11 A TALISMAN OF CONFRONTATION AND EXCHANGE 12 THE EVOLUTIONARY NARRATIVE OF MODERNISM /

11 A TALISMAN OF CONFRONTATION AND EXCHANGE

BECAUSE THE SCULPTURAL FIGURE occupies our space even as it stands apart from us, bidding us to approach, to step forward and meet it face to face, our encounters with it are ultimately confrontational, regardless of its scale. Extreme formal stylization would be Giacometti’s means of amplifying the effects of this situation for the viewer: however benign its intentions, confrontation is active and experiential as a matter of course, and Giacometti clearly hoped that it would prompt an active response from the viewer. Such operations are not mechanical nor, strictly speaking, within the artist’s control. The standing gures can seem quite animate, alert to our presence, as if they really do wish to extend the possibility of incipient exchange. But what are they really asking of us? What will happen if we accept their invitation? Here, once again, we can see the success with which Giacometti reinstated the frontal format in all its affective power and with a seductive presence that endures even in a contemporary museum environment — a stylized, hieratic gure, quasi-religious in its command of site.

Neri began exploring stylization at length in the 1970s, when access to the same model in the studio allowed him to begin treating his motif as a repeatable form: whatever its gestures, the gural “body” was now consistent from work to work. Neri continued his practice of barricading the face behind a mask of

373. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1983

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374–376. Prietas Series VI, 1993 Private Collection

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plaster, more determined than ever to eliminate the calculated indicators of personality, psychology, and narrative that are normally encoded into facial expression. By blocking off this information on a reiterative form, he forces us to look more carefully at the gestures of the gure in its entirety as the basis of communication. With a radical shift in emphasis from eye to hand during the constructive process, Neri would thus declare his desire to convey what might be called the experience of experience. If he mistrusts language as an exact or truthful mode of communicability, neither does he have much con dence in any acculturated hierarchism of the senses that would privilege vision, especially as it plays out in art, and in his treatment of the formal gestures of the model, he reveals his will to communicate what he knows with his hands. He trusts what he can touch with his body, literally so.

Like Giacometti, Neri treats the sculptural gure as a (his) talisman of confrontation and exchange, with a crucial difference: their gures often seem to “stand” in much the same way, forthrightly, but for Neri, touch additionally upholds the fullness of identi cation between gure and sculptor, as, we might say, mirrors of one another. Here, “identi cation” refers to Neri’s deepest feelings for both model and sculptural gure as images of the (his) self. Those feelings imbue his transaction with the model, and he brings them into material formation in the studio as he labors with plaster and paint. Within this process, however, Neri is not inhibited by Giacometti’s reticence before the model. The intimacy and sheer force of his identi cation with his subject generate a vivid atmosphere around the sculpture, one that can strike us as unabashedly sensuous and, at the same time, without contradiction, metaphysical. Because Giacometti takes the experiential procedures of sight as a basis of his constructive activities, the expressive force of his identi cation with the human model breaks down when sight is rendered as distance, as he obviously intends. Hence the mood of spatial/spiritual isolation that seems to envelop his standing forms.

Neri, again, has no interest in the effects of attenuation, or in a surface characterized by mostly similar types of marks. What seems to worry him is the modern cultural habit of interpreting surface disruptions as little more than constitutive features of an “artwork,” the distinguishing autograph of the builder, inscribed for all to see. Simply put, this view would be too limited, or it would

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377–379. Kneeling Figure, 1991 (Cast 1/4), 1991 Private Collection

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accept too limited an array of meanings. Yet Neri was never tempted to turn in the direction of a conspicuously narrative gure, either, not in the manner of a Rodin or Bourdelle, and certainly not in the manner of those gurative sculptors of his generation af liated with photorealism, pop, and their various derivatives, George Segal, say, Duane Hanson, or John De Andrea. Nothing could be further from Neri’s objectives. His gures possess reality rather than realism. He wants us to “feel” the gure in the fullness of its communicability, and so he does not want viewers to be distracted by illusionism’s glossy craft or its proximity to the intentions of an unambiguous realism.

