line assembly, this manner of using the line.  The longitudiness of the sculptures is a direct byproduct of his employment of the line.  It is as if his sculptures are an assembly of lines in space.  I’ve been looking at Giacometti sculptures for years.  I could flash card answer a Giacometti sculpture from day one.  Yet until this show, I absolutely had no clue that there was a drawing based process to his work.

We have lamented our cultural flash card mentality as evidence of “knowing” art.  But what if you can’t know art until you know the province of both the piece and the process?  What if your knowledge that Giacometti used the drawn line as a fundamental basis for his sculptures was what you were required to learn and our culture mandated that you know?  What if we were taught, from the beginning, that the linearity of Giacometti’s sculptures derived directly from the line independence of his drawings?  But Giacometti might as well have landed on this planet from Neptune, his immediately identifiable sculpture technique a lightning bolt from the heavens.

So all of that was one revelation.  Want to hear another?  Giacometti is the most ideal artist to be exhibited in the Guggenheim.  That is because he focused almost exclusively on the figure.  And the figure, as in real live human figures, remains one of the most fascinating aspects of visiting the Guggenheim.  We have all looked across the space, and even though there is art on the wall, what is usually most interesting is the people that you see on the ramp across from you who are looking at the art.  They are typically nearly in silhouette, given that they are backlit by the lighting for the art.  And Giacometti’s figures, both sculptural, painted and drawn, are as if in silhouette.  So when you look across the space, for a second, you can’t distinguish between what is the art and what are the people looking at the art, of people.  It is a perfect, circular (pardon the architectural plan pun) overlapping (pardon the architectural spiral pun) of images, meaning and function.

So, the confluence of Giacometti’s drawing and sculpture:  a revelation.  And the confluence of the function of a building and how that function is perceived:  another revelation.  Two revelations in one art show?  I think I got my money’s worth