Photographs of Fairytale at the Documenta 12 part 2: please see following article for discussion

Photographs of Fairytale at the Documenta 12 part 1: please see following article for discussion

Ai Weiwei at the Documenta 12

I was first told about Fairytale from a Chinese graduate student who described it as a giant westernized castle built in Kassel. It was a mansion in her eyes, constructed solely for the lives of 1000 people and the artist himself, to total our culturally magical number, 1001. Like the palace of Scheherazade and King Shahryar it would hold these 1001 people and the story of each of their lives in one art festival “night”. It would be dissembled as quickly as it had been built as soon as the money ran out and the people would return to China. She sat before me and pointed to a computer printout plan of the Aue Pavilion with its elusive codes of boxes and dots charting the territory like shallow shoals for smugglers. Are those sea monsters or instillations? In the center were three large lines making a star coupled with a number that identified it as an Ai Weiwei.

“There it is . . . that must be it!” she had said pointing to the x on our treasure map.

The beauty of Ai Weiwei’s art is that he is a master of negative space. He is aware of what the seeming blanks that surround an object can do. Fairytale was both a blank space in itself and also transformed observers into blanks themselves through their needless searching for something solid and self contained to his ideas. There was no castle. The x marked his triumphal arch made from Han dynasty doors and screens taken from the quickly disintegrating ancient sectors of China’s cities, the refuge left behind after the new skyscrapers are built. By July 1st the water logged German summer had dissolved the ancient wood and the arch had fallen like a house of cards into a sodden heap of antiquity. There it remained, a pile of contorted wooden latticework, for all to mistake for the original intention. What does a triumphal arch stand for: the conquer of exotic peoples bringing commerce and glory, something permanent from our past and to our future, or specifically something classical. Ai Weiwei’s arch is also an entryway from one period of history and into another that was built from the inadequate blueprints of our European model, except that it conquered its past not its enemies. It stood for whole suburbs of traditional “hutong” and “siheyuan” structures being torn down, “conquered”, by an economic agenda that promised commerce and glory. It, however, was not permanent in the sense of traditional European arches. It was the perfect introduction to the subtlety of Fairytale.

The real site for the Fairytale came in two parts. One was the temporary home of the 1001 people, which the Documenta Guide book described as “accommodation on the grounds of the former tent factory, Gottschalk & Co., which was adapted for the purpose.” After pestering more than a few official looking people my friend and I arrived at a disused factory, but saw little adaptation. The brickwork compound surrounded by high walls and metal gates, topped with smokestacks in the outlaying area of the once razed and most eastern city in western Germany, was only identifiable from a sign in German and English that read:

“These rooms are not open to the public.
This place is no exhibition venue.
Thank you for your understanding.
Your Documenta 12 team.”

What my new friend had been right about was the quickness of dis-assemblement. The Fairytale participants had left three days before and already the factory had been mostly stripped. Everything had been shipped in from China and now, neatly labeled in German, was repackaged to be sent to the proud purchaser from the auction held the day before. Everything down to unwashed sheets had been sold. We had crept through the door, cameras hidden in motley tot bags, and had made a dash for the first forbidden looking doorway. A guard and his miniature schnauzer instantly apprehended us. Luckily the experience of living with the 1001 guests was an exciting shift from patrolling an abandoned factory and two pretty young girls asking questions brought fame by association. He offered to give us a tour, explaining the rooms, unpacking the boxes and describing the eating, bathing, sleeping arrangements, his schnauzer wagging its tail and fetching old cigarette cartoons and magazine covered in Chinese characters back at its pleasure. Each person had been given: a cot, a reed mat, a mattress, an under duvet, a duvet, a lamp and two pillows. The long factory had been rigged with metal bars hanging from the ceiling on which drapes had been hung like an outpatient recovery room for privacy. The men’s dorm was on the bottom floor, the women’s on the upper. The kitchen was the original factory kitchen, but a large propane stove/barbecue and hot water boiler had been brought from China. A large white plastic tent in the courtroom constituted the dinning hall and a few bikes were still scattered around. They were the only things not brought with the participants who were not a hapless selection of untraveled citizenry but artists in their own right, mostly young and eager. We heard from another graduate student, employed by a Heidelberg professor to closely document the activities of the 1001 people as best he could, that one artist from the group wandered the small centralized Kassel streets (public transport was not budgeted or allowed for the group) in traditional funerary clothes, stopping pretty girls and kissing their feet before moving on. They were not passive subjects, yet each wore a Global Positioning System and were neither allowed to leave Kassel at any time nor were they permitted to alter their tickets to stay beyond Fairytale’s bounds. In essence they were pieces of artwork, trapped in a physical location, subject to the whim of their curator but fascinating and creative within these rigid restraints.

The second ‘site’ for Fairytale were the 1001 Quing Dynasty wooden chairs, each with a hidden red stamp of authenticity, scattered around the Documenta. The chairs were one half of Fairytale, the solid and own-able, and the people were the second part, the vital and independent. The core of the project had just walked off leaving the chairs like empty chrysalises. This process infests every art showing. The thing sitting on a pedestal or hung on the wall is the chrysalises of the artist, whose mind has wandered out of the object and can only be reached through constant study, informative placards or exhibition catalogues. Everywhere the chairs clustered, the audience pilled into them, grateful for a place to rest, but the symbolism of the spectator crawling into the void left by the departing artist was striking and begged to remind us all that the real symbolic counterparts, the 1001 Chinese people, were wandering around, independent of the chairs and their treatment. What were we sitting on? Who is that person watching us sitting? Are they one of the 1001? Is she? Is he? My friend and I spent the first 24 hours there unaware that these rare 1001 had left and like everyone around us who was still unaware of this development, we too searched the marching masses for ‘art.’ Like spotting traitors we queried every person who looked the part, wondering if their purpose here was more purposeful, interesting or complex than our own. There lies the genius. These pieces of Chinese contemporary art had walked of leaving a historic chair as a shell, which we, who by extension were the European art world, sat in.

