The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
Rosalind K. Krauss
The MIT Press CJuinbridgo, Massaclmseds London, En.i;lan(l
No More Play
I 1 I To ticscribc Giacometti's Invisible. Object as "a youn^ girl vvidi knees half- I boni as (hougli olVering hcrseirto ihc beholder (a pose suggested lo the sculptor by the attitude once assunicd by a little girl in his native land)" is to participate in the work of rewriting his beginnings that Giacomctti i)in)soir started in the 194()s. But this cooperation on the part ol" Michel Leiris, as he constructed the text for the sculptors 19r)l exhibition catalogue, placing Invisible Object in the service of a siniple transparency to the o!)servable world, is an cxj)ression of the rnpiiires and realignments that were transforming postwar Paris.' For this description is a slap in the face of Andre Breton. Who can Ibrgct the magisterial example through which Bretciii opens the world of L'amour fou onto the strange but impressive workings of objective chancc? Giacomctti and Brirton go to the Ilea market where cach one is "claimed" by a seemingly useless object that each is impelled, as though agaitist his will, , to buy. Giacornctti's purchase was a sharply angled, warriorlikc mask, for which neither he nor Breton could determine the exact, original use.^ ' However, the point of the example was not the object's initial but its ultimate destination. This, according to Breton's account, was in the service of resolving ' the conflicts paralyzing Giacomctti as he attempte
1. Mifhi'l lA'iris, "INcrrcs p
Athrrlo CfiatomeUi. Invisible Objcci. 1934. Piaster, 60 inchts high. Photograpk by Dora Mfuir fmhlished iu A ndte Hjeton, I -'Aincii j i IVm, Pam, 1937.
Iron Mask. Photoj^raph by Man Kay publisheti in Andre Breton, L'Ajnour fou, Paris, 1937.
Pigure. Bougainville, Solomon Islands. Painted wood, ()9 inches hi^h. Museum fur Vulkerkunde, Basel. ;\'o More Play 45
nothing to do witli an ar( of niiincsis; the objccts arc in no sense models for the sculptor's work. The world is instead a great reserve against which to trace the workings of the uncortscious, the litmus ])apcr that makes it possible to read the corrosiveness of desire. Without the mask, the dream, (Jiacometii could no more have finished Invisible Object than Breton, without his own trouvailU from the market, could have entered the written world ol' L'amour Jou. Btit the little Swiss girl of Giacometti's later recollection (and Leiris's ac- count) has nothing lo do with this key example of the marvelous and objective chance. By serving as a dii'ect, real-world model for a work of an, the little Swiss girl withdraws Invisible Object from the orbit of surrealism and places it in the postwar realm of Giacometti's studio, as he notoriously strained, month after month, through trial and retrial, to catch the likeness of the model posed in front of him.^ Recontextualiziitg the work, setting it in relation to a new group of friends and allies, like Sartre and Genet, -Leiris's account draws it closer to the problematic of The Phenomenology ojPerception and further from that of Z/W vases communicants.'^ This a-chronicity is, of course, unacceptable to the historian, and thus Reinhold Hohl, the leading scholar of Giacometti's work, does not even men- tion the memory of the Swiss child in discussing this masterpiece of the sculptor's prewar career. But then Breton's .story is, for Hohl, equally suspect. "Contrary to Breton's acccjuni," he beginSi.fthal a mysterious object found at the flea market (it was, in fact, the prototype for an iron protection mask designed by the French Medical Corps in the First World War) had helped the artist to lind his forms, Giacomctti liad borrowed the stylized humait shapes from a Solomon Islands Seated Statiu oJa Deceased Woman which he had seen at the Ethnological Museum in Basel, and had combined them with other elements of Oceanic art, such as the bird-like demon of death. Despite the certainty of his tone, Hohl's evidence for this connection is both .scant and indirect. In 1963 Giacomctti had spoken to an interviewer of a ix'constructed Oceanic house installed in the Basel Museum.' Since the Solotnon Islands figure had been displayed in the same gallery early in the 1930s, when it was brought back to Switzerland from the expedition that had plucked it from the South Seas, 1 lohl could at least assume (Giacometti's knowledge of the
4. One of these aiders wrote a detailed account of (his process. obser%-ing thai 'iniL^niuch as ii WU.S chci) c.xprcsscd in (he purticulur acts ol puiiKing and |>i)sing, (here were elements oi (he sado- masofhjs(ir in otir rcl.i(ion.ship . . . fahhouRhl i( would have been difRcuU to deternnnc exactly wha( ucis were sadia(ic and/or niusocliistic on whose side and why."Janirs Lord, A GiatmntHi I*or- trait. New Y<»rk, The Museum of Modem An, 1%.'), p. 36. 5. See, Siinonc dc Bcauvoir, La Force de t'A^e, Paris, Gullitnard, liJtiO, pp. 409-5(>:J. 6. Reinhold Hohl, Aibfrto Giacomftti, New York, The Solomon Guj^j^enheim Museum, 1974, p. 22. See also Hohl, Alberto (Jiaionuiti, London, 'Hiuines and Hud&on, 1972, p. In. 19. 7. Jean Clay, Visagts dt VAri modrmt, Pari.s, Editions Rcnrontre, 1969, p. 160. Modcrnisl Mydis 46
Alberto OuicomUi. The C:cHi|)lf. 1926. Bronze, 25 inches hif objccl." Thr detail that lends the greatest credence to Hohl's claim is the schematic, railinglike support for the half-seated figure, a construction that is entirely characteristic of this type of statue and is not commonly found else- where.' Since part of the power of the pose of Ciiacometti's sculpture comes from the enigmatic relation between the half-kneeling posture and the struc- tural elements thai seem to contain it —a Hat plate against the shins in front of the figure and the peculiar scaffolding behind it — atid since this construction is not "natural" to a model posed in a studio, the probability was always that its source was in another work of art. Because of the railing, because of the posture, because of the forward jut of tlu? head and the articulatioti of the breasts, the Solomon Islands statue of Hohl's nomination seems a logical can- didate.'" Behind Hohl's assertion of this statue as the source for Invisible Object there is a whole reservoir of knowledge about the role of primitive art in the sculptor's work in ihe years leading up to 1934. Primitivism had been central to Giaco- metti's success in freeing himself not only from the classical sculptural tradition but also from tlic cubist constructions that had appeared in the early 1920s as ihe 8. TUc slalut: ramc lo tlir museum from ihc 1929-30 expedition of Felix Spciscr and was publisheti in 1933 in