Essay by Guitemie Maldonado

To the Bottom Lines: Fred Sandback and Alberto Giacometti, Sculptors

 

Guitemie Maldonado
translated from the French by Lucas Faugère


Alberto Giacometti (b. 1901) took an interest in surrealism and simple abstract shapes before coming back to the human figure, a move that tied in with the post-World War II existentialist zeitgeist. The year that his life came to an end in Switzerland—1966—also saw the Jewish Museum of New York hold the first large-scale presentation of minimalism with its Primary Structures exhibition, Robert Morris publish his “Notes on Sculpture” in Artforum, and Fred Sandback (b. 1943) begin his studies at the Yale School of Art and Architecture. Only the year before, exhibitions at the Tate Gallery in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York confirmed that Giacometti had achieved international fame and acclaim, while Donald Judd published his musings on “new three-dimensional work” in an article titled “Specific Objects.”[1] These are among the many signs of sculpture’s growing importance at the time, as it became an open field for experimentation and theoretical debate, enabling those who practiced it to stand apart from abstract expressionism or Greenbergian modernism.


The conjunction of these events also allows us to consider both Sandback and Giacometti within the same space and time, despite their belonging to different generations and having led very different careers. Moreover, it offers an opportunity to go beyond the traditional comparison between minimalist artists and one modernist forefather, Constantin Brâncuși, however fruitful it has been—with Valérie Mavridorakis, for instance, highlighting in her research the effect the Romanian artist had on Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, and Richard Serra.[2] On the occasion of Giacometti’s solo exhibition at Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in December 1961, Donald Judd praised the sculptor’s sense of spatial composition and the way he staged “polelike figures” so that the surrounding “empty space appears to push inward on the figures, compressing them into an obdurate shaft.” However, Judd’s conclusion emphasized the lesser appeal of the artworks’ emotional dimension: “The core defining its space is a paramount idea, one which would be more clear and complex without the old notion of a figure’s emotion hypostatized in its surrounding space, space usually defined by the figure’s form.”[3]


Beyond the issue of the human figure and all its implications, many comparisons have been drawn between Giacometti and other artists, beginning with Franz Meyer’s study on Barnett Newman, in which the critic posits that the artist saw Giacometti’s artworks displayed at Matisse’s gallery in 1948 as “confirmation” in the process leading to his signature zips.[4] The cover for that exhibition’s companion catalogue featured a cutout layout designed by Herbert Matter that made Giacometti’s 1947 Tall Figure even more isolated and reinforced its verticality, akin to that of Newman’s 1966 sculpture titled Here III.[5] As Meyer notes, “in each case, the extreme verticality of form seems to be the result of energy being concentrated and projected upwards from the pedestal.”[6] In the summer of 1979, the Kunsthalle Bern devoted a series of exhibitions to the art of sculpture, featuring two great figures of the past—Henri Matisse and Giacometti—and four minimalist artists: Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Richard Long.[7] A photograph by Balthasar Burkhard shows how Giacometti’s 1958 The Leg was aligned with Andre’s 1967 Altstadt Copper Square; the former’s reflection is set in perfect perspective with the latter’s middle axis. The vertical artwork was folding onto the horizontal sculpture on the floor, both dimensions coinciding and colliding in a display that conjointly emphasized the surface irregularities and the structural principles of each artwork, and the crucial role assumed by lines and axes. The same logic was at play on the cover of the catalogue accompanying the exhibition held by the Sidney Janis Gallery for its fortieth anniversary: verticality and symmetry informed the juxtaposition of Standing Woman by Giacometti and a vertical composition by Piet Mondrian.[8] Indeed, the gallery had long been championing avant-gardes beyond institutional, strict, or prejudiced categories. For example, it exhibited neoplasticists with Jean Arp or Constantin Brâncuși, and produced the String + Rope exhibition in January 1970 in which fairly dissimilar artists—among them Joan Miró, George Segal, Bruce Nauman, and Fred Sandback—used and combined the titular materials.


In light of such disparate examples, it becomes clear how instructive simultaneously addressing Giacometti’s and Sandback’s oeuvres can prove to be, as each casts light on the other. Sandback himself welcomed the comparison during a conversation that took place in 2001 at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, founded by Donald Judd. Prompted to comment on Judd’s influence on his early work, Sandback responded that other bodies of work had also interested him, including Giacometti’s, of which he said, “There was already a big issue there, albeit a slightly different one.”[9] The nature of this stimulating influence—which began for Sandback even before he had decided to be an artist—“certainly had to do with the way it anecdotally is described as a space eroded away or stripped down to its essential, if there is an essential core to it.”[10] Sandback also explained this in relation to a scene in a film his mother recounted to him, in which a guest at a fancy dinner, pulls the leaves off an artichoke one by one and throws them over his shoulder, without eating any, all the way down to the artichoke heart, which he also throws over his shoulder. Metaphorically, this brings to mind how one can reduce, thin, or strip things down, and also calls into question the notion of center. The artist offered a decidedly philosophical interpretation, framing it as “a potent image of moving on beyond Immanuel Kant and the thing itself and leaving that borderline with Platonism behind in the dust somehow.”[11]