Ai Weiwei once made a series of 3 photographs of himself dropping a priceless and ancient Chinese vase. Here was China, 1001 pieces of it, shipped to us like a single vase and dropped. Its splinters flying around Kassel like debris, which settled to ground in the form of chairs wherever one looked. Sit in the chairs, walk through the arch, but we cannot undo the drop. The Documenta 12 catalogue, its Ai Weiwei caption also written by the Documenta 12 Team describes how the project is a homage to the Brother’s Grimm and how Fairytale “is also a source of inspiration in its pedagogical function as a transmitter of values and foreign worlds . . . The exposure of the Chinese guests to the international art world forms a possibly favorable situation in which individual awareness of global connections and cultural identity can be formed.” This is a linear view of the impact of this work at best. The catalogue description goes on to say that “against the backdrop of a totalitarian past and massive social changes China is particularly in need of an exchange not based on institutions but rather on the individual.” There is no individualism represented in Fairytale only fracture, wholeness and the time that differentiates the two. Global connections are at stake, but not by “Chinese guests” as the catalogue describes the representative. Contemporary China, constantly accosted by human rights activists has given 1001 GPS sporting artists as an exhibition to Germany. Kassel began the Documenta as an effort to reconcile the German people in its war-ruined landscape to see, love and be reconciled with the very modern art Hitler had banned and burnt. Of all places, the symbol of early modern Germany being given this blood gift, which it could not refuse, could not have been coincidence. Ai Weiwei could have brought Fairytale to the Venice Biennale or to the Munster Art Festival, but he didn’t. Fairytale is a grim statement of human rights, offset by its title, which simultaneously invokes the seemingly Disney-like and sugary implications of contemporary fairytales and the real, dark, sad and twisted Grimm’s fairytales.

If one attended the Documenta 12 this summer in Kassel and stood in the long lines that snaked out from the unventilated information trailers to purchase an audio tour, one would have been surprised that there could have ever been the pretence that artists were on display. The thousands of people with the red ipod minis strung around their necks, who marched dutifully or ecstatically through the four exhibition spaces, listened to brief descriptions of arrangement rather than any individual’s intent. Contemporary art has become so open to any conception that the eternal why is not asked of artists, but of curators. The modernist cry of “Is that really art?” has turned into the contemporary query of “Yes, interesting, but why did he or she choose to place the Agnes Martin next to the Narseen Mohamedi?” Instead of Paul Signac reveling in the obliteration of anything but “the pure and virtual colors of the prism”(1), the Documenta 12 audio tour acclaims its curators, Ruth Noack and Roger Buergel, as having carefully selected each piece to complement each other, creating a unique and independent statement in every room. Amidst this revolution one piece within Documenta 12 refused to be a color. In complement to all its other symbolism, the un curatable nature of Fairytale questions not only the artist’s relationship to art, the spectator to both of the previous and most of all how you can curate something as complex of shattered culture in an alien setting.

1. Signac, “Eugene Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism

Picasso's The Guitar of 1912: Its Development and Its Influence on Surrealism

Introduction:

Guitar of 1912 is an appreciated sculpture in its own right and valued for its importance within Cubism. What has not been accredited to it, however, is the significance of its innovations as a crossroad between the sculptural dynamism and collage aesthetic of Cubism and of the developments of Surrealism. Its most important legacy is shattering visual assumptions and dissecting forms according to how a person can know an object. In the interest of brevity this document addresses Guitar as a piece in itself and not within the greater movement of Cubism. In order to examine how monumental Guitar’s innovations were for sculpture and how its key points were interpreted within the Surrealist movement, this document is divided into two chapters. The first examines the development and significance of the Guitar through examining three main influences and a sculptural precursor, Standing Woman. The second chapter delves into Picasso reception and interaction with the Surrealists and how his work influenced key themes in Alberti Giacometti’s Gazing Head. Giacometti’s conception of forms is Guitar’s greatest legacy through the conduit of Surrealism.


The Developments Leading to Guitar of 1912

Guitar was a powerful challenge to perception. Picasso developed an acute interest in how forms interact with, or dictate to, how we know the world. This innovation was not a sudden development but spawned from a long-standing fascination with contemporary art, theory and the influx of exotic primitivist artifacts that entered Paris through its colonies. In order to trace the development of Guitar I will examine three of Picasso’s influences, Primitivism and the examples of Rodin and Jarry through Standing Woman. Though Guitar does not directly quote Standing Woman, it was through the formulation of its structure that the innovations of Guitar were experimented with. I will then examine the Guitar itself, specifically how it denoted metamorphosis and simultaneity.