h'uhret dutch das Muifitm flii Vblkfrkundt Haul, Satumonm, la ligure II {'J'l/tenilaiuf. liougaincHk), p. 21. In 1930 ihc an of i lie Solomon Islands was ihc focus of an essay in fhtummlx llial deiill widi du* visual and telixi FRMAND Leger. SkeUh Jot Creation du M(»nd<-. Publishffl in L'Espril nouvrau, no. 18(1924). Tlic 1927 Spoon Woman goes beyond tlie applied use of the modish style negre dial was influencing everything from Art Dcco furniture to I.eger's theatrical curtains in the mid-1920s and which Giacomctti had employed in his Tht Couple the year before." The decorative application of iribalizing detail to a stylized, planar background is the formal strategy of what tnight be called Black Deco; it is this one finds in The Couple, giving the work its generalized character of the Africo-primitive in the absence of any specific sculptural source.But moving toward a much deeper level of structural assimilation of African carved objects. Spoon Woman acknowledges the metaphor frequently put in place by Dan grain scoops, in which the bowl of the implement is likened lo the lower part of the female seen as a receptacle, or pouch, or cavity.'^ Giacoitielli may have seen these spoons in the years before 1927. Six spoons from Paul Guillaume's collec- tion were included in the massive exhibition of African and Occanic art at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in the winter of 1923-24.'* By taking the metaphor and inverting it, so that spoon is like a woman" becomcs "a woman is like a spoon," Giacomctti was able to intensify the idea, and to universalize it by 11. Hpoon h'oman is convcniiuiudly iissigncd lo 1926 rxrrpt iit I lohlS inoiiugraph whcic, lur reasons not argued, it Is daied 1927. In following Hohl's dating, I am proposing the greater siyli&tic maturity, accomplishment, and thus later (late af Spoon H'oman, precisely on the basis of Giacometti's developing relationship to primitive sources, '/he Coupte, on the other hand, seems lo me lo p;irticip gcncrali/iiig dx* fornis of (he soriietiincs naiuralisiic African carvings (oward a more prismatic abstraction. In forcing on the Dan model the image of the woman who is ahnost itothing but womb, CJiacomelti assimilated the formal elegattce of th<' African object to the n>ore brtitish conception of stone-age fer- tility Venuses.'^ With this celebration of the prinial function {)f woman seen through a primi(ivi/e 12, I'rrvicnis altoiniXs to asNign a triliiil, sculpUiral xourcc for ihc frinalc half of I'ht CoupU Kvm unconvincing on ihc basis of conceptual and morphological comparison. .Maurer suggests a Maliongvve reli<|uary figure, Cciwling proposes Makonde body shie ds (see Maurer, p. 31<), and Kliziil>eth Ncibilt Cowling, "The Primitive Sources of Surrealism," unpublished .VI. A. thesis, l.dndon, die Courtltauh Insliliite, 1970. p. -16). Hut however unpcrsuasive the s|x-cifK "source" might Iw, the suggcstiona put forward by these authors attest lo Uieir experience of the Africaniz- ing character of the figures in Thr CoupU. This quality makes suggestions of a .Nc<»lithic source for the work, put forward by other scholars, somewhat dubious. There is a strong compositional (but not conceptual) reseml)lancc belween the female figure of I'kt CoupU and (me of die menhir figures from St, Scrnan sur Kance, a work that ligurc.s in the t]lusirati(ms of the Cariiac Museum < atalogiie of 1927. 'I1iis connection was first sugge.sted by Ste|>hanir Poley ("AlberKt Ciiacoiiiettis Uinsetzung Archaischer Gestaltungsformcn in Seinein VVerk Zwischcn 1925 und {^"ib" Jahtbuth drr Ilambuifin KuniUammUinufi 22 (19771, 177) and later by Alan WilkenM>n {(iaunuin to Mootr, hmiltvum m Modtrn Stulptutt, Art Cjallery of Toronto, 1981, p. 222). There arc other e.xamplesof the elfect of prehistoric images and objects i>n (H.irometti's work, most obviouxly in the 1931 sculpture 'Iht CatfSi in which the splayed hand etched onto the surface mimics the "stenrilled" palm print.sof the caves. Intrrest in this detail fn>m prehistoiie painting is to be ftnind ever>'wheie m the 1920s, one famous example ol' which is the cover of Ozcnfant's Foundation! of Modem Ah (1931), But in 'Vht CoupU the prehistoric image, if it indeed funclionrd as a sugge.stion for the c(int|K)siiion. has been converted into an evident style nt^re. 13. The Dan scnirce was first suggestetl by Jean Laude. I.a Peinturtjran^aise (1905-J9I4) n t'ml nrxrr, Pari.s Klincksieck, 1968, p, 13. I'i. The Exposition de t'ati indigene de.f colonies d'AJrique ei dXkeanxe, Muser des Arts De(«>r.itif* (Novemlxrr 1923-January 27, 1924) vvas organized by Andre l^vcl. Among the collections drawn upon for the exhibition weiv those of Felix F^tu'on, Andrui.\ Paudial Ix-lieves that these nnist have included Dan objects. Two other spoon/women lhai Giacometti could have seen were: the Lega spoon in Carl Ein.strin, l.a Sculptwr africaine, Paris. Iviitions Crcs, 1922, plate 42; and the utensil il- lustrated in plate 3 of Paul Guillaume and 'Iliotnas Munro, Ptimittve S'egro Stulptwe, New York, Hanourl, Brace, 1926. The Krench edition of this l)CK)k api)eare(l in 1929. 15. .See the copy Ciiacometti made of the Venus von Laussel, publislied m l.uigi Carluccio, A Sketihhoofi of Intnptethe />aM'inji. New York. Hariy N. Abrams, 19(iH, |)late 2. It is dilKciilt to dale these drawings, ljut this page also contains the sketch-idea for Giacomettis 'Vroii personnages dfhon of 1929. Modernist Myths 50 Jean Lambert-Rucki. Two Masks, 1924. ' Wotxi Alherlo Ciacomrlli. Si) ispuoit. Wofv. Ivory Coa\t. Wood. Miisre de I'Humme, Pati^. Sfwou. Hun. Lihetiu ut Ivory Cuasl. Wtmd Musee de I'Homme, Pari\. T.»? goal would not IH' the Pra 16. Georges Henri Riviere, "Ai'cheologinnes." Cakim d'ari, n by Roger Fry." Because of (}uillauiiu:'s prominence in the art worltl the book wouhi unfloul)(edly have been well known in Paris even before its translation into I'Vench, and indeed, one of its illustrations may have reinforced (Giacometti's conc<;ption of the woman/spoon. Maintaining that every work of African art can be understood as the solu- tion to a formal problem, PrimUive Negro Sculpture presents each of its objects as "a rhythmic, varietl smental psychology as that was being etmnciate 19. Roger Fry, "Negro Sculpture," Viiion and Driign, New York, Brcutano's, 1920. 20. At (uu- of many examples of ihe aesthetici/.ing discourse that analymi primitive url as just one moment of the collcciive reprcscnialion of Ari-ln-general. and thus of the acstheiic impulse roinmon lo all humanity, see A. O/enfant, Foundaitont o/ModrmArl: The Iff Age to 1931, Ix>ndon, 1931 (French publication, 1928). 