This was hardly an arbitrary issue for modern sculpture: we might say instead that it has been crucial to the fate of gurative sculpture in the modern period. Industrialization in the West brought with it an increasingly humanized landscape. Cities expanded upwards and outwards, and in the modern cityscape, the mounting scale, density, and complexity of the visual eld inevitably began

to overwhelm the sculptural object, which, even before the mid-twentieth century, faced the diminishment of its old cultural status, its prominence of display in open civic spaces, the gravity it once brought to the service of social and political stability. This situation was further abetted by a steady assault from advances in modern painting, widely regarded by the end of the nineteenth century as the medium central to the trajectories of progressive art.

How, then, was sculpture to recover its place in such a uid, visually demanding environment? And if it could not, might it then be utilized as a vehicle of discourse with those surroundings? To what purpose? The gures of Giacometti and Marini had to nd their home here, in this world. The situation was even more emphatic for Neri a half-century later, when public and corporate spaces were increasingly populated by large non-objective sculptures that negotiated their relationship to contemporary architecture with an ease the gure could not hope to equal.

LEFT/RIGHT 380. George Segal (1924–2000) Walk, Don’t Walk, (1976) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 381. Duane Hanson (1925–1996) Rita the Waitress, 1975 Courtesy of Van de Weghe, New York 382. John DeAndrea (b. 1941) Three Versions of Ariel [Ariel I, Ariel II, Ariel III], 2011 Courtesy of Bernarducci Meisel Gallery, New York

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As Giacometti confronted these changing conditions, the representational legacies of likeness, mass, scale, measurement, and proportion that had descended from antiquity and the Renaissance, all the signi cant traits of sculptural rationalism, would be of less importance than a totality of impression dependent on space and distance — in the spatial environment that had come to characterize the modern city, all the spaces and distances and proportions that shifted continually, sometimes unexpectedly, as the sojourner passed among its buildings, streets, alleyways, and parks. Thus Giacometti turned from likeness as such to scale, or literal height, as a decisive factor in his rendering of form, and necessarily withdrew it from the traditional sites of display. His gures would thus advance the critical argument that scale was no longer a standard of sculptural signi cance, even among the smallest works, nor was location. His standing gure did not want to be a reproduction of visual reality.

If we look back from Giacometti’s solution, we can see which issues were most problematic for him, and how they have in ected Neri’s work. The management of the eld in sculpture, as in painting, can easily become absorbed in the business of producing visual hierarchies, those valuations regarding which objects are signi cant (and why) and which are not, arranged through the means of scale, placement, and so on. Giacometti rejected the notion that such questions could be satisfactorily answered by the preoccupations of rationalism. Because he was so immersed in questions of how we acquire knowledge, particularly as it comes through the senses, and most especially through the eye, he could not accept comforting but thoroughly conventional assumptions about the stability of knowledge or even our capacity to know things in a de nitive way.

Giacometti had recognized that because the sculptural gure must operate in the disorganized precincts of real space — that is, without the aid of painting’s self-enclosed spaces — its submission to the ordering logic of perspective, scale, and so on can appear willful, arbitrary, arti cial. His sculpted gure needed to be completely itself in the midst of any and all visual conditions, xed in its setting but capable of registering ambient changes as they occur around it, which are then registered in turn by the mobile viewer, whose passage through time and place is variable as well. Needless to say, conventional guration would not serve this purpose.