In 1882 Auguste Rodin created Sorrow. The tilted head basks in the light that shatters into large squares and triangles that dance along the rhythms of musculature in the upturned face. The eyelids pressed firmly into the folds and concavities of the sockets mirror the larger circles created around the opened mouth as the light rings where the depressed cheeks are paused in the moment of tension before collapse. The elements of the face mirror the rhythmus of the interlaced pairs of lovers with their sinuous bodies that brought Rodin his unprecedented fame. The sorrow implied in the title is secondary to the eroticism of a head neither pretty nor grotesque but symbolizing consummation by internal emotion. Pablo Picasso’s similar study, Head of a Woman of c. 1902-1903, echoes this submission of self to emotion, but it has not realized what would latter be Picasso’s great thrill for the art world, the utilization of imbalance to imbue life in the static. The discordant light reflections of Rodin’s Sorrow animate the face in convulsive beauty that is only intensified in its bizarre power by the jagged line of disembodiment across the throat that isolates the painful internalization of the remaining head. The symbolism of its submission to emotion (eyes shut, mouth open to dispel its power in sound) would have appealed to the young Picasso who arrived in Paris around 1900 from Barcelona where his involvement with an mildly anarchistic group of young Catalans would have made him receptive to the culture of extremes in early modern Paris and the resultant isolation that Rodin tirelessly depicted.

If one jumps ahead to Standing Woman of 1907, it marks the beginning of Picasso’s ability to control and create the tension of movement within sculpture. The years between 1907 and 1912 were to represent a monumental breakthrough in sculpture for Picasso. It was within this period that he achieved the effective removal of precious materials, the reorganization of depicted body plains and a new emotional freedom. At first appraisal Sorrow and Standing Woman are antithetic, one is a groundbreaking but a somewhat classical study of emotion where the later uses experimental methods to produce an emotionless idol. Standing Woman is a simplified figure, whose schematic representation has reduced her arms to roughly parallel bars, her abdomen to a large irregular egg and her face to the long nose and almond eyes iconic in Picasso’s paper and painted pieces, and yet all the elements are carefully discordant. The eyes are unmatched in size and ellipse, the head is tilted and unsymmetrical, the legs either bulge or whither and the entire piece is bound tightly and is aggressively hewn into a confining rectangular outline. On closer analysis, however, their simplification is similar. In Standing Woman the body is divided into segments much like the guidelines for the Renaissance ideal person, which separates the figure’s height and width into certain numbers of feet. Standing Woman is made into five segments, head, arms, abdomen, legs and feet. She is almost decorative in the rigor applied in this formal division, which unifies head and belly as the two most arresting features for their solidity within the shifting incisions of arms and legs. Similarly, Sorrow has constrained the pain of the body into the head alone, and as mentioned before, the uneven and striking lie of light draws attention to the mouth and eyes above all. The relationship between these two features, one open, and one shut is meant to evoke the eyes as vehicles of reason and the mouth as a vehicle of emotion, the two functions of the self. Similarly Picasso has reduced the function of Standing Woman to perception and to reproduction. The blank eyes are still and quietly appraising as the only painted detail within the busy shell of the figure. Just as the abdomen, mirroring the head’s shape as if in a reflecting pool, sets itself as an equally important counterpart to reason, the teardrop line of mouth and chin is carried through to the stomach, as if what is superimposed onto the face is only solidly realized in the belly.

Sorrow provides a foundation for a complex modernist aesthetic; the lessons therein for the young Picasso aided the creation of his early assemblages, which predated his feted papiers colles and collages. Above all else, it dramatically shows how the fracture of planes could invigorate a sculpture while simultaneously simplifying the subject into symbolic, salient features. Standing Woman was not only influenced by Rodin, however, but also visually quotes the aesthetics of the playwright and essayist, Alfred Jarry, who centered his inspiration upon the interplay between repulsion and fascination for the world. He believed that ‘the monstrous’ could produce extreme creativity, juxtaposing elements of the world into new relationships that were previously impossible. Such relationships became so complicated and compressed that they achieved ‘embryonic’ perfection or ‘horrible beauty’.

Jarry’s theatrical innovations first appeared in the 1896 performance of Ubu Roi, where he visually realized the statement that art like a diamond formed of carbon should be a condensation: “simplicity must not be simple, but complex, tightened and synthesized.” (Shattuck, Roger, The Banquet Years, New York, 1968. p.193) Jarry believed that embryonic forms are the most evolved creatures, and that the smoothest body presents the greatest number of different facets. A simple thing structurally plays void against solid and ideologically plays absence off presence. It equals the tension between space and object, implying what is not there. By its simplicity is creates complicated external references. He aimed to use this severe simplification to suggest to the audience’s imagination. Towards this end, Jarry preferred puppetry and marionettes to real actors, whose personalities obstructed the desired character. In order to minimize interference Jarry wrote to the theatre director Lugné Poe about the obliteration of scenery, superfluous crowds and props: “One single stage set or, better still, a plain backdrop . . . A formally dressed individual would walk onto the stage, just as he does in puppet shows, and hang up a placard indicating where the next scene takes place.” (Alfred Jarry, “A Letter to Lugné Poe” in The Ubu Plays, page xix.) In the same letter, he wrote that costumes should be divorced from the prevalent color and chronology of set and play to simultaneously highlight the modern satire and to foster a sense of the eternal. From these directions, Jarry created the concept of the Super-marionette. (A term developed by Gordon Craig from the ideas of Jarry. Claude Schumacher, Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire, London, 1984, pp 100-102.) He encouraged actors to emulate dolls, adopting six basic gestures to convey all emotions. Masks and special accents or voices were given to the main characters. Emotions were kindled from displacing shadows on the surface of the mask; and the monotone, staccato voice, which emanated from the back of the throat, was the dehumanized sound of doll that is neither alive nor dead (Jarry believed the mask conveyed the ‘eternal quality’ of the character and together with the pantomime acting could create a ‘universal gesture.’ Jarry, Ubu, p 313). In Jarry’s words: “the actor should replace his head with the effigy of the CHARACTER.” (Jarry, Ubu, p 310.) Man would be transformed into a puppeteer of himself, wielding an all-encompassing character-effigy. The super-marionette is a toy or automaton, whose crude imitation of humanity signified the presence of absent desires, children or toys playing with meaningless adult motivations.