21. C». M. lAi(|uei, I.'Arl prtmilif, Paris. Gaston IXlin, 1930. For Bataille's review, see "L'Art priinitif." Docununts, 11, no. 7 (1930), 389-97. Collected in (Jeorges Bataille, Oeuvrts Compl'etti, Pnriii. (iailimard, 1970, vol. I. pp. 247-254. No More Ploy 53 luaily able to repeat the images voluntarily. Since the basis of the interpretation is enormously schematic, what is involved is the connection of a mark with the idea of an object, a process that has to do with conception and not with resent- blance. For this reason Luquet calls primitive figuration inlelleclual realism, reserving the term visual realism for the Western adult's preoccupation with mimesis. Luquet's presentation of the development of prehistoric cave painting follows the same schema as that of the present-day child: random marking changes gradually to intentional patterning, which in turn gives rise to a figurative reading. Resemblance to external objects having been first "recog- nized" within die nonligurative patterns, it can be elaborated aitd perfected over time. In Luquet's program, then, an absolute freedom and pleasure initiates the impulse to draw; it is this instinct, not the desire to render reality, that is primal. On top of this foundation a procedttre is gradtially built for adjusting the mark to the conditions of representation, and within this a "system" of liguration develops with consistent characteristics over the entire domain of primitive art. whether that be the drawings of children, gralltttists, aborigines, or peasants. Characteristics like the profiles of faces endowed with two eyes and two ears, or the rendering of houses and bodies as transparent in order to display their contents, or the free combination of plan and elevation, are what remain unchanged through the practice of "intellectual realism." In Luquet's scheme, knowledge is thus generously added to pleasure. CX course, the chronology of prehistoric art does not su]}])ort Lutjuet's cheerful progrcssivism. The caves of I^ascaux, with their astonishing naturalistn, precede the much cruder renderings of later periods. Yet if Hataille draws his reader's attention to this obvious flaw in Luquet's scheme, it is not for reasons of historical accuracy but in order to assert something that had already become a staple of his thinking throughout his editorship Documents, and was lo con- tinue beyond. What Bataille points to is the unetiual mode of representation, within the same period, of animals and men. "The reindeer, the bison, or the horses," Bataille attests, "are represented with such perfect detail, that if we were able to see as scrupulotisly faithful images of th<; men themselves, the strangest period of the avatars of humanity would immediately cease being the most inaccessible. But the drawings and sculptures that are charged with rep- resenting the Atnignaciaits themselves are almost all injorme and much less human than those that represent the animals; others like the Hottentot Venus are ignoble caricatures of the human form. This opposition is the same in the Magdalenian period."" 22. Oruvrt:, Compiitfi, V'dI. I, p. 251. /N/ormr (tatiHlatrs "unruriiu-d,'although BataiDr iittcnds the word to undo Uie Aristotelian distinction between form and matter. 54 Modernisi Myihs I( is becausc "this crudt* and distorting art has been reserved for the human figure," that Bataille insists on its willfulness, on its status as a kind of primal vandalism wrought on the images of men. Indeed, Bataille wishes to substitute destructiveness for I.u(]uet's serene view of the pleastire principle at work at the origin of the impulse to draw. The child's marking on walls, his scrawls on paper, all proceed from a wish to destroy or mutilate the support. In each subsequent stage of the development charle 23. Ofuim Comf>rftf<:, vol. I, p. 2.')3. 24. Ibid., p. 2&I. This luktioo of (IK- D xignificnncc ol' ilic dtrformi-tl anthropoids that appear in the caves, or so that he aestheticizes the whole of African art. In the first essay tliat he wrote on primitive civilization Bataille remarked this resistance on the part of scholars to acknowledge what is liideous and cruel in the depiction of the gods of certain peoples. The text, included in a collection of ethnological essays occasioned by the first major exhibition of pre-Columbian art in Paris (1928), was called "1/Amerique disparue," and in it Bataille tried lo understand the reality behind the representation of the Aztec gods, depicted as caricatural, monstrous, and deformed.Although his knowledge of pre-Columbian culture was still rather superficial, his analysis proved to be extremely prescient, according to the ethnologist Alfred Metraux as he looke But in speaking of the Aztecs' insatiable ihirsl for blood, of their sacrificial practices in which the living victim's heart was cut out of his body and held up, still palpitating, by the priest at the altar, Bataille stres.ses the "a.stonishingly joyous character of these horrors." As in the case of the concept of alteration, the practice of sacrifice by the Aztecs allows the double condition of ihe sacred 26. In Jr.in HaWlon, l.'Ati prhvtumbifn, I'aits, fuiiiidnst Hvaiix-Arts, liKiO. Tins collcciiun of was lo acconi|>iu»y llit 1928 Kxposition de I'art /U I'amhiquf, in ihc Pavilion dc Marfan an lo be cxperlence 29. /ftirf.. |>. l.'»7. 30. Zcrv«>s, "Notes sur la »< ulj)tuiv contcmporaioc," |). 472. 31. For an actouni of the way Bataille's thought was shaped by Mauss, see Metraux, "Rencon- tre avec les elhnoKijjues.'' Another di.v:u%sion of this relationship is lanie.i ClifTonfs "On Fthn<»|{raphic Surrcalistn," Comfiaralive Studies in Socifiy and Htilory, XXIII (Oct<.l>er 1981), 543-564. 32. l-lohl insists on (liaeotnctti's knowledge and employment of the kind of prccise ethnographic information alK>ul the contexts uf tribal art that would have come to hint ea.sily through his con- nection with Ixiris (H<)hl. 1972, p. 79.). In an interview with the author (Fcbruar)- 24, 1983), Leiris supplied no dciaile Alifrrlo Giacotwtfi. Sus|K*tHU'{I Ball. Sus]K-tuk-(i Hall (detail). I930-JJ. Plaslcr and meUtl, 24 by 14'/, by t'-iVi inthes. The Alberto Giacumetti Foundation, Kumtmuseum, Hasel. Documents, Giacomctli made Suspended Ball. A sculpture that was to causc a sen- sation among the orthodox surrealists, giving Giacometti instant access to Breton and Hali, a sculpture that set olFthc whole surrealist vogue for creating erotically charged objects, it was nonetheless a work that had much less to do with surrealism than it did with Bataille.'' Maurice Nadeau remembers the reactions originally triggered by Suspended Ball: "Everyone who saw this object functioning experienced a strong but in- definable sexual emotion relating to unconscious desires. This emotion was in no sense one of satisfaction, but one of disturbance, like thai imparted by the irritating awareness of failure."'