I’m writing this outside any framework of knowledge, as far as that’s possible, and as an ‘ordinary’ subject called upon, provoked to speak by this work. It is a full size figure of a woman standing with her arms at her sides, and her feet embedded, I think, in a squarish block of the same material (gypsum) of which she is made. She is not standing on the block; it is very much part of the total figure. On the bottom of the block is a wooden board with four wheels attached making a kind of mobile platform like one of those vintage wooden children’s toys. Again this is not so much a support as an extension of the block and the figure. At least there is some kind of ambiguity there between the block/chariot as support of the figure and as prosthesis. What affects me about this has something to do with mobility and immobility. It provokes (perhaps) a somewhat sadistic inhibition of human movement, and a supplementation of it which might redeem, give back movement to the figure, but as constrained and linear (no steering mechanism), through the brutal technology of block and wheels. This provokes some kind of shudder or stutter, movement denied and affirmed in the instant, which I can almost feel as I move around the piece freely (though a black shrouded backdrop prevents you from circling it - different in the picture above). I seem though to be brought back to the same position in front of the work, in the sightline of the woman whose single visible eye is wide open and staring frontwards. My mobility is also being constrained. I am transfixed in front of it, suggesting some kind of dialogue or face to face.
Something is happening to sculpture here, to sculpture as the representation of the human figure, and I think it’s about the support, the material. The material is no longer simply the support of the figure, but is affirmed in its materiality, its brutal materiality, I want to say, as that out of which the figure is made.
These statements may miss the point entirely.
The pedestal is an instrument of imprisonment which, in my affective, sentimental response to G’s work, I associate with an image from the Bond film Diamonds are Forever. The almost naked ‘Plenty’ O Toole’ is thrown from a high window by a band of gangsters. She lands in a swimming pool, but is found the next morning dead in the same pool, her feet embedded in a concrete block, anchoring her to the bottom. G’s image resonates for me with a sense of horror and sorrow for this murdered girl, from a film no doubt seen at an age when I was sensitive to such things (assuming I have ceased to be so). Undoubtedly there is also an element of sadistic delight in my horror, conjured by the film’s presentation of the image of the drowned girl in concrete as seductive and sensual. Music. It exploits the sexual delight of horror and cruelty, of death, and it is this, partly, that surfaces in my experience of the Femme au chariot.
Yet the Femme au chariot is not only, and perhaps not at all, determined by this perverse, Gothic, morbidly sexual and sadistic tone. It is perhaps not predominantly an image of imprisonment, but of movement and vision. In G’s own account of his works, he signals the importance of the car accident in 1935 or 1938 (?) which crushed his foot, hospitalizing him and making him limp for several years. It was only later, in 1947, however, that image of the nurse pushing the hospital pharmacy trolley arrived at its sculptural form, or was manifested as a sculptural possibility, realized in 1950. In his short essay on G, Marcelin Pleynet links the Chariot and the suite of works associated with it to Parmenides, and some verses from his poem about being carried or driven by a chariot. OK, but I am more interested in the picture that is conjured here of G’s accident, his hospital stay (at the Bichat hosp. in Paris), and the nurse with trolley. Why?
It’s a commonplace of writing about G that this sculpture marks the beginning of a transformative shift in his work, both in terms of scale (the Chariot-Woman is life size) and meaning (away from the Surrealist elements of previous years). The art historical writing is informative, but nothing more. What draws me to the piece is the narrative that seems to be in the process of weaving itself around it, of an accident in the biography, I mean in G’s life, which puts him on the path of the work. Something about the creative possibilities of the contingencies of the real, of the encounter. Femme au chariot may say something about human movement, about technology, it may express or vehicle thinking about the status of the human in the 20th century, the camps, l’espèce humaine, all that post-holocaust morbidity and melancholic lamentation, but it nonetheless owes its existence to a biographical accident, thus to an instant, to time as it swerves and declines a life this way or that. That this work, in this narrative, originates in some sense in the life of its author is a powerful factor in my experience of it.