Standing Woman is both a puppet and an adult woman, a toy of desire. It loses none of its power or its references to male fetishism or to female reproduction in its simplification. It is related to an early piece simply titled Puppet that used the same figurine format but contained a hole for a string on its head. It is thus possible that Picasso’s standing figures were conceived of as Jarrian puppets, through their solemn and simple shell invoking the emotion of their carving. Picasso arrived in Paris only seven years before Jarry died, during which the older playwright was already suffering in extreme physical and mental degeneration. Though it is possible they never met, Picasso collected Jarry’s works and even emulated his eccentric habits of carrying pistols and of keeping pet owls. In Standing Woman Picasso combines the lively surface texture of Rodin’s Sorrow and the symbolism of Jarry’s simplification. The figure hugs herself as if she were literally being condensed out of carbon into a diamond. Picasso also utilized the ‘horrible beauty’ in his ritualized carving. He aggressively chiseled the roughened volumes into a brutal beauty that is born from the visual shock and has little precedent in the appearance of a standing woman. As C. Burgess remarked, “only the very joy of life could reveal in such brutalities,” (C. Burgess, The Wild Men of Paris, page 58) a contradiction complimentary to Jarry’s monstrous combinations that would be more fully expressed in the metamorphosis of Picasso’s Guitar of 1912. This interest in ritual and art, however, leads to the third substantive influence exercised on Picasso’s early sculpture, primitivism.
Primitivism represented to Picasso a rejection of academic strictures that not only provided liberating formal possibilities of simple surfaces, strong structuralism and sharp lines but also an emotional potency. A prevalent characteristic of Picasso’s figures is a detached self-consciousness. Standing Woman’s unreadable and solemn shell elicits a sensation of her acute and silent awareness of the human world. The expressive element is not her emotions surging from within her, as is the case with Sorrow, but Picasso’s impulsive carving and his sensitivity to the possibilities of the medium. Picasso does not adopt the mantle of Romanticism’s aesthetic and moralistic naivety, but instead he follows the Jarrian precedent of the child-man’s renewal through destruction, as he rendered form the slave of the instincts. The decorticated body of Standing Woman is a celebration of beauty beyond formula. A sentiment reiterated in 1935: “Academic training in beauty is a sham…Art is not the application of a canon of beauty, but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs.’ (Conversation between C. Zervos and Picasso. tr Alfred Barry. In Ron Johnson Ron, The Early Sculpture of Picasso1901-1914, London, 1976, p 42) This beauty was born from surprise. The ritualistic element of carving allowed Picasso to elicit sentiments rather than to describe them. Although this discovery came from the attraction to cultures whose aesthetics ran counter to the Western march of progress, most ethnographic objects were not roughly hewn. Primitivism was an idea of the western artist and divorced from authentic ethnography. Despite this it allowed Picasso the freedom to not only use schematic symbols to transform humanity into a wide range of structural forms but also to sculpt as he intuited the subject rather than how he saw it.
All three influences: Rodin, Jarry and Primitivism contributed to the main precedent created by Standing Woman, which is imbalance. Gotthold Lessing’s eighteenth century treatise, Lacoon, defines sculpture as the deployment of bodies in space. (Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p 54.) This argument sets sculpture apart from human experience. Sculpture exists within its own time sensitivity. Like painting, both mediums are frozen in a specific moment, but unlike painting, sculpture is not framed as a window into another world. It is a physical protrusion into our space, yet it cannot interact with humans as a painting would with itself. Traditionally the sculptor used devices such as friezes and repeated figures to create an illusion of a sequence that could be read in a simple narration and denotes the passage of time. Sculpture is both fascinating and uncomfortable precisely because of this human interest in time and space. Man reacts against the fixed body because of its perfection, elimination of chance, but most importantly because of its permanence against the changeability of time. Picasso bound the limbs of his primitivist works tightly to their geometric bodies, eliminating all reference to classical motion and creating a sense of Rodinesque liveliness through chaotic disparity.
The only movement in Picasso’s sculpture is one of imbalance. Like the squares of light irregularly cast about the bronze Sorrow, the asymmetry of Standing Woman is the heart of its visual arrest. Picasso, himself, described this: “A painter shouldn’t make them so similar. They are just not that way. So my purpose is to set things in movement to provoke this movement by contradictory tensions, opposing forces and in that tension of opposing to find the moment which seems the most interesting to me.” (Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, London, 2002, p 36) Balance and the human mind are simple lovers. People rarely focus upon objects in detail, often smoothening over irregularities in the process. In the words of Rudolf Arnheim: “balance is unambiguous, man strives for equilibrium in all phases of his physical and mental existence.” (Arnheim, p 37) To the mind, imbalance lacks finality. And, according to Freud’s pleasure principle, mental events are activated by unpleasant tension as the mind searches for a way to reduce the tension back down to equilibrium. The death instinct is simply the will to return to the inorganic stability of pre-life. (Johnson, p 122) It is the instinctual association of disparity with discordant life that energizes the static sculptures and marks them as brilliant, precisely for their lack of finish.