* An erotic machine. Suspended BaUn, then, like 33. Along wiih Miro and Ar]>. Cii.icometii rxhibiicd in the .luiuinn of 1930 al dir (tnlcriv I'ierrt:. (icorgcs Sadoul rcculls, "At die end of 1930 1 niei Alberto (liacomciti. He had ju&i been admitted into (lie Surrealist group ... In 1930 he inlroducetl a new mode into SurretJisin with his sculptures (hat were nu>t>ile ot>Jcc(s. 'rhi.s launched the vogue of Surrealist objects with a sym- bolic or er«>lic function, the making of which Ixrcame practic ally obligatory" (Cited in I lohl, 1972, p. 2-19). The dale i)f Dali's 'Objeis a fonclioiHtemeni symbolique' (Le Sunndiimt au mvUe de la th'olution, iKi. 3 119311. 16-17), demonstrates (his later attempt to absorb Cfiaiometti's innovative wurk into (he heart of the surreidist mt>vcnten(. 34. Maurice Nadeau. Hiiloirt du SurtMtsmt, Paris, Seuil, 194S, p, 176, .•>8 Modcrnisl Mydis T liaU-f>ame player. Vega de Aparieio, Veracniz, Mexico. (Diau ing adaptedJtom a stone utdpliirr in ihe Museo National de Antropologia, Mexico City.) ])u( liiinip's l.argf Glass, an apparatus for ihe disconnection of the sexes, the nonfulfdimeni of desire. But Suspended Ball is more explicitly sadistic than The Bride Stripped Bare. For the sliding action that visibly relates the sculpture's |{r(M)ved sphere to iis wetlge-shaped partner suggests not only the act of caress- ing but that of culling: recapitulating, for example, the stunning gesture from the opening ol Chien Andalou, as a razor slices through an opened eye.'' In this double gesture incarnating love and violence simultaneously one can locate a fundamental ambiguity with regard lo the sexual identity of die elements of Giacometti's sculpture. The wedge, acted upon by the ball, is in one rea 35, Bat.iillf"sarjirlc"rOKil.''/Xw/iw«7i Atherin GiacameHt. CirruiI. I9'JI. H 'ood. I % by IHy2 by J&y, inches. Collection UentifUe Gotne\, l*aii>. And the wedge is possibly a diird subscilute for the phallus, joined in yet another wiiy to d»e universe of sacred violence that had, by 1930, become the shared interest of Giacornetti and Bataille. The wedg<' is shaped like the palmette stones of the ancient Mexican ballgame —wedge-shaped elements that were thought to have been worn for protection by the nearly naked participants in a game in which the ball could only be kept in play by being hit widi die knees and buttocks and in which the very names tjsed for the game stressetl the in- sirunu'ntality of the buttocks (for example, from Molina's 1571 Nahua dic- tionary one finds, ollama: to play ball with the buttocks; and olli: certain gum of medicinal trees of which they make balls with which they play with their but- tocks).'' Like evei-yihing else in the Mexico Bataille admired, the Toltec ballgame was a combination of exuberantre and cruelty, with accounts of bloody wounds caused by the ball and deaths of the players on the courts, With its use of the buttocks as a principle instrument of play, the game had a further homoerotic overtone. If. as I am suggesting, the Mexican ballgame was a com- ponent in the formation of Suspended Bail—opening as the work does onto Giacometti's immediately subsequent investigation of sculpture itself as a ball coun, or playing held, or gameboard, as in Point to the Eye, Circuit, and "On ne M. St* Fraiis Bkmi, The Maya Ball-fJaiiir Pok-'r.i-l'ok," MiddU Animcan Papn\, liilanr Univcnsily, 'I'liii essay pubhshed in die 1930s represenis ihe level of elhnographit knowl- edge of (he ballgame at ihe time we are here c«in»i«lering, Modernist Myths Alberto Ciacomelti. Point to the? Eye. 1932. Allferto Giacometti. Head. 1925. Phstrr, Wood and metal, by 24 by 14 inches. 12 yi inches high. Musee National d'Art Musee S'atioiial d'Ari Modeme, Centre Georges Modeme, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Pompidou, Paris. joue pltis" {No More /Vty)—then a "tliird sex" must be added to the cycle of in- determinacy of the work's .« 38, Jar(iucs Dupin, Alberto Giatometii, Paris, Mucght, 1962, p. 88. .39. Jacqucs Dupin lold mc tluU wltcn he brgan work on his nionogra >h on (riacomrui, (he sculptor lent him his own carcfully proicctctl, full set Documents to work from. For one of (he Dociot\a\ti articles on this subjcct, illustrated by codex representations of the victims and the places of sacrifice, see Roger Herv«5, "Sacrificcs humains dtt Ccntre-Amcrique," Documents, II, no. 4 (1930). 40. Cahiers d'Art, no. 10 (1929), 45G, reproduces a pliolograph of an Aztcc pyramid topped by an altar whose structure is suggestive fur that of t'/lewe des tnues. No Afore Play 61 Hour of the Traces inimcdialcly prcccdcil Suspended Hall. The two sculptures are structurally connected by virtue of their shared play with a pendant ele- ment swung from a cagelike support. Within the universe of ideas associated at that moment to A/.tec culture, the sculptures may be thematically connected as well. But without any doubt they are both assimilable to Giacometti's fully elaborated accounts of his own thoughts uf sadism and violence. AUhough lirst published in Breton's magazine, a text like "Mier, sables mouvants," with its fantasy of rape ("the whole forest rang with their cries and groans") and slaughter, has little to do with the notions of convulsive beauty authorized by surrealism.*' Its relationship is to Georges Bataille, whose own writing and preoccupations seem to have given Giacometti permission to express these fan- tasies of brutality. Like his lifetime attachment lo Bataille's magazine, Giacometti's writing about violence —as in his essay on Jacques Callot or his text "Le reve, le Sphinx et la mort de T."—continued well beyond the 1930s 41 Albrrto Oiacomctli, 'Hicr. subles mouvants,'' Le Suniaititne au lervice de let reielulion. no. 5 (1933). Allferio Oiacoinelti. The Hour ol' the Traces. /9.30. IVhereahouts unknown. Aslec pyramid. (Published in Cahiers d'ari, no. JO (J929).) 62 Modernist Myrhs and his repudiation of surrealism. lit both their structure and imagery these texts often call Bataille to mind.