Giacometti was hardly oblivious to the potential for commentary in his work. As a metaphor, severe material attenuation could, by the mid-twentieth century, suggest, for example, a whittling away of the sheer, exhausting weight of the Western sculptural tradition, an effort to release the gure, and its maker, from the obligations of a venerated but burdensome legacy. Would he forge a path to freedom at last? Certainly the sculpture can be understood as a revelation of the struggle itself: to demonstrate its dif culties materially was to express the situation of the modern sculptor who looked at a history that must have seemed unsurpassable on its own terms. But what are the new terms? Will the artist be liberated by submission to the making process, or subjugated to it? Such is the ambiguity of the Giacomettian gure, which feels almost weightless before the eye, and, at the same time, remains grounded by its

OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 383. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Simone de Beauvoir, 1946 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris 384. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Walking Quickly Under the Rain, 1949 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

385. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004), Photographer Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti in his studio, 1945–46. Paris. The 14th arrondissement. Rue Hippolyte Maindron

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386. Inge Morath (1923–2002), Photographer Studio of Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, 1958

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oversized feet, subject to forces of gravity that are at once visual, sculptural, and metaphorical: evidently the tradition cannot bear complete effacement, for the gures are connected to the Western sculptural past even as the artist differentiates them from it. Or: they are descendants of that tradition, and stand apart from it, on their own ground, critiquing the encumbrances of the past from the vantage of an unsettled present.

Stylization enabled Giacometti to vary gural scale more or less at will, while severe material reduction gave the individual work a formal unity that can be perceived in a glance. The gures are never quite self-evident as formal signi ers of human consciousness and its operations. They are referentially human, yes, but if their overall structural integrity can be discerned quickly, their surfaces are too complicated to decipher easily. To go a further step, the standing women are neither inventions, nor are they not inventions, another ambiguity. Thus the stiff, compressed postures and kneaded surfaces convey the sculptor’s sense of the dif culties entailed in seeing the world and in representing that seeing, by showing what the processes of seeing are like, however imperfectly. The Giacomettian gure, we might say, exists to be looked at.

Giacometti did not wish to eliminate altogether the feeling of empathy that typically occurs when we approach gural sculpture. His course of defamiliarization required, once again, that the work be at once associative as a form and clearly separate as an object. His involvement with surrealism had demonstrated the shortcomings entailed in realizing (his) psychology in viable physical form, quite literally a translation problem, and while the gure could never quite elude its history as the most ubiquitous of cultural subjects, Giacometti’s close study of perception enabled him to develop, as content, the existential experience of inhabiting a physiology, a condition laced with uncertainty.

This opened the gure to some of the artist’s most distinctive visual effects, which, as it happened, had the additional virtue of allowing him to address, if by inference, the matter of separateness as the spiritual situation of the modern century. These forays into sculptural meaning were motivated by an excruciating, intrinsically human sense of (his own) isolation and individuation. Giacometti’s primary means of articulating an otherness not only sculptural can be found, then, in the manner in which he recreated the traditional sculptural transaction

LEFT/RIGHT 387. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) L’Homme au doigt [Man Pointing], 1947 The Museum of Modern Art, New York 388. Gordon Parks (1912–2006), Photographer Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) surrounded by sculptures in his studio, 1952

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389. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer Alberto Giacometti painting in his Paris studio; in the foreground is La Grande Tête, c. 1960

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between volume, surface, and ambient space, his insistence that we experience the gure as a multitude of irregular surfaces liberated from narrative duties of gural “skin,” mass, and gesture.

It may well be, as many commentators have suggested, that every mark of the hand was for Giacometti a metaphor of the glance, a way of documenting materially the processes of seeing and then transferring visual information onto the form as a rendition of perception — a sculptural equivalent of Cézanne’s taches, or color patches, the rhythmic, stitch-like brushstrokes that build towards pattern and image on the canvas — a material rendering of the combination of anxiety and excitement that arises from the sculptor’s commitment to living

with the strangeness of the world, among all its endless, endlessly shifting spaces and surfaces. As an enactment of the problems entailed in representing visual instability as sculpture, Giacometti’s surfaces necessarily want to avoid the sculptural production of the gure as a creation “like” us, formally and spatially, comprised of predictable characteristics that are replicated by the artist and observed by the viewer through a lens of conditioned perception — it is a gure that wants to avoid being “seen” in the mind rather than by the eye. Non-descriptive texture is a thickness we must traverse as viewers, another obstacle to the mechanisms of routine vision, as the moment-to-moment actuality of contact begins to unbind habituated cultural attitudes that want

