Meeting Place: The Human Encounter and the Challenge of Coexistence

Proxy

Proxy 196 When I began Meeting Place I thought it would end in a meeting. The failed rencontre with which it opened would be redeemed. The exacting work of understanding the environment of meeting would map all the possible paths of propinquity, in the process making the labyrinth of the passages transparent. The passages are all the possible approaches to meetings that surround a life like the skein of the spider’s web; when the walls containing them were no longer solid, I would see your fleeing figure, involved in its own blind destiny. From there it would be a simple matter of recalibrating time and space, and our meeting could be restaged. At least psychologically , the journey through the different theories and practices of meeting would enable me to return to the scene of the nonmeeting and see the point of Nancy’s paradoxical dictum, that it is better not to meet if the possibility of encounter is to stay open. But it appears to me now that this ambition was neurotic. There is a connection between delirium and nostalgia . The symptoms of the first man identified as suffering from nostalgia were “a noise in his ears, and giddiness of his head.”1 Delirium, from a Latin phrase “out of the furrow,” means to wander off the straight and narrow. It is the experience of being trackless, disoriented, dizzy, or giddy. It is undeniable that at times the piling up of impressions, the suddenness of the juxtapositions , and the sudden breakouts from the line of thought, which have characterized the way of the book, have suggested a kind of intellectual homelessness. Now, though, having followed the thread as far as I can, the ending appears differently. I have been to visit the museum where the statues GiacometticastforthePineStreetplazacommissionareexhibited .Giacometti’s schemes for Pine Street plaza went through a number of phases. First, he proxy 197 proposed a standing woman, a walking man, and a head on a pedestal, “representing the three major themes that almost exclusively occupied him inhismaturesculpturalwork.”2 Next,“in1960ahead,fourdifferentwomen and two variants of the Walking Men were cast, albeit without arriving at their ultimate destination” (Figures 7, 8, 9, and 10).3 These are the works I have been to see, arranged in a courtyard at the Fondation Maeght in the south of France. Giacometti designed and fabricated these statues without visiting New York or the site where they were to be installed. His biographer , James Lord, tells us that after casting these works, Giacometti finally visited New York and Pine Street plaza in 1965. Although his commission had lapsed, the site was still empty, and the sculptor was excited by its aesthetic possibilities. Between October 1 and 6, he made night visits to the site, where he had Annette (the sculptor’s companion), Gordon Bunshaft (who had commissioned the work), and James Lord stand in various places in order to reconsider his group composition. Bunshaft suggested that the original statues needed to be further enlarged; he had already proposed one pumping up of scale in 1959, and now he suggested that the figures should be sixty feet high. Giacometti, however, came to the conclusion that he could do justice to the situation with a single figure of a standing woman, six to eight meters high, slightly under half the height Bunshaft was proposing. This was his third solution to the challenge of the commission. He instructed his brother, Diego, to set up the armature for the new work, but he died the following year before the new statue could be completed.4 The figures in the Fondation collection belong to the second, rejected scheme. It would be interesting to know why, when he visited the new meeting place designed as the threshold to the Chase Manhattan Bank, Giacometti gave up the idea of installing a group. Had he realized that the insertion of his signature walking statues into a place that hosted bustling crowds (albeit without any other thought whatsoever than the prosecution of business) contradicted his ambition to express “the totality of this life”? Had he realized that there must always be something left open, a supplement of unfinished business, or possible encounter, without which the meeting place is totalitarian? Although he was testing out the effects of an absolute perspectivism on the impact of his figures, it is hard to resist seeing the tableaux vivants that Giacometti directed during the night visits autobiographically . In the triangulation of lover, biographer, and patron, the sculptorbecamethedramaturgeofaturbulenceatonceexistential...