Artistic disparity reached fruition in the pivotal Guitar. Just as Standing Woman is a fascinating example of the budding styles and influences that unfolded into Picasso’s mature assemblages, Guitar marks the beginning of an entirely new understanding of sculpture. Rodin had created simple assemblages from pieces of other sculptures found in his studio, leading to some beautiful and surprising results, but the nature of the sculpture itself, though arresting, was never challenged. With Guitar the monstrous was achieved through making scrap into instrument and simultaneously making instrument into scrap. Primitivism provided Picasso the visual language and he in turn united Jarrian simplification and Rodin’s vitality into a result that diverged drastically from both influences and previous work. As Fernande Olivier commented in her book Picasso and his Friends: “ We didn’t any longer want too fool the eyes; we wanted to fool the mind. The sheet of newspaper was never a bottle or something like that. It was never used literally but always as an element displaced from its habitual definition at the point of departure and its new definition at the point of arrival.” (Fernande Olivier, Picasso and His Friends, New York, 1965, p 137.) Guitar’s innovation lies in its treatment of time and space through creating the illusions of metamorphosis and simultaneity.
The original mocket for the Guitar was constructed from cut out cardboard, but the final version was rendered in sheet metal and steel wire. Like the peeled anatomy of Standing Woman, the eye penetrates beyond the volumes of the Guitar into a complex interplay of voids and projections. The jagged edges of the dull brown metal feign a dissembled pile of scraps, yet the thin planes precisely dissect the subject. Where the hole of a real guitar cuts into the body of the instrument, Picasso has placed a protruding cylinder, whose deep and shadowy interior creates the effect of a recess. This strong chiaroscuro and the jutting diagonals of the shaft and edges reinterpret the application of reflected light; the illusion of volume is no longer dependent on actual mass but the effect thereof. The Guitar is a hanging assemblage and thus is built up from a flat surface like a painting would be and hung like a puppet. Its placement on the wall is unnatural as if neither guitar nor scrap has any right to charade as a painting and yet it remains, strangely fragile, sharp and extremely lyrical in its monstrous juxtaposition of material and subject.
An important aspect of Guitar is metamorphosis, which is the ability to hold in equilibrium two opposing perspectives at once. In response to a shocked viewer, who demanded an explanation of Guitar, Picasso reportedly responded, “it is nothing, it is the guitar!” (Johnson, pp 126-7) The sculpture is able to imply the symbolism of guitars (pure feeling, the popular soul and the feminine woman) (Oliver, p 137) and to simultaneously be nothing. It is a pile of scrap metal that subtlety adopts the shape of an object. It has no genre, no frame, and no pedestal. The ability to see a known object within the tangled and fractured shapes mimics the ability of the mind to animate and spiritualize the world: ‘if a piece of newspaper can become a bottle, that gives us something to think about in connection with both newspapers and bottles, too. The displaced object has entered a universe for which it was not made and where it retains, in measure, its strangeness. (Johnson, p 136.) Picasso claimed that only in the ‘the most unexpected relationships’ can tension be created. He professed that “Reality must be torn apart in every sense of the word. What people forget is that everything is unique!” (Rosalind E Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, London, 2000, pp 41-2.) Picasso, and his circle professed to abandon trompe l’oeil, the fooling of the eye, for trompe l’espirit, the fooling of the mind. As evidenced in Fernande Olivier’s quotation, elements of the sculpture were used in displaced relationships in order to defy optical assumptions. As in the ensuing papier colles and collages, elements were never used literally but as a sign. Guitar is suspended between the point where it departs from the notion of an instrument and the point where it arrives at a new definition. The same process occurs simultaneously around the mind’s perception of what the identity of scrap metal means. Guitar upsets normal perception of objects and thus razes the significance of each of its elements, replacing them on an equal level. Like Jarry’s efforts with monstrous and confrontational contradiction, Guitar is a moment of puncture between scrap and instrument, object and art. These divergent states are one being passing through two opposing and reversible stages of existence.
This aspect of metamorphosis brings us to the second major innovation of Guitar, which is simultaneity. Containing two perceptions at once automatically denotes a shift in the way time is read within a piece. Metamorphosis deals with the transformation of one object into another; simultaneity is the manipulation of time. The futurist Umberto Boccioni saw time and object-hood as two separate modes of being that could be fused. He further classified these states as absolute motion, which involves the immobile, structural characteristics of the object, and relative motion, which involves the object, as observed by a viewer in real time. (Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor, Selected Work of Alfred Jarry, London, 1965, p 193.) His sculpture, Development of a Bottle in Space, also of 1912, fuses many different sides and angles of the bottle into one vantage point. Unlike Picasso’s earlier sculptures that are ritualistic objects for the eye to traverse and explore, Guitar utilizes similar voids and projections to provide the motionless spectator with an ingeniously orchestrated illusion of simultaneous perspectives. Picasso’s arrangement of vantage points, however, approaches time from a different angle than Boccioni. Guitar more closely resembles Jarry’s concept of time and space. In The Adventures and Exploits of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysian space is defined as simultaneity and time is continuity. Simultaneity frees bodies from events, layering all that ever was and ever will be in an immediately present space. Rather than the Futurist aspiration to depict speed, Jarry does not seek to unify absolute and relative motion but to obliterate speed in favor of exaggerated duration. Timelessness fractures the world into disjointed and equivalent details. Applied to sculpture, simultaneity alters how one knows forms: “Why should anyone claim that the shape of a watch is round- a manifestly false proposition- since it appears in profile as a narrow rectangular construction, epileptic on three sides and why the devil should one only have noticed the shape at the moment of looking at the time?” (Alfred Jarry, Selected Work of Alfred Jarry, tr. Shattuck and Taylor, London, 1965, p 193.) Guitar creates multiple viewpoints through fragmented details. Just as Picasso reduced his painted faces to collections of eyes, nose and mouth, irrelevant of their placement, Guitar is known from the inside out as we would if sequence and multiple vantage points were condensed into one image. It is both simplified and condensed down to component signifiers and fragmented into commensurate specifics. Above all previous sculpture, it achieves reconciliation of perception and form by symbolically ascribing the properties of objects, to their artistic manifestation. The senses are delighted with the trick of the mind in the same way that Renaissance patrons delighted in the imagery of Perspective.
