Timothy Mathews

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Alberto Giacometti. The Art of Relation
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/alberto-giacometti-9780857735096/



Alberto Giacometti's attenuated figures of the human form are among the most significant artistic images of the 20th century. Sartre, Breton, and Winnicott are just some of the great thinkers who have drawn upon the graceful, harrowing work of Giacometti, which has continued to resonate with artists, writers, and audiences. Through those thinkers and others, Timothy Mathews explores the themes of fragility, trauma, space, and relationality in Giacometti’s art. The book is populated with others texts that in Mathews’ imagination evoke the sense of being overwhelmed by Giacometti’s extraordinary works: the novels of W.G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett, Cees Nooteboom, and the plays and theories of Bertolt Brecht, which allow Mathews to recast Giacometti’s iconic L’Homme qui marche as Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. Giacometti’s lifelong quest is to represent the human form, and to locate the humanity at the heart of conflicting conceptions of modernity. Mathews shows a Giacometti returning in sculpture and writing to fundamental notions of depth and flatness, memory and attachment. By investigating their affective power, this book asks what encounters with Giacometti’s pieces can tell us about the history of our own time, and our ways of looking; about the nature of human attachment, and the humility of relating to art.

That description, which I’ve changed a bit, still rings true. But none of it matters unless there’s a working community of you, a reader, me writing, and something made by Giacometti: none is ever in the same place as the others, but each one seeks a place from which to speak, and to reach out to others, without stifling and silencing. 



In inviting us to live in the where?, Giacometti asks where are the distances between us allowing us to live together and breathe.

Giacometti writes frequently about what he has learnt from art, especially that of Egypt. How would you like to respond? Explain the new by its allusions to the old? Wouldn’t you rather respond to the evident, which is that the old has been absorbed in the new, the now of viewing and whatever responsibility we might be able to claim for that? The past may well have been absorbed, but still it lives: in signs and hints and intangible stone-bound sketches of all kinds. Perhaps we will learn to recognise what we cannot know; what we can not-know. Communication might emerge from there with anyone, even though that impulse will remain lodged in our own intimate sense of I – where else?

Giacometti has made the image of a face and of a man watching society supplanted by catastrophe; the last chance to hear has slipped away; and still he tries again; and to reach.
from different parts of the book

Timothy Mathews’s writing vividly conveys what it is like to see, to point towards, to be in the same space as Giacometti’s precariously balanced, elongated, poignantly caged, suffering figures. His account of the ways in which he and others have responded to Giacometti s sculpture is full of discoveries. The reader is invited to share in the process of discovery through the writings of Beckett and Benjamin, Blanchot and Sebald; and most of all through the words of Giacometti himself. This is art writing at its most exciting and humbling. It conveys why we look, and look again at the human form as only Giacometti gives it to us to see, with all its burden of traumatic history.

Mary Jacobus, FBA, CBE, 
University of Cambridge & Cornell University

Timothy Mathews’ indispensable study of Giacometti takes us into the volatile contact zone between sculpture and spectator, with its complex reciprocities which multiply questions, destabilize values and redefine relations. This wonderfully exhilarating adventure in polymorphous looking, written from within his own experience, calls on comparison (e.g. Beckett, Ernst, Benjamin, Breton, Blanchot) to give critical purchase to the pursuit of an elusive quarry, where emergence and dissolution, recognition and alienation strike up strange mutualities. Mathews tirelessly, resourcefully, enthrallingly confronts the question: what kind of perceptual world do we enter if we refuse the tyranny and partiality of a point of view?

Clive Scott, 
University of East Anglia

This is an extraordinary book. Thinking of form as responsive, Timothy Mathews opens urgent questions about the way art speaks of life, about witness and embodiment. Addressing the art of relation, this book places Giacometti in contact with Benjamin, Beckett, Sebald among others. Through its series of acute, exploratory and often deeply moving readings, we are brought to respond vividly, newly, to Giacometti’s sculpture and writing.

Emma Wilson, 
University of Cambridge


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