*' I said before that alteradon functions as a Bataillian concept becausc of the primal contradiction that operates its relation to meaning, such diat the signilier oscillates constantly between two poles. This same kind of oscillation of mean- ing (for the complexity involved the more accurate term might be migration) is what is put into play by Suspended Ball. For though the work is siructurtrd as a binary opposition, with the two sexes, male and female, juxtaposed and con- trasted, the value of each of these terms does not remain fixed. Kach element can be read as the symbol of eidier the masculine or feminine sex (and for the ball, in addition to an interpretation as testicles, there are the additional, possi- ble semantic values of buttocks and eye, neither of these determined by gender). The identification of either form within any given reading of tlu; work is possible only in opposition to its mate; and ihe.se readings circulate through a constantly shifting (heater of relationships, cycling through the meta- phoric statement of heterosexual cotmection into the domains of transgressive sexuality—masturbatory, homosexual, sadistic —and back again. The trans- gression contained in the sculpture's signifying gesture, we should note, sets it apart simultaneously from Breton's adamant rejection of the sexually perverse, and the rather anodine, formal jeux d'esprit of Picasso's transformations of the human body in the late '20s, wilh which Suspended Ball is often compared.*^ In its continual movement, its constant "alteration," (his play of meaning is thus the enactment in the symbolic realm of the literal motion of the work's pendular action. Although the alter(n)ation ot Suspended Ball is constant, it is nonetheless regulated in a way that is entirely structued by the possibilities of metaphorical expansion of its two elements —wedge and sphere —and the oscillations of their sexual values. In this erotic play within a structurally closed system, the sculp- lurtr participates in the daemonic logic of Bataille's I'llistorie de I'OEil. In Bataille's work, which as Roland Barthcs points out is literally the story of an object —the eye-and what happens to it (and not to the novel's characters), a 12. All>rri«i Gi.'iroiiifiti, "A (iropos do Jacqucs Callot," luibjrintfie, no. 7 (April 15, 1945), 3. This essay rclaics the fascination with horror and (Icstruclion on the part of CaDoi, Goya, and (Jcricaidt: "For thrsr artists there is a frenetic desire for destruction in every realnt. up to that of huinaji consciousness itself." In a thought that is olwiously close to Bataille, Giacometti com hities dial in order to uiiderMand this one would have to speak, "on the one hand of the pleasure in de.struction that one finds m children, of their cruelly . . and on the other liaml of the subject- matter of art." "I..<- reve, le Sphinx et la mort tie T.," I^ibiyinthe, no. 22/23 (December 15. 1946), 12-13. Not only does the story ol the .spider, in the dream recounted in this texl, recall Bataille's iheme of the in/ormr, but the description ofT.'s head, rendered hideously objective by death, is pure Bataille. Income 'an object, a little, measurable, insignificant box," the head is seen lis a rot- ting cadaver, "miserable debris to be thrown away," into the mouth of which, to (liacomctti's hor- ror, a lly enters. 43. I lohl ileclares, for example, "li is certain that the club and sphere forms that Picass (-onciition of migration is established in which the otiject is, as it were, "declined" through various verbal states. As a globidar element the eye is transformed through a scries of metaphors by means of which, at any given point in the narrative, other globular objects are substituted for it: eggs, testicles, the sun. As an object containing fluid, the eye simultatieously gives rise to a secondary series related lo the lirst: yolk, tears, urine, sperm. The two metaphoric series thus establish a systetn of combination by means of which terms can interact to produce a near infinity of images. The sun, meta- phorized as eye an 44. Koliiiiri R.-irilu-s. 'l^ji inrtnphorc to th 46. "Infonnc" was Bataille's cntr)' in the "Diclionnaire" of Doiumntt, I, no. 7 (1929). 47. For a discussion of Bniiiille's *Dictionar>'" within the context of the various avant-garde dic- tionaries, .see Denis Hollier, La hue de fa C^ntotde, pp. 59-65. 4B. For cxainj>le, a four-v(»lunie series of ph Albato CiacomeHi. Hea 52. Rrcton, Dvcummts 34, 20. 53. The year before making ihe plaster mask/sketch for Inuisihle Object, Giacomctli executed another "mask" in plaster: the derorined head of Flower in Danger {{923). 1'hiji sculpture, with ils images of incipient decapitation of the flower/head, is like a little macJiine for the production uf the ace{Aale. It is possible (hat n plaster head by Arp, published in ibe special issue on surrealism in Vari^a (June 1929), contributed to the notion of the head as a mask in the process of dccom- |M>siti(m, (iti Motlernisi Myihs Alberto Cituometti. Flower in Danger. 193'J. Wood, melal, phuer, 21V» by 30% by 7H intbes. The Alberto GiQcomeiii Foundation, Kunsthaus, /.utiek. copicd from one of the carnival masks photographed byJacques-Andrc Boiffard and reproduced in Documents to accompany (Jeorges I Jmbour's text "Eschylc, le Cartiaval et les Civilises."^"* The setting for Limbour's meditation on this subject is a chaotic gen 54. Documenls, 11, no. 2 (1930), 97-102. ;\'o More Play 67 Jean Arp. H<';ul. 1929. /'wWnArt/iM Varit'u's June J929), special issue: Surrealism in 1929. primitive art v^ras no lotiger that of Alrica (which was considered loo rational, too formalist) but that of Oceania, and it is to this that Limbour refers." In a pa.ssage representative of the angrily anticolonialist feeling of both groups, Limbour castigates the violation of these territories by (he white man, who sub- stitutes his "missionaries of Lent, his paper-mache Jesuits" for the incredible force of the Melanesian conception of lite mask.^"> And in an image that is right out of Bataille's conception of die soleilpourri, he speaks of the faces carved onto the great poles stuck into the earth, "staring straight into the sun."®' Flaving raped the South Seas to sencl its sacred objects back to the art markets and !>r>. I'lii' c.Niiinpti-, tltr .\ui'r«'iili\l iMa]> nf the worlci in placcs Oceania al ihe very center ( yarielts jjune 19291; SurrealiMii in 1929). 5(>. In 1931 I.OUIH Aragon org-tniml an iin(icolt)niali.xl rxhihilion in a inecling hall in the rue Jacqufi-Andre Boiffard. Photograph. Published in Documents. //, no. 2 (1930). "La Protection des hommes, 'Jrorn VaritU(5s, //. no. 9 (January 1930). Trocaderos of "civilization," the West has also developed its own masks, ones, Limbour writes, that are worthy of Aeschylus. These, of course, are the gas masks that alone are authentic to our times. "Because if religion, the cult of (he dead, and the festivals of Dionysos turned the mask into a sacred, ritual orna- njent among the various ancient peoples, we too have our own religion, our own societal games, and consequently our own masks. Only tlur general stan- tlari/ation of our age requires that we all wear the same one." The thought of the gas mask, which substitutes for the "humanity" of the face a horrific image of the brutality of industrialized war, had become 58. "Aboutissemcni.s dc la incthuniquc," Variiiis II, no. 9 (Jantuiry 1930). ;\'o More Play 69 rri Alhrriu Ciacomefii. Ciigc. 