So I picture G in his hospital bed, looking at the nurses with their trolleys. Undoubtedly this immobility, his horizontality come into this, and the image and the narrative it conjurs begin to seem like a fantasy; lying immobile in a hospital bed lends itself so to speak to a situation of willful sexual fantasy, or at least one which carries and expresses desire. G, born in 1901, would have been 37 at the time of the accident. The sculpture, which may have taken several years, was finally completed in 1945.
Only a vague sense of what this desire is, what it wants. To be prone, immobile, bound perhaps, and administered by women with trolleys to carry their instruments, undoubtedly appeals to a clichéd scenario from Gothic horror movies or even Carry On films I would have watched. Dario Argento maybe. [But also does not this scenario replicate an infantile situation; is it not a return to the motor incapacity of the infant and its desired dependence on maternal care?]. Interesting how I keep coming back to a kind of underlay of perverse fantasies derived from cinema and TV of ‘low’ cultural status. The unconscious, affective force of such things may deserve to be taken more seriously. Yet in looking at the femme au chariot I feel I am less dubious territory, that it lies beyond this puerility, that it exists in metaphysical territory, a domain purified of specifically sexual concerns. Sublimation then. G, I imagine sublimates the situation, drawing out of it its sculptural possibilities, in order to make of it a thing of plaster and wood. He draws out (as one draws out poison) the puerility of subjectivity (isn’t all subjectivity a precipitate of that time, the time of childhood attachments and fantasies?) and evaporates it in the forming of this figure.
Sartre says of G’s people that each secretes their own void: ‘chaque créature sécrète son propre vide’ (Situations IV, 350). I imagine the woman’s ‘void’ as an encrustation at her feet, as if it has flowed downward through her, emptying her out (she’s so thin), but she can’t get free of it. It traps her. So she has the chariot to move. I think of an image of another distorted body from Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, perhaps, a legless cripple, just a torso on a similar flat wooden cart, pushing himself along with his arms. These images belong to an imaginary repertory of figures of the distorted body, images which people our imaginations and form the substance of visual art. (Jean-Louis Schefer again, Uccello, Le Déluge, La Peste) But I feel dissatisfied with this account; Sartre’s emphasis on the void, and the isolation of G’s figures. I feel more drawn towards Genet’s note – that G walked with a limp, and that he had been happy when he learnt that the accident would have that lasting effect, and Genet adds: ‘That is why I will risk the following statement: his statues still give me the impression that they are taking refuge in a secret infirmity that grants them solitude.’ Earlier Genet writes (in The Studio of Alberto Giacometti) that G’s work wants to discover ‘the secret wound of every being’, a wound that ‘everyone keeps in himself, that he preserves and to which he withdraws when he wants to leave the world for a temporary, but profound solitude.’ Secret wound of solitude; refuge of infirmity. G’s work makes it concrete, and I suppose this is not far from Sartre’s comment about G’s being ‘secreting’ their void, but it puts it better, gives it existential form ( a lived form). The woman on the chariot exposes her infirmity, her ‘clubfoot’ (Genet’s term for the pedestal (socle, the sound of the French word communicating exactly what is at stake here, for me) to which some of G’s walkers seem to be tethered.) But why is infirmity a refuge? And how did G’s vision of a nurse with trolley transform itself into such an exposure of the ‘secret wound’. [Of course, the rhetoric of the secret wound cannot not call to mind Georges Bataille, and his provocative proposition that every being opens up where it is wounded, a God at the throat of the slaughtered animal, a woman under her dress…]. In the text 'Method de meditation', I think.
Is there pathos in this work?
