Giacometti

Giacometti first encountered original Egyptian artifacts in 1920 in Florence, where he was confronted with the reification of his own artistic aspirations: a distillation of reality, the living presence of humanity in a stylistic form. It was the beginning of a life-long relationship.

In Paris, he studied Egyptian artifacts at the Louvre and copied illustrations from books. This is the origin of his paradigmatic form of the striding figure, just that space in front makes all the difference to a sense of space, fluidity and motion. The show at the Kunsthaus pairs drawings and sculptures, so that it becomes absolutely revealing of Giacometti’s methodology.

Chariot, 1950, MOMA

I am all for the materiality of art. Amenhotep III (1405-1367BC) at Luxor museum only found in 1989 hidden beneath stone slabs, is one of my favourite works of art. A beautiful formal quality using pink granite. From the side an impossibly small bottom and short back but from the front exquisite and powerful. Arm bands of rough stone, a lovely belly button, sandals rendered, the cartouches and hieroglyphs on the base - all becoming a natural whole.

The equivalent in this show is the block statue in granite of Senemut, (c1470 BC).

Brancui's 'Kiss' of 1907, was a breakthrough, after finishing a brief period in Rodin's busy atelier he made this very rough work, acknowledging the original limestone block.

Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill (1913-1915) is the first work of Modernism in Britain, a powerful figure of man becoming mechanised. The work (destroyed) was initially a large plaster figure on top of an actual pneumatic rock drill. He considered adding a motor to make the piece drill. “Here is the armed, sinister figure of today and tomorrow. No humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein's monster we have made ourselves into...” (Autobiography, 1940).

Henry Moore visited Brancusi and Rodin in Paris, returned to the British museum and became fascinated with Meso-American sculpture, the God Chac-mool figures. They gave him freedom to carve roughly and not like Victorian smoothness. He took his materials very seriously, his figures looked like rock fertility of invention. He bought random blocks from English quarries and watched them to perceive their distinct qualities and to imagine what he could carve. Sculpture is both a very active process, chiselling and hammering, and passive, waiting to get a feel of the block, what it was capable of becoming.

Clement Greenburg went too far in his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in arguing that art must reject anything that ignores its intrinsic formal properties, in painting flat abstraction and in sculpture volumetric clarity; otherwise it degenerates into kitsch.

And I do not believe a materiality thesis works with poetry. When Charles Bernstein champions non-traditional poetry which “emphasises its medium as being constructed ... designed, manipulated, picked, programmed, organised", it is a mistake. Language is primarily concerned with meanings; syntax, grammar etc. are not that interesting.

And from the other end of the spectrum:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all/Ye know on earth and need to know.” Ode on a Grecian Urn, John Keats, spring 1819. The first time this link is mentioned by Keats, is in a letter, ‘What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.’ (November, 1817).

Whoever is speaking (when first published in the Annals of the Fine Arts, the last two lines were without quotation marks) it is a wild Platonic utterance. And no Greek vase exists that corresponds to Keats' description.

Senemut, c1470 BC, Berlin. On the left side of the block, 12 birds as hieroglyphs, such beautiful writing, simple but powerful. And now thought to predate cuniform.

Jacob Epstein, Rock Drill, Tate