1931. Wood, 19 Vi Alherlo Ciacotnefti. \V»>inai», Head, Trci* inches high. Modana Muieei, Stockholm. J930. Piaster. an(hropuid.N of the eaves, acephale: a transgressive thought of the human.^^ The term is, of course, Bataille's, and in liis work it functioned as a kind of password by which to enter the conceptual theater where humanity displays the richness of its contradictory condition. For acephale opens onto the experience of man's verticality—his elevation in both its biological and moral signilicance-'as a negation: a development towar 59. Bataille's concent rut ion on llie acephale le cat its partner alter, or even during, copulati<»n. Because ol the strongly an- ihropomorphic character of this insect, its mating habits seemed extremely portentous to the surrealists. Roger (Jaillois's essay {>n the mantis, published in Afinotaurr in 1934, which became the basis of his later sttidies of the function of myd> and the ambiguity of the sacretl, reported that Breton, Eluard, and Dali all kept large collections of these insects, in cagcs.**" Caillois's essay reUrased a swarm of praying mantises onto the surfaces of surrealist painting/"' But even before 1934 the insect had appeared in (iiacometti's work as well as Krnst's. Ciiacometti's 1930 Woman, Head, Tree depicts du> woman as a mantis attd seems to have introduced the production of the two Cages of the following year. In both of these an abstracted image of the mantis is at work within the nightmarish confines of the sculpture, attacking ils ma.sculine pariner emblematically lepresenlt'd by a simple sphere, or cranium. With these Cages, the mantis appears as well as to have been thought throtigh the medium of extreme formal disjunction that vvas consi 61). Roger Caillois, "La niaiuc rcligicu-sc," Minolautt, I, no. .') (May 1934), 25. See al.so, "La Nature ei raiiKiur.' Vatirif^. II, n Max Etnst. Callage Jwm Une Setnainc ilc Hot>it\ 19.14. pijih book. Element: Darkneis. Example: Raster hland. Mallanggen. New Ireland Painted Wood. Musee des Arts Ajricains ei Oeraniens, Paris. 72 Modcrnisl Myths reworking and etching large stones that the two men dragged front the glacial moraine. 'I'hc figures Krnst chose lo represent on these sculptures were both (he birds from the Easter Island cults and the Papuan bird from New Guinea, with which Ernsl identified and which he used as his alter ego Loplop.^' Much of the sculpture that Ernst went on to make in the following years shows the ell'ects of this visit on his art. His Lunar Asparagus (1935), for example, is obviously in- debted to i'rois personnages dans un pr'es, a wurk resonant with primitive associa- tions, which Giacometti had set up in 1930 in the Swiss countryside.^® But the interest obviously ran both ways as Giacometti's Project for a Passageway (1930-31) indicates, with ils closeness to images like Ernst's Anatomy of a lirtdeor La lielle Jardiniere. Thus Ernst's association in La Semaine de Bonte of the mantis with the con- lexl of Oceania and the site of the Papuan spirit bird provides yet one more aspect of the many factors that determined the conception of Invisible Object, with its own inclusion of a bird's head reminiscent of Loplop's. It establishes a conceptual site within which to see how the logic o{ Invisible Object works to com- bine the Solomon Islands spirit of the G7. AltlxHigh Ernst's rxtrnsive lollrrttoii of Occiinic art ((•nlaincd other things as well, he largely specialized in objects of the Papuan Guir (New Guinea), according to the researcli of Philip)K- Peltier. (See Peltier in /Viwrti'inw in 2(Hh ('.mlury Att. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, I9fi-1.) (iti. Now destroyed, (he wurk was )ublished in Minolautt, no. (1933), 40. Tiiere is an ob- vious resemblance between these .stakelike per&onages driven dircctiy into die CTOund and the tribal w AnncUa Stanipa Giacomctti.^' It is possible to trace the way this maternal force was simultaneously associated with the ideas of death that haunt his work and its equally strong focus on pregnancy and birth. Giacometti was obsessed with the idea of the rock that bears fruit, or, as Arp had written, "The stones arc full of entrails. Bravo. Bravo."" Interesting as that territory might be to explore, it lies at a tangent to the subject of this study, although in what follows, wilh ils concern wilh death and the monument, the additional testimony of this per- sonal, biographic motivation is certainly not unwelcome. Any artist's work can be seen from the vantage of either of two, possibly cimllicting, perspectives. One of the.sc looks at the oeuvre from within the totality of the individual. The oiher regards it, far more impersonally, within a historical dimension, which is to say, comparatively, in relation to the workof others and the collective development of a given medium. Often these two perspectives overlap. The shape of Mondrian's career, for example, in ils search for the neoplastic elements of painting, coincides with his position at the forefront of the general development of abstraction within twentieth-ceniury art. In Giacometti's case this is not so. For Giaconietti's sculpture viewed from the perspective of his individual oeuvre is overwhelmingly that of the monu- ment: the single, vertical figure, raised commemoratively in space, hieratic, immobile, (all. From (he Spoon Woman, to Invisible Object, to any of the 19r)0s standing figures, we can follow the trajectory of this concern, using il to bestow a conceptual unity on Giacometti's art. But from the point of view of the histor)' of sculpture —an impersonal and far le.ss .sympathetic measure-Giacometti's entire production of the vertical monument is less interesting, which is to say, less totally innovatory, than the work he made in the years from 1930 to 1933. For that intervening work is horizontal. The formal innovation of those sculptures, almost wholly unprepared for by anything else in the history of the medium, was their ninety-degree (urn of the axis of the monument (o fold its vertical dimension onto the horizontality of the earth. In objects like Project for a Passageway, Head /Landscape, and the extra- ordinary gameboard sculptures like Circuit and "On n^ joue plus" the work itself is simply and directly conceived of as a base. We could challenge ihe in- novatory character of (his inven(ion by saying that already, in the teens, Bran- cusi had cancelled the distinction between sculpture and base, but we would then be missing the point of the profound originality of Giacometti's move. F'or Brancusi's base/sculptures remain vertical. They continue to house the object within the domain created by the primal opposition between what is not ar- tistically determined —the ground —and what is —the sculpture. The very axis 71. Giucuinctti, "Lc juilais dc quatrc hcurcs," A/tnttfourr, no. 3/4 (1933), 46. 