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PARTISAN REVIEW
"objective" world, nor to be an all egory of this world, but would have
its own life and "objectivity." This reality would be created by the
artist's imagination only, an individual theater which on the surface
bears no resemblance to the "objective" world, yet may be conceived
as a metaphor of it, a new myth.
Giacometti's
Model Jar a Square
(1932) appears to anticipate an
artistic ideal that the artist expressed in his own words much later:
"Every moment of the day people come together and drift apart, and
approach each other again to try to make contact anew. They
unceasingly form and reform livin g compositions of incredible
complexity. What I want to express in everything I do is the totality
of this life." (The same idea is expressed in Beckett's story "The Lost
Ones.") But the totality of this li fe cannot be reached by static
scu lptures, nor by the attempt to shape it as "reRection" or
"representation" of "objective reality."
Another Giacometti scu lpture from this period,
No More Play
(1932), might also be considered as a preparation or anticipat ion for
a stage set. In this case, it might have been a set for one of Beckett's
play. Here again, the conception of the objects i surrealistic; but
the relations between the immobile figure of the woman on one side ,
a nd the figure of the man, raising his hands in a gesture of sub–
mission, on the other side, a nd the relations between the figures and
the whole stage - in the middle of which we see graves and open
coffins - a re appropr iate for the concept of art as a theater stage . To
be more accurate, the play we see, or might see, on this stage is
already finished. There is "no more play," except the play of death.
This very play is enacted many times on Beckett's stage in such plays
as
Endgame, Happy Days,
and
Play,
or described by him in such
stories as "Lessness" and "The Lost Ones," and in his novels.
Giacometti himself was not pleased with the solutions he found
during his surrealist ic period. I believe that the main reason for this
dissatisfaction was his feeling that by using the surrealistic symbols
he was neglecting what he cons idered to be the main concern of the
artist, the living subject itself. As he himself said , he wanted to put
himself to the test of drawing from a model again, to work eye to eye
with reality , letting the consequences be what they may. In other
words, he started (or probably never ceased) to ask himself if the
closed world of surrealistic symbols might really a nd honestly serve
hi s goal of creating the "totality of life ." In a way, he was searching
for the imposs ibl e: to bestow on the work of art its independence,
accord ing
to
the inherent laws of perception realized through art,
