Kent Kosack
Beauty has no other origin than a wound, unique, different for each person, hidden or visible, that everyone keeps in himself, that he preserves and to which he withdraws when he wants to leave the world for a temporary, but profound solitude . . . Giacometti's art seems to me to want to discover that secret wound of every being, and even of every object, so that it can illumine them. [1]
It's a cold January morning in Pittsburgh and I have a creative writing class to try to teach at ten. I'm at my usual bus stop on Liberty Avenue opposite 39th Street, standing on a crust of refrozen slush and watching the cold make my breath visible to me. I check the local transportation app Busgazer to see where my bus is, to confirm where I am. But even apps err, so I'm not surprised when the bus's determined arrival, 8:49, comes and goes and the bus fails to appear. I check the app again and it tells me the bus has just come, come and gone, and that I must have missed it, this phantom bus. Though I don't mind much. The app tells me there's another 54 coming in twenty minutes, six blocks south of me. Plenty of time still to catch the bus, teach the class, live my life. I'm thirty-six, staring at the rusting utility pole, a flyer for a lost Pomeranian taped and weathering at eye level, the perforated slips of contact information long since torn. I remember Nick's realization in The Great Gatsby that it's his birthday. He's thirty. A decade which promises "loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair." And though I'm slumping into my mid-thirties, light on friends and enthusiasm, lighter each year, and though the hair on my head is receding into oblivion, I tell myself I'm unfazed, at the moment, by the remembered quote. I have a beanie to wear, a job to do, another bus to catch.
I lift my leather satchel over my shoulder, a version of Wittgenstein's rucksack overstuffed with all the accoutrements of the underpaid, exploited, and itinerant class of adjunct professors I belong to—a peanut butter and jelly sandwich smushed between an old laptop, a folder full of student essays, and too many library books—and head to the other stop, chasing my shadow. In the low-light of the winter sun, it looks like one of Giacometti's walking men, tall, coarse and deformed. This other me.
The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality—and he was concerned with nothing else except the contemplation of reality—could ever be shared . . . This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of his staring at it. The act of looking was like a form of prayer for him—it became a way of approaching but never being able to grasp an absolute. It was the act of looking which kept him aware of being constantly suspended between being and truth. [2]
Five minutes later, I'm on the corner of Liberty and 39th, listening to music on my ten-year-old iPod. Bob Dylan's "Jokerman," the first track of his mid-80s album Infidels. One of my father's favorites. A tune full of biblical imagery with a reggae-esque back-beat. I looked up the song's history in Bob Dylan, All the Songs, a book about the creation of every Dylan tune. My stepmother mailed it to me a few years ago and I read the book as if it would help me understand them, her, my father, the increasingly bizarre decisions they made as they flailed and raged into their dotage, penniless, friendless, maybe some warning, a lesson to glean to avoid a similar fate?
The lyrics allude to the Bible, gesture to some depth. But even Dylan doesn't know what it's about: "That's a song that got away from me . . . It probably didn't hold up for me because in my mind it has been written and rewritten and written again." Yet maybe that's what made it resonate with my parents? This desire, compulsion, to constantly erase and revise themselves, to shed and refashion, ostracize and alienate, as they march on towards old age, isolation, and death.
