Giacometti

please do not dance
with the statues –

leaves swirl
into the atrium     drift
between steel
glass   stone

a man
cast in bronze       stalks
through a flurry
of programmes
the woman      elongated
towers overhead
stares back      forward
along the century

watches men walk
on the moon.

© Helen Lowe

Published in JAAM 28: Dance dance dance, 2010

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I first featured Giacometti here in 2013, as part of an ekphrastic series, i.e. poems that respond to a work of art. Here is the poet’s note I provided for the series:

On Giacometti:

I wrote Giacometti in response to the exhibition of sculptures, prints & drawings from the Maeght Foundation, including the “walking man” and “giant woman” (Grandes Femmes) pieces from the Chase Manhattan Plaza project (1960), which was featured in the Christchurch Art Gallery, November 2006 – February 2007.

For me, poems often derive from ‘sparks’ of experience. In this case the Giacometti exhibition was amongst the first major exhibitions for the newly opened, new Christchurch Art Gallery building, and I recall there being a real sense of excitement about that in the community—both for the new building and the major exhibition: we all wanted to go and see the statues.

The notion of ‘dancing’ with the statues sparked in part from that sense of excitement and the flurry of people coming and going through the new foyer area—in itself conceived much like an enclosed plaza—and although the leaves swirling into it were real, the words also allude to the sense in which programmes also became ‘leaves’ amongst that flurry of people all engaged in their own individual dance with the statues.

The poem focuses on the “walking man” and “giant woman” pieces from the Chase Manhattan Plaza project because those were the two that most “spoke” to me in the exhibition. The woman in particular conveyed a great deal which may or may not have been intended by the sculptor: the sense in which the twentieth century is the one in which women stepped away from the circumscribed roles of the past and became “giants”, as well as the tremendous array of events the ‘new women’ of that century were witness too. I could have focused on world wars, the Great Depression, the holocaust, the atom bomb–but I chose to focus on the event that for me, more than any other, was a similar stepping away from the known past:

“stares back      forward
along the century

watches men walk
on the moon.”

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