The Artist as Blind Seer:
A New Perspective on de Chirico
Part Four

Brian George

Giorgio de Chirico, The Nobleman and the Bourgois, 1933

The artist's Double has declared his independence from the wheel of the Eternal Return. He obeys no law, but instead appears in the period he chooses. He is not a projection of the needs of either the living or the dead. Taking the sun with him, like a weapon aimed at the ego, he can no longer be bothered to imitate every gesture of the pedestrian.

It had been years since the metaphysical revolution had attempted to subvert the myth of progress, in its own, perhaps too subtle, manner of subversion. For all the good that it did.  Since 1920, many towers had been built to equal that of Babel, though this time, much more durably, out of glass. The Italian Committee for Eugenic Studies had been closed, knowing a great deal less than when they opened. They should have studied themselves first. As if the current race could be improved, as if statisticians knew what time was, as if anything so simple as the measurement of a skull could have altered the long arc of our descent. Neoplasticism had subjected the ratios of Phidias to germ warfare . Cubism was born again as evangelical Abstract Expressionism. The point of ontological convergence kept getting moved to some land beyond the Workers' Paradise, to some sky beyond the triumph of Neoliberal Economics. Always, the enigma remained. The thread that binds a people to its creations. The reason for the gulf that separates the two hands of a clock.

De Chirico was sad. The 1972 New York Cultural Center retrospective, called De Chirico by de Chirico, had not provoked any radical new theories about or reassessment of his oeuvre, as a hieroglyphic dream had once led him to expect. He had done what he could. Mocked by his enemies, the knot people, grouped with reactionary critics like Sir Alfred Mummings, a dinosaur, and his only source of applause in one lecture on the Baroque, his obsessions a test of patience even for his friends, he would leave any unmet challenges for some starving artist in the future to resolve. Perhaps, already, the clockwork mechanism of the fates had arranged for their introduction, or would do so at the earliest convenience of the daimon. Perhaps, even now, this unknown poet/artist had managed to probe the implications of some few of his symbols, a book had been published, and a reader had turned to a page at the end of the first section. It was time, again, to set sail, but in a boat no longer seaworthy.

  de-c-odysseus-cr Giorgio de Chirico, The Return of Odysseus, 1968

Death would untangle the huge knot that was life. Death, in its turn, was a different type of knot. In a small room hung with fishnets by the docks, the Metaphysician brooded on the conundrum of the Eight, that perfect figure, which a prehistoric hand had once stamped on his forehead, like a curse. It was this action that had generated the topology of his pictures, those faithful reproductions of the nonexistent originals, which he had first seen in a vision from 1912. Or perhaps it could be said that even at that time, in a kind of reverse perspective, the complete works of de Chirico were already in existence, waiting only for the artist who would claim them, and for a bit of blood to reactivate their symbols.

In a letter from 1912, de Chirico wrote, "Thought must so detach itself from all human fetters that all things then appear to it anew—as if lit for the first time by a brilliant star."(12).  

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12) Giorgio de Chirico, Manuscript from the Collection of Paul Eluard, from "Appendix A" of James Thrall Soby's Giorgio de Chirico, page 248.  

 

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Part I
Part II
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Brian George is the author of two books of essays and four books of poetry. His book of essays Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence has just been published by Untimely Books at
https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin. He has recently reactivated his blog, also called Masks of Origin at https://masksoforigin.blogspot.com/. He is a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art, an exhibited artist and former teacher. He often tells people first discovering his work that his goal is not so much to be read as to be reread, and then lived with.
For more of his writings in Scene4, check the Archives.

©2024 Brian George
©2024 Publication Scene4 Magazine

 

 

 

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