72. Thiii is ihr epigraph for the cluipier of Unr Srmaint dr Ronit that contains the Easter Island scciion. Giacometti's text, 'Hier, sahtrs mouvants," Ix-gins with his account of the large nKk into which he w yi/lage of (roui/e, Camrroon. Fublisked in Ciiliicrs dart. no. 7-li (1927). of vcriicality dcclaics the apartness of sculpture's representaiional field from the world of aclualily, and this dimension is iradiiionally introduced by the uprightness of a pedestal, wilh ils initiation of the lift of the work above the ground, ils removal from the spa 73. Sec Amirc (liclc, "Architcfiurc nrgres." Cahien d'art, no. 7/8(1927), panicularly ihc image on p. 2ti!). 7't. Dif Sammhtng det Alfynto Giaconuui-Stijtwng, Kun.sthaus, Zurich, 1971. p. 94. 75. It was Bataille who c.onlrihtncU thr name lor ihr review Mtnotaurr, in 1933. ;\'o More Play 75 Alhrrto GiacomrUi. Prnjcci for a Passagcvvay. imO-31. Plaster. (> by 50 by 17 inches. The Alberto Giatometti Foundation, Kunsthaus, Ziirich. Fall oJa Body onto a Diagram, and it is diis notion of the body's fall that verbally acknowledges what the sculpture? visually perfornis."' The structural principle of Head/Landscape on the metaphorical relation between the two things operated through the spatial device of anamorphosis: rotated onto the horizon- tal plane, the face resembles a landscape. This precise relationship was spelled out in a display of "paranoid critical" thinking by Salvador Dali when he "read" a photograph of African natives sittitig in front of their huts as a Picasso head, a (mis)reading that resulted, he explained, by his disorientation with regard to the photograph. In Dali's presentation the image is then, like Head/Landscape, rotated ninety degrees." But Giacometti's sculpture is less like a head in rota- tion than it is like a mask or Hat covering of some sort. And the landscape that is ils alternate reading does not seem like (he neutral terrain of Dali's example but rather resembles a necropolis, its rectangular openings suggesting a tomb.'® (This combination of tomb and necropole would be made more precise by the coHins sunk inio the ground of ne joue plus" of the following year.) 76. In Zrr\'Os's "Quclqucs notes sur le.s .sculpture.s ChiUl'i cofin. Naumea, New CaUdunia. Woud, Fish. Easter Isloiul. Wood, (iy* inches long, fiber, l^Yi inche.\. Musee dt I'lhmnxt, Varis. Formerly Museum Jiir I'^olkerkundc, Retlin. Whereabouts unknown. Various African masks, photographed and published lying down, may have played a role in suggesting die morphology of Head/Landscape.^'* Bui die object that weaves together most of the threads of association suggested by the work's metaphorical i)lay, and which for that reason could well have been a source, is the lid of a child's coffin from New Caledonia, iti the Musde de I'Homme. This object figured in the copious illustrations of the 1929 Cahiers d'art special issue on Oceania, an issue that Giacomelti possessed and from which he made many copy-drawings. Giacometti had constantly insisted that his frequent drawing after other works of art was most often done from illustra- tions rather than in front of the things themselves.®® The example of his pre-!945 drawings of Oceanic objects bears this out, for they are practically all taken from the same published source.®' This resource, at the time the largest easily accessible repertory of Oceanic images (containing, moreover, many representatives of the surrealists' collections: Breton, Aragon, Tzara), may have suggested other types of relationship lo Giacomctti liesides the head/land- scape of the coffin lid (figure 122). The Raster Islands bird/fish of figure 180 could have operated behind the development of the phallically conceive 79. I'or rxaiimlr, llic 9|>C('iai IMUC on ati negre l.a Servie, ii«». 9-10(1920), Htfurr 9. 80. Albcno Giacomctu. "Notes sur Ics copies," l.'liphhnere, n Albato GiatomeUi I Icacl/I.aiuNcapc. J930-31. Plaster, 9'/i by '27Yi inches. Whereabouts unknown. Alberto Giacometti. Disagrefablc Objcct. 1931. Wood, 19 inches long. Prnate collection, New York. 78 Modernist Mvths Em (hnamait. \fmiiuf\a\ !standi, loory, IVj AlltfiUi Ciacomrlti. Disiigrrc-jihlr ()!>j«'<-i ni inrkrs high. I'ormrTly atUrHion 'i'risian Tzara. Bf Disposed Of. 1931. Wood, fi'A inches I'rivaU: toUeclion. long. Prii atr collection, London iher» the bird/wotnan statue ol" figure 46 resetubles otic of tlie two personages that iidutl)it the necropolis of"0« neJotie filus"; and as has been suggested above with regard to the object owned by Max F.rnst, the various mallangffan, par- .J ticularly the one belonging to Louis Aragon (figure 65), contain the idea of sculptural scaffolding that one finds in Giacometti's repeated use of the cage. Given the almost exclusive identification of the surrealists with Oceania, the upsurge of these sources among the range of primitive iniages that were fueling his imagination at this time might be used to reinforce the general char- acterization of this period of Giacometti's work (1930-32) as his "surrealist epoch."®* 1 lowever, Giacometti's connection to the orthodox surrealists did not really begin in 1930, Suspended Ball, the object that excited their attention, was not exhibited until the end of that year. It is not to the surrealist conceptual do- main, to its fascination wilh the aleatory, wilh games of chance and the objet trouve, that we shoukl look for the matrix of ideas that operate Giacometti's con- ception of sculpture's rotated axis: the horizontal gameboard, movement in real time, (he sculpture as base, the base as necropolis. The year this all begati was 1930, and al that period Giacometli was still connected to Documents. The preoccupation with real time that enters his work with Suspended Ball and Hour 8.1. HoUl, 1972. p. 81. ;\'o More Play 79 Casset-TeUs. New Calahnia. Wood, \fn\ee de I'Homme, Farts. 80 Modernist Mytljs oj the Traces opens onto u consifieration of real space; and real spa<-e is defined by sculpture that has become nothing but its base, a vertical that is rotated into "baseness." This veiy operation was made continually by Hataille as he developed the concept of "ftarmc''— a low or base materialism —in Documents.