In Switzerland, the harder he worked to mold heads and figures, the more they crumbled and shrank, to the point that, when he returned to Paris, he could transport many of the works in matchboxes. He reported having a life-changing epiphany, in 1946, on leaving a movie theatre, when the abrupt shift from the film projection to an engulfing street ignited a sense that, as he wrote, "I see reality for the first time but in such a way that I can make everything very rapidly." Some occult circuit had closed between what he saw and what he could make visible. For me, a spark leaps from that moment to the present day, a time of paralyzing anxieties and cascading illusions. [3]
The second 54 is on time, slowly climbing Liberty Avenue northeast towards Bloomfield, towards me listening to "Jokerman" on repeat, wearing a beanie, waiting. Inside, I swipe my bus pass, take a seat in the back, remove my gloves, blow on my fingertips and watch the familiar stops pass: Bloomfield Park with a swimming pool, hockey rink, baseball diamond, and makeshift skatepark—all empty. And, in homage to the aging Italian population in Pittsburgh's Little Italy, a bocce ball court. In the locally controversial Pittsburgh episode of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, Bourdain played bocce with some old timers there, talked about Pittsburgh, and ate sausage and peppers on a roll. But a storm blew in and flipped the table, sending the aluminum trays of food across the pavement. All that wasted food, a heap of processed meat and marinara sauce, colored by Bourdain's suicide, is the only image I can remember from the episode. The foreshadowed loss. The woman who runs the local green grocer, a neighborhood institution herself, said, after the episode aired, as I was buying parsley and cucumbers, that she didn't understand why he went there, of all places. Why? I asked. Because no one uses those courts. No one plays bocce there, she said. No one.
If he had been born in an earlier period, Giacometti would have been a religious artist. As it was, born in a period of profound and widespread alienation, he refused to escape through religion, which would have been an escape into the past. He was obstinately faithful to his own time, which must have seemed to him rather like his own skin: the sack into which he was born. In that sack he simply could not in all honesty overcome his conviction that he had always been and always would be totally alone. [2]
We pass West Penn Hospital, the uniform store across the street selling sensible shoes for nurses to stand in all day surrounded by sickness, by birth and death, and head south towards the campus. The passengers become younger and more homogenously dressed as the bus enters the university's umbrella of dorms and de facto student apartments. At Craig Street and Centre Avenue a horde of young adults wearing on trend Doc Martens and Canada Goose down coats and carrying canvas FjällRäven backpacks in warm pastels and mustard yellows boards the bus, standing in the aisle. There are no seats left. I vary my focus from the world outside the window—CVS, Vietnamese restaurant, Catholic high school—and the grease smeared on the window. I can trace the arc of the previous tenant of my seat, the slide of their head against the window like the trail of a slug.
Giacometti's drive to capture essences of human reality as it confronted, or, better, assaulted, his consciousness. That goal was fundamentally so impossible as to be comic, but his ordeal in its pursuit—materialized in the bodily scrimmages of his sculpture—conveys a desperate sincerity. Sculpting from models or imagination, his hand ate away flesh to register how, instead of in what form, people existed for him, whether in pride or abjection, in loneliness or resilience—perhaps ridiculous, perhaps frightening. Sometimes his quest for a likeness beyond appearance came literally to nothing: scraps of material fallen to the studio floor. The drive is an irresistible force of ambition colliding with an immovable conviction of inadequacy. [3]
At Craig Street and Forbes, the bus ejects the majority of college students and I watch, through the grease smear, as the goose down coats and Swedish-designed backpacks flock across the street. The bus turns onto Forbes and passes the Carnegie Museum of Art with Richard Serra's Carnegie, a towering forty-foot sculpture of steel plates designed for the 1985 Carnegie International standing sentry near the front entrance. There's a hopefulness to the sculpture. Giant steel slabs leaning against each other, embedded thirty feet into the earth, reaching towards the sky, in a city known for steel, for a heavy polluting industry in steady decline and a city linked to its fading fortunes. Or, as John Russell wrote in his New York Times review of the exhibit in 1985, "Walking around it, we sense a twist that is self-renewing, not strangulatory." What stark choices: rebirth or the noose.
A month ago, I took a tour of the permanent collection at the Carnegie. The docent brought me and the other couple on the tour out front and had us enter Serra's sculpture. I didn't know you could but inside it felt intimate and cold, the center of a steel teepee. A two-foot square of sky above, framed by the steel panels, now rust-colored. Your view inverts, disorients. Serra himself, in an interview with Pittsburgh-based art historian and curator Vicky Clark, said "I find this space, the internal space in this piece, strange and moving in a way. And I don't mean religious. I'm not quite sure what I mean. But there is something moving about it. . . . I think the outside makes you want to walk around it. It makes you continue to follow it. I think the inside really grounds you into the concreteness of the ground. And there's something about being inside long enough that makes you forget just what you are observing. You may think you are on top looking down. You might also think you are leaning against something and looking along it. So you go through a process of reorganizing your basic coordinates."