 

Floor and Pedestal

 

Both Giacometti and Sandback chose different ways to express their formal and conceptual visions, but this should not prevent us from drawing lines that can intersect with and connect both their oeuvres, all the more so because they activate anew their means to produce artworks in service to radically personal and innovative aesthetic views, rather than taking them for granted. Yve-Alain Bois has shown how essential the floor or ground is to Sandback’s sculptures, stating that it is “impossible to imagine any Sandback piece in a space that does not have a perfectly flat, uneventful floor.” Furthermore, according to Bois, “knowing that the upper ending or beginning of all lines is determined by architecture—that they share not only the same material ground but also the same conceptual ‘ground,’ even if not always the same planar surface—is part and parcel of our intuition of Sandback’s space.”[12] The critic’s argument takes stock of two outdoor projects or “landscape designs”: one consisted of a bed of salvias planted in a park in Arnhem, The Netherlands, as part of the Sonsbeek 71 exhibition, while another, unrealized, planned for buttercups to be planted in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.[13] In both cases, the components of the sculptures would emanate from the earth organically, imparting limits but also rhythm to a section of ground, attracting the gaze of onlookers to a specific height and defining a specific plane of interest—one that also pointed to something related happening beneath the surface. In Giacometti’s figures, a tension also comes from the ground or base. Their feet are often massive and seemingly fused together in a kind of clog. They act as ballast or counterweight to the heads, whose sizes, on the contrary, are reduced as they stretch and lengthen, fading away. What’s more, Giacometti’s groups of figures bring to mind images of forests, clearings, and glades, leading Anne Lemonnier to see these works as “humankind as a high forest.”[14] A forest of figures was to have been installed on the Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York, according to a never-completed project the sculptor began drafting in 1959 and revised in 1965 after visiting the city. Incidentally, there are no sculptures by Giacometti in public spaces anywhere in the world, as the courtyard of Fondation Maeght is not truly public.

 

Squares and “Pedestrian Space”

 

Giacometti’s partially freestanding figures constitute a response to the artist’s “desire to abolish the pedestal.”[15] They are nonetheless framed within a specific context, however open. This is evidenced by the cages within which Giacometti sometimes placed his sculptures, and even more so by his “squares” that provide them with exclusive, specific spaces, enabling the different figures of a composition to share a common plane and entertain relationships.[16] For what is at stake here is chiefly the position, the place of the artworks and their components. Sandback would also carefully examine the spaces where he would place and stretch his yarn lines, carefully considering their configuration. Keeping Giacometti’s The Walking Man in mind encourages us to understand Sandback’s notion of “pedestrian space” in the literal sense, and maybe to run with it. The concept—defining space as “literal, flat-footed, and everyday”[17]—emerged in relation to Donald Judd’s “real space” and how to behave in front of “specific objects.” If Thierry Davila describes it as “a space to roam,”[18] it could also very well be dubbed “walkable” and literally pedestrian: the space that our bodies inhabit and feel daily, an open yet delineated square, in which places, positions, and trajectories are in turn free, framed, and fixed, alternatively offering wider fields of vision and closer points of view.

 

Vertical Lines and Ridges, Tension and Vibration

 

In a December 1950 letter to Pierre Matisse, Giacometti wrote that he aimed to relinquish the “stiffness” present in some of his compositions. This formal, tangible issue might have found a later answer in Sandback’s arrangements of stretched yarn, which combine “the qualities of the hard and the soft.”[19] They allow for straight, precise lines to be traced in space while still showing, when viewed close-up, the fibers that compose each one. Similarly, Giacometti’s sculptures display their irregular surfaces even as they slenderly rise and surge upward. Such artworks perceptibly present tension—explicitly so in the case of Suspended Ball, The Nose, or The Hand, which all involve suspension systems that play with gravity and oscillating motion, mirroring the way plumb lines work. The plumb line is necessarily brought to mind by Sandback’s “straight, precise line,”[20] which not only cuts through the space that welcomes it but also “[gets] space to vibrate and resonate.”[21] For Frédérique Joseph-Lowery, this was foreshadowed by the fact that the artist built stringed instruments and practiced archery in his teens. Tension and vibration echo in all these facts and anecdotes, rich with potential sounds. Some emerged, under the guise of a poetic evocation, in a prose poem written by Giacometti during his surrealist period: “Gropingly I want to catch the invisible white thread of the wonderful which vibrates in the void, and from which facts and dreams escape with the murmur of a brook running over small pebbles, alive and precious.”[22]

 

Sculpture as Drawing

 