I imagine G lying on his hospital bed, observing the nurses as they pass with their dispensing trolleys. He is the patient to whom they must minister, yet this position of horizontality (I almost typed hospitality?), the static observation of this parade makes G into the master, and the nurses into the object of his vision, the ones to be pitied. Sartre begins his essay on G’s drawings by quoting G talking about his vision of prostitutes at the Sphinx, and about the distance which separated him from them, across the ‘parquet luisant’. Sartre emphasizes the distance, in his commentary on the sculpture to which G’s memory relates. He says, with a striking precision: ‘Ces putains à vingt mètres, vingt mètres infranchissables, il les a fixes pour toujours dans l’éclairage de son désir sans espoir’ (347). Sartre refers to the paralysis that seizes G at the sight of his fellow man (348), and he compares the distance from the work which G’s pieces oblige their viewers to adopt to that which he rediscovered on re-entering ‘normal’, ‘civilized’ space after the space of ‘absolute proximity’ of the Stalag. His frontier was his skin. I think Sartre collapses two distinct fields here, though the account of proximity and collectivity, and the memory of the Stalag, recurs in Les Mots where he compares it to his first experience of the cinema. There’s a fascinating discussion on what Barthes calls proxemics (in Comment vivre ensemble ) there. The distance of desire is folded into the social distance of ‘respectful bourgeois society’. Yet it is also a distance of respect and ceremony, and G’s figures are also figures of ritual, sacrifice and veneration.
But, thinking of G in the Parisian brothel (echoing the narrator’s vision in Madame Edwarda), and then in the hospital, I think of the distance as that of his ‘désir sans espoir’, desire being always without hope (this is what gives it hope). I think of his desire as accompanied by a kind of pathos, a friendship for these ‘victims’ of his look, for the objects of his desire; is he not destroying them? This is what Bataille would call complicity, friendship, communication. G transforms the infirmity of his desire into the visible, exposed encrustation of the footblock, the prosthetic wheels. Yet I feel an enormous sympathy for these women, these administering angels. Sartre writes that G refuses neighbourly relations with others, preferring the isolation of desire: ‘S’il ne peut le franchir, ces quelques metres de parquet luisant qui le séparent des femmes nues, c’est que la timidité ou la pauvreté le clouent sur sa chaise ; mais s’ils sont à ce point qu’ils sont infranchissables, c’est qu’il désire toucher ces chairs de luxe. Il refuse la promiscuité, les rapports de bon voisinage ; mais c’est qu’il veut l’amitié, l’amour. Il n’ose prendre parce qu’il a peur d’être pris’ (349). Sartre comes close to Bataille’s’friendship’ here, and in a way which is closer to it than the purified grey wash of Blanchot’s appropriation. But then he seems to collapse it back into a kind of critique: G is not socially committed; he lives in the isolation of impossible desire.
But, thinking of G in the Parisian brothel (echoing the narrator’s vision in Madame Edwarda), and then in the hospital, I think of the distance as that of his ‘désir sans espoir’, desire being always without hope (this is what gives it hope). I think of his desire as accompanied by a kind of pathos, a friendship for these ‘victims’ of his look, for the objects of his desire; is he not destroying them? This is what Bataille would call complicity, friendship, communication. G transforms the infirmity of his desire into the visible, exposed encrustation of the footblock, the prosthetic wheels. Yet I feel an enormous sympathy for these women, these administering angels. Sartre writes that G refuses neighbourly relations with others, preferring the isolation of desire: ‘S’il ne peut le franchir, ces quelques metres de parquet luisant qui le séparent des femmes nues, c’est que la timidité ou la pauvreté le clouent sur sa chaise ; mais s’ils sont à ce point qu’ils sont infranchissables, c’est qu’il désire toucher ces chairs de luxe. Il refuse la promiscuité, les rapports de bon voisinage ; mais c’est qu’il veut l’amitié, l’amour. Il n’ose prendre parce qu’il a peur d’être pris’ (349). Sartre comes close to Bataille’s’friendship’ here, and in a way which is closer to it than the purified grey wash of Blanchot’s appropriation. But then he seems to collapse it back into a kind of critique: G is not socially committed; he lives in the isolation of impossible desire.