The docent said in the mornings you could find all sorts of stuff inside. Gross and strange detritus from nighttime visitors to the heart of the structure. I asked for specifics but the other tour-goers were eager to move on and the docent didn't answer, hurrying us along inside instead, to one of Giacometti's famous walking men.
Certain statues by Giacometti cause an emotion in me quite close to that terror, and a fascination almost as great. They also cause this curious feeling in me: they are familiar, they walk in the street. And yet they are in the depths of time, at the origin of everything, they keep coming near and moving back, in a sovereign immovability. If my gaze tries to tame them, to approach them and—without fury, without anger or wrath, simply because of a distance between them and me that I had not noticed, so compressed and reduced was it, that made me think they were really close—they move out of sight: it is because this distance suddenly unfurled between them and me. Where do they go? [1]
Walking Man I is a bronze sculpture of a man, gaunt, tall—the same height as me, just under six feet—and slender to the point of emaciation. The man is walking forward, arms at his side, roughly textured. He looks like a malnourished inhabitant of a village of Richard Serra sculptures, a metal man dwelling in a metal teepee, the steps ahead of him or the patch of sky far above are his only views. Except he wasn't inside Carnegie. He was here. In front of me. We exchanged stares and I thought about Serra who, despite his lack of interest in figurative art, has praised Giacometti's Walking Man series, saying, in an interview with art historian Hal Foster, "they look like they are deteriorating in front of you. They're fragile and vulnerable; it's as though they've been in the Aegean for centuries. And yet they gather space, even if it's a space that's withered."
I could do with a break from focusing on the way everything is deteriorating right in front of me—my parents' health, the way my reserves of enthusiasm and energy for waking and rising and entering the wider world dwindle daily—these personal witherings petty against the backdrop of a global pandemic, as a citizen of a gluttonous hegemon pumping carbon into the atmosphere and plastic into the seas. But maybe there's some redemption in the gathering despite the fragility, as if the statue has agency though it's bedraggled and inert, its creator dead now for over five decades.
Imagine one of the sculptures. Thin, irreducible, still yet not rigid, impossible to dismiss, possible only to inspect, to stare at. If you stare, the figure stares back. This is also true of the most banal portrait. What is different now is how you become conscious of the track of your stare and hers: the narrow corridor of looking between you—perhaps this is like the track of a prayer if such a thing could be visualized. [2]
My stop is next, Fifth and Tennyson. I pull the cord above me to request a stop and exit the bus as the air brakes exhale. In a refilled pothole I see a key pressed into the pavement. It's a key I pass before each class I teach, wondering what it could open. I cross Fifth Avenue and walk with a swift stride towards my classroom in the Cathedral of Learning, a gothic revival building, forty stories tall, the tallest educational building in the world. But, since I'm early, I cradle my rucksack and sit on a bench facing the Heinz Memorial Chapel, a popular wedding destination, its grand red doors the site of many a staged wedding kiss, sit and watch the college students scurry from heated building to heated building, to and fro, approaching and receding, bent with hurry in the cold.
At 9:55, I enter the Cathedral and walk up the stairs that are hot and dry year-round and, for some unknown reason, reek of burning rubber, to my class on the third floor, room 318. There are peepholes in the door to allow security people, as they make their rounds, to peer into the room and surveil the situation. I peer in now, alone in the corridor, my nose just grazing the thick wooden door, my hand resting gently on the handle. A shaft of morning light bisects the room, illuminating the dust suspended in the air. On one side of the bright divide, nineteen hunched and discrete bodies, young faces lit by the glow of screens. On the other, a blank chalkboard. A crooked desk. My empty chair. Amen.
[1] Jean Genet, "The Studio of Alberto Giacometti."
[2] John Berger, "Giacometti."
[3] Peter Schjeldahl, "Giacometti's Skinny Sublimity."