Meeting Place: The Human Encounter and the Challenge of Coexistence

Over and Above

Over and Above 51 Can we go back to the distinction made earlier between aesthetics and history ? The Giacometti commission staged an encounter between two different understandings of the way the meeting place is designed. An urban design predicated on the erasure of gesture came up against a sculptural practice that brought to the representation of the human body an antithetical stance. Giacometti reduces the human figure to essential gestures that “communicate directly.” His is a very different aesthetic from the Art Nouveau appreciation of flowing robes and windswept ribbons found in de Clérambault; however, a comparable perception of public space exists. In a way, although naked, Giacometti’s figures provide the cladding of public space, spelling out an incipient choreography that can keep agoraphobia at bay. The essential gesture lies between them when they are arranged in a group; when the figure stands alone, its treelike height implies a clearing or milieu. Nevertheless, the impact of the work remains aesthetic. Its power to change the design of public space is limited. Perhaps Giacometti felt this himself; on the way from the studio to the art gallery, he used to place his figures in urban spaces and photograph them from ground level. In this anticipation of the Photoshop technique ubiquitous now, the forest came to the forum. Placed between the railways tracks funneling into a great nineteenth-century railway station, they were like voodoo dolls designed to ward off the evil of places of rencontre where everything runs on time. Incontrast,therenderingofpublicspacethatoccursinanIndigenoussettingisnotsecondary ;itistheperformancethatbringsintobeing,orrevives, the possibility of a place held in common. In contrast with the act of choreographic punctuation used to procure repetitions in future, Giacometti’s 52 over and above masterworks are relatively undeveloped: they exhibit a hypersensitivity to thetimingofencounterbuthardlylocatethisenigmahistorically.Ofcourse his work can be placed within the history of ideas and art movements as well as within the urban culture of modernity, but it is not obvious how his depictionofsocialregionscouldbetranslatedintoapublicspacepraxisthat marked a decisive break with the past. This may be of little concern to his reputation, but it indicates a far profounder limitation or blind spot of the culture within which he worked. I refer to the general refusal to accord performances a historical significance—to give them, for example, the same authority as laws, titles, contracts, and other legal forms of possession, dispossession , and sharing. To entertain for a moment the idea that the meeting place might be designed like a forest would mean taking seriously the desirability of a bustling crowd that had no business whatsoever. In this scenario of collective idleness the trees would stand as the revolutions of air do in between revolving couples dancing a waltz. They would create a multiplicity of gates between which the flow of passage would rub, causing smalltourbillonsandotherephemeraleddiestowindandunwind.Andthis, despite its seeming innocence, might have a revolutionary character, as it would illustrate a self-organizing capacity resistant to the linearization of time and space. But this is a thought experiment. To show how the absence of this consciousness impacted on non-western societies, it is enough to consider the situation of first contact. Here, in the encounter between European imperialists and Indigenous societies, an aesthetic blind spot had immediate historical consequences. From the other, Indigenous, side it had equally decisive, if antithetical, implications; for, drawn into a performative exchange with the trespassers, they found their attempts to historicize the meeting were aestheticized; at the very moment they applied their techniques for incorporating the other into their story, they found the human agency they desired to exercise evaporating and the ground (physically and metaphysically) slipping from under their feet. Recall, for example , what, according to Magellan’s amanuensis, Pigafetta, happened in the about-to-be-named Tierra del Fuego. First a man, unaware of the critical significance Christians gave to veiling and unveiling, appeared, “a giant, who was on the shore of the sea, quite naked, and was dancing and leaping, and singing.” Next there was a bout of diplomatic mimicry: “Our captain sent one of his men towards him, whom he charged to sing and leap like the other to reassure him, and show him friendship.” Then “they showed over and above 53 him some things, amongst others a steel mirror. When the giant saw his likeness in it, he was greatly terrified, leaping backwards.” But comedy soon turns to tragedy as, next, two of the giants are tricked into allowing themselvestobeputinchains .Theybegin“tobeenraged...