Earlier this year, I visited an exhibition of Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti's works at the “Statens Museum for Kunst” in Copenhagen. Giacometti's sculptures offer fascinating insights from both philosophical and theological perspectives, which I will explore in this blog post.
The presence at the root of the phenomenon
There is something strange when you observe a Giacometti statue. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre captures this strangeness well in an essay he wrote in 1948 for an exposition of Giacometti’s work in New York. From a distance, you feel you can approach the work to see it better. But the closer you get, the more difficult it becomes. It seems like the whole work vanishes. Up close, you can see the material, but nothing else. Only from a distance do the essentials stand out, suggesting something more that cannot be grasped.
In his work, Giacometti tried to capture the essence, not the abstraction, of what we see when we observe a phenomenon. This explains why we can recognize his sculptures as human figures. At the same time, it also explains why we cannot observe the sculpture up close, because then the statue is reduced to its individual parts and details, diverting our attention from what it tries to capture: the essence, the root of being in the world. This theme resonated at the time in the art world, with both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s "Phenomenology of Perception" (1945).
Walking trees
Walking through the exhibition, I was struck by the parallel between observing a Giacometti sculpture and a short story in the Gospel of Mark, in which a blind man in Bethsaida is cured (Mk. 8:22-26). Giacometti was an atheist, so I do not presume he was familiar with the story, but I think there is a link between the Gospel story and Giacometti’s project.
The Gospel story begins with Jesus leading the blind man away from the village. Jesus then puts spittle on the blind man’s eyes and lays his hands on him. The man opens his eyes and begins to see. He sees, but does not immediately understand what he sees. Looking around, he thinks he sees people, who look like trees walking around. Then Jesus lays his hands on him again, and the man can see plainly and distinctly.
In my opinion, the blind man’s first attempt at seeing mirrors Giacometti’s project. The blind man observes the essentials of a human being, making a human almost unrecognisable from other tall things such as trees. Clearly, Jesus wants the man to see more than that. After the second laying on of hands, the details and substance of what the man observes become clear. He can now distinguish between humans and trees. Only then is he sent back home, to see his familiar surroundings with new eyes.
Essence and substance
Giacometti’s works serve as a reminder that we are called to capture the essence of what it means to be human. However, the moment we think we can see a human person clearly, in their essence, an essence we can almost grasp, the image disappears. We may think we can look at reality and get its essence, but when we do that with his art, we are left disappointed and a bit confused. There is a mystery there that escapes us. The Gospel story illustrates that there is more to the world than its essence. Substance and materiality matter and are not optional or impartial. Only when the blind man has learned to distinguish individual people from trees is he ready to face the world.
Walking back to my hotel afterwards, I pondered what I need to do to see both the essence and the substance of things, to distinguish people from the background of impressions that make up everyday life, to see friends and strangers once again plainly and distinctly.
Picture: Alberto Giacometti, Falling Man (1950) © Richard Steenvoorde OP