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- Title
מה רואה ג'קומטיהתהוות זולתעצמי ביצירתו של אלברטו ג'קומטי ?
- Authors
גולן, נמרוד
- Abstract
This paper examines the work of the renowned 20th century artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) from the perspective of psychoanalytic self psychology. I suggest a complementary perspective, examining the artist's work in the light of the central concept of the selfobject as well as enhancing our understanding of the concept of selfobject through the insights created by Giacomettiʼs art. The central hypothesis is that Giacometti's work is first and foremost an attempt to use the artistic act to reinstate the archaic merger experience with an earlier, lost selfobject environment. The artistic creation, according to this point of view, will achieve its goal if can be experienced as a selfobject for the artist and for the viewer. It is asserted that the conspicuous scarcity of psychoanalytic attention to Giacometti stems from the difficulty involved in applying the classical Freudian-structural interpretation, commonly used in art research, to this artistʼs work, touching as it does on the movement of existence as a constant vibration between presence and absence, between the structured and the unstructured. From my point of view, Giacometti's work should be perceived as an attempt to simultaneously express the essence of the visible external figure and the inner experience that takes place at the moment of encounter. His work is a unique, focused, and clear expression of the merge of external object and inner experience. The psychological environment of the child Alberto Giacometti – and later the young artist's work as a painter opposite and alongside his father, the artist Giovanni Giacometti – is portrayed as an empathic matrix rich in mutual selfobject transferences, that, coupled with Giacometti's great inborn talent, made possible his growth as an artist and also led to his constant yearning for the repetition and rehabilitation of the states of early merger with the environment. His work after the Second World War is redefined here as the artist's success in extricating himself from archaic narcissism and reaching, in his art, a no-longer-dual but now fully transpersonal (or transformed) narcissism. In this analysis, several prominent characteristics of Giacometti's works are described: (a) the experience of immediacy (the experience of lookingat the work is immediate, sudden and absolute, without linear process and development), (b) the founding gaze (taking in the work depends on the precise and constant distance of the viewer from the work), (c) paradoxicality (the role of complementary contradictions), and (d) the timeless quality (figures exist in a world where there is no object of volition) and the lack of linear development. At this point, I also focus upon “creative" destructiveness, a component that is part of the process of the merger experience coming into being. By this I mean the artist's tendency to destroy his work in the process of construction, and even to avoid completion, as part of the essence of his artistic intent. I argue that these aesthetic elements are all characteristics of the selfobject, and illuminate the nature and essence of this key Kohutian concept that otherwise never fully yields to complete conceptual grasp.
- Publication
Ma'arag: Israeli Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2010, Vol 1, p101
- ISSN
2413-290X
- Publication type
Article