Guitar was one of many assemblages incorporating or depicting string instruments between 1912 and 1913, some of which were no more complex then a painted canvas with cloth arms extending over a real guitar. The creation of these pieces of playful sculpture remained a constant throughout Picasso’s life, informing his understanding of other medias, though many of his sculptures were destroyed and thus were only enjoyed by his close circle of friends. A famous anecdote related by the surrealist photographer, Brassai described how every morning for a month Picasso tore the shape of Fernande Olivier’s lap poodle from a white napkin and laid it at her breakfast setting to console her after its death. Such simple experiments mark a constant artistic activity that did not discriminate between the precious and the plain. It is tragic that so few relations of the Guitar of 1912 survive. In energy and in deed, the legacy of such work was expressed to rising innovators of the next generation, especially within the Surrealist circles.
The Surrealists and Giacometti:
Picasso was the author of surrealist collage. Although he was never a fully involved member of the Surrealist Movement, the advancements of Guitar and its lessons in imbalance, metamorphosis and simultaneity helped formulate a crafted Surrealist aesthetic. Giacometti in turn was neither a collagist nor a fully involved object creator. Even his disagreeable objects series never strayed into either found materials or pure objects. He entered the movement when collage and paintings had exhausted the surrealist hopes of the pure psychic automatism. Giacometti took Picasso experiments in knowing an object and reformulated them to be essays on experience itself. Other Surrealists attempted this type of experimentation, for example Bataille’s Alphabet articles in Documents and Magritte’s This is Not a Pipe, but it is only through sculpture, by the nature of its cohabitation of our space, that an object/subject can be fully explored. Picasso realized this in his assemblage experiments and incorporated its principles into Cubist collage. Giacometti recognized this potential in Picasso’s work and thus did not attempt super reality as Breton limned it but instead sculpted what was latent and dangerous as part of a penetration to the heart of human experience.
In order to understand the importance of Picasso’s influence on surrealist construction, it is vital to first examine the framework for all Surrealist developments. Surrealism began as the search for a systematic exploration to reconcile man and the world, creating a new aesthetic on the ruins of the old. In the first, 1924, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ Andre Breton, the leader of the movement, defined Surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” (Nadeau, Maurice, The History of Surrealism. London, 1964, p 72) Thus a superior reality was believed to spring from morally neglected and aesthetically ignored associations. These associations or arbitrary juxtapositions were dictated by both coincidences and the moments that break the pattern of reality. The Surrealists labeled this objective chance. In line with Dada’s absolute revolt against all reason, objective chance defies all meaning through its anomalous, random associations. When objective chance creates a puncture between the mind and the external world or the dream and the waking life, surprising associations erupt into reality. Maurice Nadeau described this as the motive for all surrealist activity: “there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the heights and depth cease to be perceived as contradictory.” (Nadeau, p 159) Within this rubric the object played two roles: it brought desire into material reality and it represented an art form attainable by all.
In 1933 the Surrealists held their first object exhibition. The show catalogue categorized the different objects in the show as found, natural, ready made, mathematical, perturbed and the surrealist object proper. Picasso’s Guitar appeared next to ethnographic artifacts as well as the blossom of surrealist constructions such as Claude Cahun’s I bet with my Heart and Giacometti’s Suspended Ball. The exhibition was set forth as a museum of oddities in opposition to the traditional gallery aesthetic. Breton castigated the sterilization and stifling control of pre-existent galleries and instead sought an environment where the viewer could encounter and be inspired by the objects as the artist had. For Breton and his followers, the object was a fundamentally transgressive messenger that struck the finder as an external emissary from an internal world. Guitar’s exhibition within the show was both a tribute its role as a founder of collage and as a link between sculpture and object.
The power of Picasso’s collage aesthetic was well acknowledged, Hans Arp, the revolutionary Dada collagist, openly admitted being influenced by Picasso’s work (Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p 27). In George Hugnet’s essay, ‘Fantastic Art: Dada and Surrealism’, he compares Picasso’s papier colles and collages favorably to Arp’s, which were created blindfolded by dropping ripped paper on another sheet and gluing them without alteration. The significance of this is the contemporary recognition that objective chance is limited for art. Picasso used the dream-like union of unlike elements by manipulating chance associations, quotations and materials, but he never compromised the artistry of his works. Despite criticism for using lyrical and identifiable subjects, the Surrealists perceived Picasso’s sculptures as a steady development towards the autonomy of the object. In relation to Picasso’s series of guitars, Hugnet wrote that “certain objects composed by Picasso in 1913 and 1914 take on a considerable importance; seen in a Surrealist light, they shed a strange radiance.” ( Olivier, p 137) The Surrealist element Hugnet conditionally casts over Guitar is the recognition of the inherent challenge of metamorphic art to see accurately rather than neatly. Guitar does not involve