LEFT/RIGHT 390. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer Alberto Giacometti with two sculptures, 1954 391. Rene Burri (1933–2014), Photographer Rue Hippolyte Maindron. The studio of Alberto Giacometti, Swiss painter and sculptor

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to restrict the gure to a passive, routine, or secondary role in its spatial setting.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Neri began working in bronze and marble, taking advantage of the approximate, open-ended historical references offered by various combinations of materials and poses, he had given careful study to the handling of similar kinds of visual information among his predecessors. With that said, Neri was nally less concerned with demonstrating what has been lost to the culture — thus separating himself from Marini’s project, as well — than what can be saved and, more importantly, what endures. He comes to the gure with a sense of what is at stake in a lifelong engagement that placed his sculptural form at the crux of an encounter between self and other — or self and culture — an encounter that might go on and on, without prospect of a de nitive end.

Still, in a climate of modernist triumph, it is an aspect of his originality, and his courage, that Neri never makes an effort to refute or avoid positioning the naturalistic gure as a cultural object loaded with associations past and present. Whatever happens to adhere to it will adhere. Such is the artist’s choice — not a failure of nerve, certainly not a retrogression — and because his gures so willingly accept this fundamental identity, Neri has been able to embed the form with an unusual array of operations — sculptural, painterly, autobiographical, expressive, perceptual — that continue to draw upon its innumerable associations, sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes not. His gure is, in a sense, a “still” (or more properly a “stilled”) life, and we feel neither discord nor collision as its naturalistic and metaphorical components slide into one another.

Neri accepts that at least some degree of perceptual accuracy is available to him, and to us. It must be. Could we endure our lives otherwise or, for that matter, negotiate the world successfully? He begins from there. Our consideration of his gures turns, then, on their ability to speak, or to speak for the artist. How do we receive their (his) speech? Is it self-evident or inferred? A species of poetic information? In Neri’s hands, the human form catalyzes an exchange between gural depiction and the artist’s own narrative, or something like narrative. This further explains the drive behind Neri’s surfaces, as well. They are his gestures, a mode of textural marking, inventive, essentially non-repetitive,

OPPOSITE 392. Julia (Cast 1/4), 1976; Cast 1998 Private Collection

393–394. Carrara Figure No. 1, 1979–80 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

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integrated with the gure’s gestures. To go another step, they connect naturalistic gurative sculpture to developments that were taking place among Neri’s contemporaries, in abstract expressionist circles in particular, related to the language of the mark and its ability to visually objectify the structures and workings of consciousness. Not that Neri can or should be seen as an “abstract expressionist” sculptor — his work, again, does not trade in gesture as a kind of constitutive calligraphy — rather that he was attuned to issues in the art of his time. Even when the surfaces perform in a quasi-linguistic manner, their beauty, so irresistible to the haptic eye, is thoroughly personal.

OPPOSITE 395–396. Carriona Figure No. 1, 1981 Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, promised gift of Thomas J. Davis and Shirley Ross Sullivan, L.37.1.2004

397–398. Etrusca, 1989 Private Collection

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In his study of Giacometti, David Sylvester noted the sensitivity of the sculptor’s attention to the spaces around the gures, although Sylvester, rightly, was less interested in the question of whether or not Giacometti had extended the vocabulary of sculpture than he was in the ways in which the gure expanded the effects of sculpture in its own space, that is, the paradox by which the gures simultaneously dominate their space and are absorbed into it. Neri, too, continues to grapple with this complex gural/sculptural presence, and like Giacometti and Marini, his gure must resolve the matter in the face of larger questions regarding the stability of the gure as an ef cacious contemporary form in contemporary settings. With this in mind, he embraces the textural mark as gural in essence — insofar as it originates in the active body of the artist, and is a token of that body — and as yet another layer of gural signi cation on the surface of the form, where it joins with the whole of his visual vocabulary.