G’s piece indeed removes me, removed me from a space of neighbourly contact, drawing me into a face-off with the chariot woman, the nurse. But as I think of it, is it not true too that part of the response to this piece has to do precisely with the potentially therapeutic quality of our encounter. As if, in my now isolated situation and in the distance of desire, I require that attention, that sustained and absolutely singular attention she can offer me (not she alone, for there are numerous others, and men amongst them). Of course she offers it too to all-comers, as any nurse, but in our encounter, in the one to one she offers me, her attention is undivided. Her role is to nurse my wound, my desire, and she does this simply through her availability. Otherwise her presence. I sense that I can call on her at any time, that a permanent relation, a contract, has now been established. She nurses my desire in being its object and in complicity with it, but also out of sympathy for its hopelessness, knowing that she is not its aim. (Lacan’s distinction between the aim and the object of the drive). She is aware of her inaccessibility, of the distance that she imposes or that is inherent in desire.
But what has this to do with the object? It has provoked me to weave my own narratives around it, but have I betrayed it in doing so (the beginning of a view of narrative as betrayal)? The test: how much does what I have written tell you about the Femme au chariot? Does it allow you to have a picture of it? Perhaps the piece will always have that enigmatic status, suspend its own description, and in posing itself as enigma provoke the weaving of narratives around it. Or, if I let the object speak, what language would it use? It, I, am committed to the language of narrative, betrayal, all the subjective poison. But perhaps one may stick to the evidence. The evidence is of a form, a materiality, gypsum and new wood. But this materiality comes into form as a woman... comes into form as a woman whose feet are embedded in plaster and... already the form and its putting into expression are drawing out the narrative. The object does not have a language.
Schefer writes that G’s work is about evidence: ‘L’objet de cette recherche est la forme inédite du moi et du monde apparue un beau jour comme une évidence. Sa traduction ou son expression demandent une vie afin d’attraper la simplicité de l’évidence’(Figures de différents caractères, 43).
And :
‘Ce que propose Giacometti n’est pas une expérience de physique, la traduction d’une aberration optique (les poires du compotier qui s’emmenuisent, les silhouettes qui s’amincissent, la tête retrecie, les pieds faits en socle). C’est une donnée d’évidence de la perception non corrigé par l’habitude ou la convention d’une géometrie rassurée’ (44).
One day, in 1935, G saw a nurse pushing a pharmacy trolley as if the lower part of her body were fused with it. Obviously this is not it; metaphor (as if) is not evidence. He saw the nurse, a woman, with a block on wheels for feet. This is what he saw. Then he drew it. Then he made it into a form, in gypsum and new wood, or bronze. What he saw was an accident, an incident, the vision of a moment, uncorrected as Schefer proposes by visual habit. As if the accident, the fortuitous encounter, the tripping up, the car crash, momentarily illuminates the evidence not seen in the normal course of events.
Schefer says that in G’s work there is no ‘truc’, no decorative element, no trick of style. What recurs is the reduction of the figure to its disposition in space. In some cases this is a cage. In the drawings, Sartre says, G provides his figures with a structure for the void from which they emerge; the frame. The block, in the Femme au chariot, we can thus see as a reduction of the cage, the frame, as if it has succumbed to gravity. But it is also mobile, since G gives it wheels. Something fundamental is happening here, affecting the way the woman is framed, the structure of her being. The frame has dropped away, the support is now mobile, such that she is absolutely isolated, absolutely suspended. Tim Mathews makes the link between Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’ whose emblem is Klee’s angelus novus, and G’s chariot, referring to G’s ‘disappearing angel’, and stressing the figures’ suspension. I see the reduction of the frame, the structure, to a block made mobile, as a liberating gesture. It says that the figure is unconstrained by frameworks – ideological, moral, psychological, as well as art-historical. It may surrender its volition, and neighbourly relations, but it gains a mobility subject to chance, to accident, to the trajectory and momentum of history. And it invites us to push it.
Comments
Post a Comment