While the plumb line helps achieve vertical lines, the chalk line guarantees horizontal ones. Construction workers trace straight lines by pulling taut a string coated with colored chalk and then “plucking” it, essentially making it vibrate. The idea of three-dimensional drawing becomes all the more tangible and yet diffuse, while that of presence—the crux of Giacometti’s sculpture—indubitably vibrates and irreducibly escapes at the same time. Indeed, the sharpness and thinness of Sandback’s lines make them as difficult to perceive as Giacometti’s figures, whose quivering edges make them flutter or pulse. In the end, the two artists’ works on paper might very well be the place where their practices come closest to each other: Sandback’s lines widen, duplicate, and tremble, while Giacometti’s figures are stripped bare of their last remaining details, crumbling and thinned down to the point of simple lines. This is the case in Paris vu de très loin (circa 1960), which Giacometti drew for the book Paris sans fin; seen from far away, the city is condensed into a horizontal line, somewhat thick and vaguely broken here and there. Such work testifies to an ability to get to the heart of the matter, the soulful or technical core, with the simple means offered by drawing.[23] This reduction to the “bottom line,” the bare bones, makes all the more palpable what the 1991 Giacometti exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, organized by artist Rémy Zaugg, pinpointed as the “work of perception” in relation to “the upsurge of reality.”[24]

[1] Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Contemporary Sculpture: Arts Yearbook 8 (New York: Arts Digest, 1965), 74–82. Both Robert Morris and Donald Judd taught at Yale during 1967, which had an influence on Fred Sandback, as did George Sugarman, who challenged the young Sandback with this taunt: “Well, if you are so sick of all the parts, why not just make a line with a ball of string and be done with it?” Fred Sandback, “Remarks on My Sculpture, 1966–1986,” in Fred Sandback: Sculpture, 1966–1986 (Munich: Fred Jahn, 1986), 12, https://www.fredsandbackarchive.org/texts-1986-remarks.
[2] Fred Sandback took an interest in Brâncuși’s oeuvre but “later and differently” than the artists cited here. See Valérie Mavridorakis, “Fred Sandback, or Occam’s Razor,” first published in Brussels by La Lettre volée in 1998 and revised in Fred Sandback ou le fil d’Occam (Paris: Galerie Marian Goodman, 2018), 64ff.
[3] Donald Judd, Arts Magazine (February 1962), 42.
[4] Franz Meyer, “Giacometti et Newman,” in Alberto Giacometti: sculptures, peintures, dessins (Paris: Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1991), 61.
[5] Herbert Matter also produced a number of photographs and montage-style layouts and designs for the 1965 exhibition catalogue, especially playing with lines, grids, and duplication.
[6] Meyer, 59. [trans. LF].
[7] Skulptur. Matisse, Giacometti. Judd, Flavin, Andre, Long, Kunsthalle Bern, Summer 1979.
[8] 40th Anniversary, Sidney Janis Gallery: Giacometti/Mondrian + Arp/Léger, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, 1989. A more recent exhibition can be added to the list of such comparisons: In perspective, Giacometti, Caen, Musée des Beaux-Arts, May 17–August 31, 2008.
[9] Michael Govan, Marianne Stockebrand, and Gianfranco Verna, “Conversation with Fred Sandback,” Chinati Foundation Newsletter 7 (October 2002), 26, https://www.fredsandbackarchive.org/texts-2002-conversation.
[10] Govan et al., 31.
[11] Govan et al., 27.
[12] Yve-Alain Bois, “What Lies Between,” in Fred Sandback: Vertical Constructions (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2017), 9.
[13] Bois, 7.
[14] Anne Lemonnier, “Une humanité de haute futaie,” in Un arbre comme une femme. Une pierre comme une tête. Alberto Giacometti (Paris and Lyon: Fondation Giacometti and Fage éditions, 2022), 30ff. 
[15] Alberto Giacometti, letter to Pierre Matisse, December 28, 1950. Excerpts of this letter were translated into English and published in the companion catalogue to the exhibition: Alberto Giacometti (New York: Pierre Matisse Gallery, 1950), 3.
[16] The French word for a public square is place. See Thierry Dufrêne, “Les ‘places’ de Giacometti ou le ‘monumental à rebours,’” Histoire de l’art 27 (1994) : 81–92.
[17] Fred Sandback, “Remarks on My Sculpture,” 13.
[18] Thierry Davila, “Being in a Place: Les sculptures filiformes de Fred Sandback,” in In extremis: Essais sur l’art et ses déterritorialisations depuis 1960 (Bruxelles: La Lettre volée, 2009), 95.
[19] Frédérique Joseph-Lowery, “Fred Sandback, Thin Lines,” translated by Charles Penwarden, Art Press 445 (June 2017): 44.
[20] Mavridorakis, 49.
[21] Joseph-Lowery, 45.
[22] Alberto Giacometti, “Charbon d’herbe,” Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution 5 (May 1933), 15. [trans. LF]
[23] Primarily meaning “soul,” the French word âme also means “core” in several technical domains (an empty center in objects that allows for air to circulate; a piece at the core of an object that concentrates pressure and from which the overall shape starts; a piece that ensures balanced vibrations, and so forth).
[24] Rémy Zaugg, “Concevoir et réaliser une exposition, c’est devoir s’effacer,” in Alberto Giacometti: sculptures, peintures, dessins (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1991), 72.

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