objective chance, but it could have been the inspiration for Salvador Dali’s Paranoiac Criticism, which he defined as the use of metamorphosis and doubling to associate delirious chains of meaning. The ability for the object to resemble an instrument out of scrap seemed to illustrate this capacity of the mind to recognize known objects within the chaos of natural details. Guitar shows how the artist’s piercing gaze had traveled into the volumes of a guitar to explore what casts shadow, how light falls and where sound fills chambers. The result is a sculpture that turned the known object inside out. The naked volumes and voids are exposed it to the viewer as if the penetrating look of the artist is shared complicity. Unlike the surrealist found object as a personal messenger, Guitar is a publicly assessable vision into how Picasso knew his subject. Like Standing Woman it is Picasso’s gaze and Picasso’s emotions that posses the viewer, fleetingly allowing his desires and perceptions to inundate the observer.
It is arguable that despite the influence and admiration, there existed a subtle but profound misunderstanding between Picasso and the surrealist ethos. Fernande Olivier described Picasso’s collages as taking a bottle and a newspaper not literally but as elements propelled into a relationship that brought them into a new universe where old definitions were useless. This is strikingly similar to the Surrealist practice of juxtaposition in order to create a super reality. If one examines Picasso and Breton’s views of the Minotaur, however, an important difference comes to light. Breton saw the Minotaur as the child of the amoral union of Pasiphae and the White Bull, a super human monster trapped in a maze where it devoured the young Athenians. It was revered because of its anarchy and its oddity. Picasso, however, identified the Minotaur with male sexuality. It represented the animalization of desires when subject to the volatile forces stirring in the passion of all men. For Picasso the Minotaur was something latent and dangerous but constantly present. Like Guitar, the Minotaur was the result of his deep examination into a subject. Where Picasso sought to make evident what was hidden the Surrealists sought to create a new world against preexistent nature. Guitar encapsulates the surrealist puncture discussed above by Nadeau, but it is not its sole meaning. Thus it is not surprising that though influential for many surrealists, the legacy of Guitar’s innovations lie not in the surrealist object proper but in the more intentionally sculpted creations of Alberti Giacometti.
Many Surrealist object-makers moved away from Picasso because of the reasons discussed above and dismissed him as only a step on the chain to the recognition of independent objects. Unlike his Surrealist contemporaries, Giacometti did not renounce aesthetic judgments and thus was never prey to objective chance. He entered the movement at the point of disturbing social change; the Spanish Civil War and Hitler’s rapid rise to power threatened to liquidate avant-garde art. In the midst of this, Giacometti introduced the possibility of crafted sculptures that acted like Surrealist objects and exp of Picasso’s Guitar.
Alberto Giacometti was born in 1901 on the Swiss border of Italy. His father was an obscure Expressionist whose joy de vie paintings were heavily influenced by the same spatial tension in Cézanne and Gauguin paintings that impacted Picasso. The young Giacometti moved to Paris in 1922 to study sculpture at the Academie de la Grande-Chaumière with Antoine Bourdelle. From an early age he was interested in the art of ancient Egypt. In Paris this interest diversified into other forms of Primitivism using prehistoric schemata for men and women that expanded under the influence of African and Mexican art. In 1929 Giacometti exhibited Gazing Head of 1928 at the Jean Butcher Gallery, where it was bought by one of the principle patrons of Surrealism, Charles de Noailles. Andre Masson also noticed the sculpture and promptly initiated Giacometti into the Dissident Surrealists, who under the leadership of Georges Bataille were disgusted with Breton’s idealism. Where Breton praised the process of arbitrary juxtaposition, Bataille did away with objective chance in favor of Daliesque and delirious trains of metaphoric associations. Only in 1930 after the creation of Suspended Ball was Giacometti initiated into the newly exclusive membership of Breton’s inner circle, where he unleashed the fashion for the Object. In the interest of simplification the remainder of this chapter will examine Gazing Head as an example of Giacometti’s advances.
Giacometti created Gazing Head not from a model but from the memory of a model. The significance of this lies in the stark simplification of any features. Thus, the sculpture isolates what it is to be a gazing head into key signifiers. Guitar of 1912 fooled the mind where Gazing Head fools the emotions. It is arguable that it is one of the last pieces in a chain of busts created in Stampa of Giacometti’s father, which slowly unravel solid forms into scratches and hollows on the increasingly flattened facial plan. Counter to this evolution it was surrealistically grouped with Giacometti’s Parisian works in Michel Leiris’ laudatory article, “Alberto Giacometti” in the 1929 Documents No. 4. Unlike the other pieces represented, such as Apollo or Reclining Woman who Dreams, there is no over complication to tamper with the simple tension of the perfect balance between opposing associations or meanings. Gazing Head is an austere plaque. The sides of its square face are tilted to the right like a listening human or the iconic sculptures of Alexander the Great. The lines of plaque’s outline are bulged slightly as if the square were a skeleton from which the warm marble, like classical sculptures or like skin, slightly swells. This comprises the only softness of the piece. Within the square are two grooves perpendicularly placed and strangely menacing. These two concavities could represent eyes, a nose or a mouth, as the features are stretched or shortened into a uniform shape and then represented as a pair. The luminosity of the marble creates a subtle and beautiful gradation of light over the smoothened planes that dip violently into the concavities that not only represent facial features but double for androgynous genitalia.