Still, the extent to which any gure succeeds as a viable modern format is also the extent to which the sculptor can satisfactorily answer questions surrounding the cultural ef cacy of the motif with the work itself. Does the gure still matter to us? On this point, there is little left to say about Giacometti or Marini. They have done their work well. Neri, meanwhile, persevered in his efforts to “advance” the gure in every sense: he evolves its means, uses it as a form with which to meet viewers on their own ground, and presses its utility in a wary cultural environment. At the same time, the autobiographical nature of his gure can also suggest the kind of self-motivated, self-authenticating practice that pursues its ends outside the evolutionary trajectory of the modern visual mainstream. From this perspective, Neri’s surfaces are variations on a theme of self-projection, a mode of free speaking characterized by its dense linguistic texture.

The liveliness and variety of the artist’s touch are remarkable, and bring the surfaces to life by creating passages for the viewer’s eye to follow, like roadmaps across the form itself. At the same time, manipulation of surface insures that no sculpture duplicate itself. Every square inch will be topical and documentary, a material signi er of the artist’s activities before the work, always reminding us that process lies at the core of Neri’s undertaking. No gure is or can be de nitive. One leads to the next, and along the way, textural discontinuity resists

399–401. Re-making Mary Julia No. 1 (Cast AP), 1976; Cast 2006; Painted 2008

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our desire for a visual site of ease and rest. Even the smoothest areas want to lead the eye somewhere else, mitigating against the stillness, silence, and material solidity of the gure as a sculpture, and giving the form a visual charge — an aura of animation — that supports its communicability as a dimensional entity.

Neri avoids extreme distortion or disintegration for just this reason. Not only do such techniques disturb our sense of correspondence with the form, they can by now appear to the viewer as chie y formal strategies, intended to attract our curiosity or to implicitly connect the gure to practices going on elsewhere in contemporary art — and so the artist’s most urgent concerns might remain hidden. Giacometti may well have provided a cautionary lesson on this point. Whatever else it might achieve for the work as sculpture, the radical elimination of mass, the stripping away of the outermost body of the gure, poses the risk that aggressive disruption of form will become its most compelling aspect.

It may go without saying that Giacometti never wanted to establish exact physical equivalence between work and viewer: his handling of scale tells us that. But once the artist’s mark begins to dominate the form, the gural basis of the work surrenders some signi cant element of its bond with us — with humanity — and for Neri, such an effect would be needlessly problematic and nally counterproductive. His form must, therefore, remain indisputably empathetic. As he knows, the sheer disunity of modern culture agitates against the kinds of vivid, commonly held beliefs that once gave reliable thematic substance to the sculptural gure in Western art, and against the possibility of encoding cultural belief into a more or less universally apprehensible artistic form. Can he create a gure unencumbered by this baggage from the past, all the old associations that no longer apply? Can it speak from its essential humanity?

For Neri, art does not compete with the built world, but enters it, participates with it, negotiates its spaces, and lives in it, as do we ourselves. In that world, the most readily available site of cultural commonality is the body, as an actual, inescapable condition, or situation, of existence. Whatever else Neri might do with the gure, this one fact cannot be ignored. His delity to the expressible grows from it, as he offers himself to others through the

(correspondent) body, his own and that of the sculpted gure in which he has invested himself. And yet, even though its physical body is real, Neri’s reality, his sense of the body’s communicative identity — his/its sculptural recourse — develops dialogically. Formation occurs in contact with the other, represented by the model. The artist goes to her, and then returns to the sculpture with further de nitions or expressions of his own humanity. Each work is an image of self-creation.

402–403. Standing Figure No. 4 (Cast AP), 1980; Cast 1982 Private Collection

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