Texte remanié de: Dissertation--Frankfurt--Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität, 2002. / Résumé. Bibliogr. p. 273-297.

Within Giacometti’s concepts of what art must do, his own art has reached an impasse. He defines art as a means to see better and considers it a method of research into the nature of the exterior world. When the truth of this nature has been discovered and totally re-created on canvas or in sculpture, only then is his art complete. Instead of greater knowledge, however, his visual researches have only yielded more uncertainty and mystery; and the qualities of the exterior world have escaped him until he is in despair of ever reproducing them. He finds himself in the situation, consequently, of trying to represent in art that which he has no knowledge of. It is the terms and manifestations of this impasse that the present paper purports to discuss. As prefatory background to the discussion proper, I have proposed the contrasted images of the acrobat and the clown, a metaphorical framework suggested in criticism of Samuel Beckett, who, in literature, has reached an impasse comparable to Giacometti's in art. The acrobat represents the artist who, like Giacometti, despite an impasse pursues his impossible goal relentlessly, glad of the most miniscule achievement. The clown, on the other hand, accepts the failure of his art and creates a new art whose basis is failure. The clown acts as a foil to the acrobat. I note also the critics' failure to consider Giacometti in relation to his tradition, an unpardonable omission because the crisis in his art is as well an indication of a crisis within the tradition. When Giacometti defines art as a means to see better, he refers to no simple physical act of recording sensation. Seeing is a highly critical procedure which strips vision of the veil of culture which tradition has placed between the eye and the model, and frees the mind of outmoded forms and conventions of perception which have become irrelevant to the total experience and organization of the artist. Having performed this operation, the artist is free to observe the true nature of the exterior world and record its likeness in art. Giacometti's rigidly controlled seeing, however, has not revealed the desired knowledge, but has instead yielded the experience of the distance which forever separates the artist from everything he wants to depict. Instead of being able to re-create the human face and figure, Giacometti has only succeeded in producing those slim, attenuated, emaciated figures whose human characteristics disappear as we approach them, and whose gaze stares emptily and impenetrably into space, revealing nothing. His art has become a testimony to the common experience of contemporary thought: man's alienation and isolation. This is basically what denies the artist the intimate rapport with his model necessary in order to re-create its likeness. As contemporary science and philosophy have been limited in their researches by human finitude, so has Giacometti's art. His minuscule bit of knowledge is but a speck on the infinite scale of things; and partial knowledge is not truth. Finally the awareness of human finitude within art is traced through its development in the nineteenth century. The difficulty of realizing on canvas what he saw in nature became particularly evident to Cezanne in an age when, deprived of all relevant established traditions of art, he had to discover for himself a new artistic language and imagery. Cezanne began to suspect the impossibility of doing art which sought after truth, but he still had reference to metaphysical concepts as to the nature of the external world which made his success in art at least conceivable. Giacometti is deprived of such concepts and his contemporary sensibility denies his ever achieving a basis of certainty. Art for him will always be a tentative gesture in the direction of completion, but completion is inherently impossible. These are the terms of the impasse in Giacometti's art. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

Zugl.: Frankfurt (Main), Univ., Diss., 2002

Univ., Diss.--Frankfurt (Main), 2002. / Literaturverz. S. 273 - 297.

Zürich, Universiẗat, Diss., 2006.

En choisissant d’aborder l’œuvre de Sam Szafran par le biais du cinéma et de la photographie, cette thèse a une double visée : - D’une part, démontrer le principe séquentiel qui domine son œuvre. Szafran, qui a appris à voir au cinéma, ne se répète pas, mais crée des images arrêtées d’une séquence globale; et la photographie, de par sa contingence et sa fragmentation, constitue à cette fin un outil essentiel. - D’autre part, il s’agira d’aborder la question du montage tant du point de vue technique, rappelons que l’artiste est célébré comme le virtuose du pastel à travers le monde, que du point de vue cinématographique. Nous établirons que Szafran — homme de cinéma — emprunte la structure d’un plan-séquence pour composer ses images afin de poser le problème du regard, ou, pour le dire autrement, de rendre la caméra « visible ». Ainsi, en exposant Sam Szafran à ses influences clés, notre étude — qui constitue le premier travail de recherche universitaire approfondi sur l’artiste — entend multiplier les analyses autour des processus réflexifs et méthodologiques du travail du peintre. A partir de sources inédites, convoquant tour à tour l’histoire du siècle et la vie intime de l’artiste, elle ambitionne de jeter un jour nouveau sur ce que l’on considère comme « l’une des œuvres les plus secrètes et les plus poétiques de ce temps » (Jean Clair). Enfin, deux volumes d’annexes complèteront cette réflexion par un large corpus d’œuvres et de documents d’archives. / By exploring Sam Szafran’s work through film and photography, the aim of this thesis is twofold: - To highlight the largely sequential nature of his work: Szafran, who learnt to ‘see’ through the cinema, does not repeatedly create the same images - he creates ‘freeze frames’ in a global sequence; and photography, which by its nature is incidental and fragmentary, is an essential tool for achieving this. - To examine the notion of editing: from both the technical - Szafran is of course world famous for his virtuosic pastels - and cinematographic points of view. We will demonstrate that his images resemble sequence shots, as employed in the modern era by Orson Welles, in order to examine how things are seen, or, in other words, to make one aware of the camera’s presence. Hence, by highlighting Sam Szafran’s key influences, our study - which is the first in-depth university study of the artist - aims to analyse every aspect of the painter’s methodological and reflexive approach to his work. Based on completely new sources, relating to both the history of the 20th century and the artist’s personal life, the study’s main aim is to shed new light on the artist’s oeuvre, which is considered to be ‘one of the most mysterious and poetic of our time’ (Jean Clair). This study will be complemented by two volumes of annexes, comprising a large corpus of works and archive documents.