The fluid doubled meanings presented by the concavities is the most striking example of Giacometti’s union of possible meanings derived in part from the metamorphosis of Picasso’s Guitar. Prehistoric schematic carvings of male and female genitals fascinated experts beginning in the 1900s and were numerous in Giacometti’s native Bregalia Valley. Male genitalia were represented as diagonal doubled lines and female genitalia were a circle or square with a line running from the centre to the bottom of the shape. Figures such as the Venus of Willendorf were believed to be magical fertility symbols. Giacometti approached female fertility as a threat, a fear stemming from the childhood case of Orchitis that left him infertile. For Giacometti a concavity symbolized a woman’s unfulfilled potential, thus also invoked his sterility. The grooves in Gazing Head could be either the doubled male symbol or the female concavity. The name of the sculpture, however, brings the viewer inescapably to its origin as a bust. As the final piece in a series of portraits of Giacometti’s father, the connection between gaze and sexuality is strengthened. In “Ladies Shot and Painted,” MaryAnn Caws associates the look with “containing that, which is about to escape.”26 She further divided the stare into the quick attacks of the glance and the gaze’s pierce through changing appearances to the core of something permanent. Giacometti would have been aware of the emasculation of such an experience from his nude modeling for his father’s paintings. It is thus not surprising that the motherly and welcoming expression of the first portrait heads of his father degenerate into the sexual and confrontational fixed stare of Gazing Head. It is also not surprising that the Surrealists were attracted to this convulsive stare as a marvelous affront.
The role of the standing figurine with exaggerated features as a magical totem, though archeologically spurious, profoundly affected the treatment of Giacometti’s figures. In keeping with Jarry’s belief in the puppet and Picasso’s fascination with the idol, Gazing Head treats forms and their symbolic possibilities as magical invocations. A traditional idol contains fixed attributes. The Venus of Willendorf’s physical features indicate importance through exaggeration. Instead of mimicking this, Gazing Head’s salient attributes are minimized; each mark on Giacometti’s plaque-like sculpture is a concise signifier like on a Hieroglyphic tablet. Like Jarry’s belief that “simplicity must not be simple, but complex, tightened and synthesized,” (Henri Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories: A critical Anthology, London, 1994, p 306.) Giacometti constricts the face into the simplest indicators, yet heightens the tension in the gaze through associative meanings. The ambiguousness of the forms allows the imagination to not only animate a face within the strange markings on a tablet but also to recognize within it several simultaneous meanings. Surrealists like Leiris saw Giacometti’s heads as modern idols dedicated to desires: “One finds some objects capable of responding more or less to the exigencies of true fetishism […] to the love of ourselves, projected from the inside out and clothed in a solid carapace.” (Michel Leiris, “Alberto Giacometti” Documents, No 4, 1929, pp. 209-214.1929. ) The pitch post function of these heads was consciously crafted as an extension of the artistic experimentations of both Standing Women as well Guitar. Giacometti moves further from decorativeness but closer to Picasso’s intense examination of his subject. Through extreme simplification and aided by widespread recognition prehistoric quotations, this piece achieves its reference to complex desires.
Giacometti was predisposed to the gaze as being sexual and sex as being like an insight. Gazing Head tries to highlight alternate sensory nodes and the way humans gain knowledge. The title of the piece grounds it as an expression of humanness and no more. The gaze is not meant literally but as symbol of knowledge. This is evident in Giacometti’s childhood belief that the stare was a means of control since looking entails knowledge and knowledge equals power. It was Giacometti’s obsession with close visual scrutiny that made him sensitive to the way Picasso parted the volumes of Guitar. Giacometti recognized Guitar as an essay in how a guitar could be known. Similarly, Gazing Head consciously invokes the sensual knowledge of its sexual gaze and the empirical knowledge of an actual stare. In the elegance of this complex simplicity Picasso’s assertion that art is what “the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon” becomes relevant afresh. Instinct and brain are the sexual gaze and the empirical stare, or Sorrow’s eye and mouth or Standing Woman’s head and womb, all of these figures double the two ways a person knows the world just as Giacometti doubled the ambiguous concavities of Gazing Head. It is only with elimination all extraneous detail that this process above all else is isolated and illuminated.
Conclusion
Guitar is a pre-collage work whose experimentation opened numerous avenues for artistic advancement. It was formed as an expansion of Rodin’s lively disparity and of Jarry’s penchant for compressed and complex puppets, which informed an understanding of the possibilities open to sculpture. With the increasing vogue for ethnographic objects, these possibilities were complimented by example of simplified totemic works that divided subjects into their key signifiers and applied rigorous schematic representation to express their most salient attributes. With Guitar’s creation came a new way of addressing objects. The use of imbalance to foster life within the decorative was extrapolated into complex experimentations with metamorphic associations related to juncture between material and subject as well as simultaneous perspectives. This document examined the significance and revolution of these innovations as informed by Picasso’s previous preoccupations as a way to appreciate the full significance of its creation. It was Giacometti who recognized the potential of Guitar and transferred it into his own vocabulary. Guitar is an important link that visually realized many aspects of the Surrealist ethos. The power of juxtaposed elements and the questioning of continuous reality launched it into the center of the then contemporary reassessment of the relationship between man and art. Where its lyricism fell from favor its philosophical probes took root in less decorative and more risky forms. Giacometti logically expanded from Guitar’s inherent questioning. He examined the nature of knowledge itself. Both artists approached Surrealism outside of its strict maxims for objective chance or the found object and in doing so created sculptures that could cut to the heart of man’s interaction with art.

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