^* In the anatomical geography of Bataille's thought the vertical axis emblematizes man's pretensions toward the elevated, the spiritual, the i 84. BataiJlr,*'Lc bas materialisme el la ffnose." 8.'). -Le gros orieil," Documenu, no. 6 (1929), 302, 8G, In a 1926 drawing ofa nude, Cfiaeometti dcpicis this axial rotation by ainllating the mouth and genitals. This relationship is the formal i Jacquti-Andre lioiffard. Photograph. Published ^ r tn Docunicnis. //. no. 5(1930). Jaequn-Andre Ihijfard. Photograph, c. 1930. • Alberto aiacometii. Woman. J926. Ink on paper 7 by 5 inrhes. ' 82 Modernist Myths Man Ray. Photograph. Pubiishrd in Minotaure, no. 7(1935). l)lind.®' The obsession with tlie sun proinote 87, Thr live icxia on ihc pineal eye were wrillen between 1927 an Painting is born with man's refusal to reproduce himself, and oul of an act of self-mutilation.®'-' This set of connections belween painting, a fascination with the sun, and the mutilation of the body in an act of sacrificial madness, is spelled out in Bataille's essay "La mutilation sacrificielle et I'oreille coupee de Vincent Van CJogh." For Bataille, Vati Gogh's is not an aberrant gesture but is entirely rep- resentative of art's e.ssenti.il, archaic function. As one scholar of Bataille's work explains, "Self-mutilation demands lo be thought of as an acl, in fact, ihe pic- torial act par excellence. Because painting is nothing if it doesn't strike at ilur ar- chitecture of the human body; this architecture which, precisely, is not simple because it implies self-mutilation.The Minotaur, not Narcissus, presides v over th(> birth of an art in which representation rt^presenls alteration. One after another. (5iacometti's gatneboard, horizontal sculptures enact the marriage of the field of representation widi the condition of the base, the ground, ihir earth. This rota(i<»n of the axis into the dimension of the physical is the shift of direction of the acephale. Fiut these rotated works share another aspect with the themes of the headless man and the labyrinth. For, with one ex- ception, all of them carry the furth<-r signilicatioti of death. "On ne joue plus^ v.im- ceives of the "sculpture" as a game, ils board cralered with semicircular hollows modeled on djc African pebble game t';^' but into its center are sunk two tiny Collins, (heir lids asktrw. 'Fhe literal space of the board on which pieces can be moved in real time fuses with the image of the necropolis. 'Fhe LiUre Dictionary lists the sheet that covers an emply coffin as one of the primal meanings of representation. kepresoKation, a stand-in for the tiead, is thus conceptually suspended between the symbolic and the real decay of mat- ter— the precise condition of alteration. Bataille's notion of a "base materialism" operates in (his very middle ground be(ween the literal and die symbolic, for il conceives the entire field of social relationships as wholly structured by the c(m- ditions of representation, wliich is to say, language. Bui language is thought of as a dir(r<-(ionless nutze in which, for exaniple, the sacred is (he function of die ver>' conditions of the word i(self: sacer, like altus, pointing in lwt> directions, toward the blessed an yy. In "I..! miiiilaiiun sacrifirirllc et rorcillc ampcc de Vinteiii Van Co^h.* Docummis, II, no. 8 (19.'t0), li.itaille al(a< k.v, lor e.yani|>le, I.U()nel's aei-eplani e of ihe "folded-linger" liy|Kjlhe.Nis (o ex- plain die cave paintings in which siencilcd hands are recorded with missing fingers {Otwtes Com- filirlrs, vol. I. p. 267). A molifof great faM'inatioii, the stenciled hand is used in Im Carmc(19.10). 90. Hollier. La /*nse dt la Concord/, p. 148, 91. I lohl mentionii woiNlen Ik'nin gamel>i>.irdH that Giacomnti might have seen at the Charles Ration Gallery, which could have .served as a model for this work (Hohl, 1972. p. 299. fn. 27). .St. Railon, however, sayx dial no Benin ohjecl.s of ihis ty|>f exisl. Instead, one has only lu lurn l doubleness and reconstruct a language in which each clement has a specific value, and only one. It wants to build vertical monuments to cover over the necmpolis where meaning burrows into the dirt of decay, contamination, death. The space of this linguistic necropolis, in which language both forms and represents the real desires of the acephale, is the labyrinth. The gameboard of "On nejoue plus^ is not a readymade, its horizontality is not the unmodulated topple of the snow shove I of Duchatnp's h Advance of a liroken Arm. The gameboard, with its little pieces, is a representation in which the symbolic is made a function of die base, the base in Bataille's sense {l>a.iexse), a concept far from surrealist poetics, forged instead out of a vision of the primitive. In 1933 Ctia(omirtti's art changed abruptly. He began to work frotn life, with models who posed in the studio, instead of making sculptures— as he later said of his work of the early 1930s — that "used to come to me complete in my mind."*' The break this precipitated with the surrealists left Giacomelti violently hostile. He declared that "everything he had made up to that time had been masturbation and that he had no other goal but to render a human head."'-'* As part of this repudiation he is also nrported to have denied his connection lo 92. James I.«)rtl, A Gituomeiti Ponrait, j>. 48. See Ciiatomclli's actouni in 'Ix palais de quaircs henrvs." 93. Marrel Jean. IHsloire dt la Peinlure sumalisle, I'aris, Seuil, 1959, p. 227. Allftrlo Cta primitive art, saying that if he had taken anything from objects of this type it was simply because art negre was modish during his early career. What Giacometti was rejecting was not simply surrealism or a related connection to tribal art. At a deeper, structural level, he renounced the horizontal and everything il meant: both a dimension within which lo rethink the formal concerns of .sculpture, and a matrix through which human anatomy was "altered." From 1935 on, he devoted himself to vertical sculpture. Having made this decision, he left behind those two concerns ihat had worked together generate die brilliance t>f his work of ihe early '30s: the base and the ])rimitive. /Vim, am 94. Il) (he late 1931)2! Giucuincui is rR]>i>nccl to havr said this to Greta Knuison, then the wife of Tristan 'J'/ara, Tor whom he .sat for a |>ortrait (as (old (o me by Knutson's (hniKhter>in>taw, Madame '['zara). '/'he game of i. Dugon. Mali. Published in Marcel Griaule, Jeux tlogons, Paris, 1938 ' particular inierr.st that painters at the Ix'^inninK of liie 20lh century had for African ait, today it is American an from l)cloix* the conquest dial. alon){ with Oceanic art, c.xercises an elective influence on artist.v" (Breton, Afrxiqu/, Paris, Kenous an