Giacometti

Realizing I haven't really blogged since mid-term, I figured it was about time to get blogging again. Flipping through the book at the works we have talked about I remembered my fascination with Giacometti's City Square. When I saw it I noticed the intense sense of solitude it gives, even though there are multiple figures within the same area. I get the 'alone in a crowd' feeling from this piece. The humanities book links Giacometti with existentialism, and at first it was unclear to me how sculptures could be linked to philosophy. It took a little thinking (mostly sparked by an essay question on the test) to make the connection of how Sartre's philosophies could be revealed in another artist's work.

Sartre's believed that 'existence precedes essence', and I actually can see that philosophy coming through in Giacometti's City Square. The whole 'existence precede's essence' philosophy implies that we are born with a clean slate, and as Sartre stated, we are who we choose to be. Basically what I get out of this is that we are responsible for who we are, we can't blame anyone for who we become, because ultimately it is our own choices that define who we are. The figures in  City Square appear to be the clean slate figures that simply exist, but have not developed their own identity yet. They are dark, bleak, and have no distinctive characteristics. Each figure also appears to be going in it's own unique direction, and will not not be influenced by the other characters. This seems to reflect Sartre's beliefs that we are responsible for defining ourselves by making our own choices; we are not defined by those around us. Whether or not Giacometti actually meant for his sculpture to reflect existentialism or not, I can see why the book links him to existentialism. Giacometti must have really liked using the dark and unidentifiable characters, because he uses them in multiple works. This picture below is his sculpture Three Men Walking, which looks an awful lot like City Square,  just with fewer people.

It seems a little uncreative to me to use the exact same figures for multiple works, but oh well I certainly am not artist. I still kinda like Giacometti's work, even though it seems a little bit dark and depressing.