| Artist: | Giacommetti, Alberto |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | City Square (Piazza) | |
| Date of Work: | 1947-1948 | |
| Nationality: | Italian | |
| Context: | Modern Sculpture | |
| Movement: | Existentialism | |
| Medium: | Bronze | |
| Subject: a city square "filled" with elongated shadow figures; despite the crowd, what registers is the empty space between people, the sense of isolation and alienation even within the crowd. In this existential void, Giacommetti creates the presence of an absence--an absence of "essence" and meaning. According to the philosophy of Existentialism, which intensified after the experience of WWII, "existence precedes essence." Meaning, in other words, is not a given, but has to be achieved. You are given existence, but you have to make your own essence, your own meaning in the void where the only certainty is death. Giacommetti's work is a post-WWII existential portrait of damaged humanity. Style: no highly polished bronze here. Giacommetti keeps the surface scarred and pitted; it is all "hurt." Flesh is treated like a charred, burned, rocky landscape, recalling the way the war ended--with the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which left its victims not looking human, covered as they were with radiation burns or worse, where the only remaining trace of the human was a vaporized shadow on the wall. Giacommetti elongates the figure until it becomes a mere line in space: the presence of an absence. He wants empty space to "outweigh" the solids they surround. The figures look stuck in the ground, as if they can't go on . . . how, indeed, to move on after the war? This is thin, brittle, broken humanity alone in the existential void even when in a crowd. Context: post-war damaged humanity, left vulnerable and lost in an existential void, unclear as to which direction to move in. Giacommetti had started out as a Surrealist, but when reality became all-too-surreal in WWII, his art started to lose its fantasy elements to focus instead on the existential crisis. His figures look like they all suffer from annorexia nervosa, but the post-war truth of atomic bombs and concentration camps brought home the existential idea of a moral vacuum and lack of meaning--a void at the heart of things. Humanity as spiritually starved; the walking dead. | ||
