Giacometti’s Woman with Her Throat Cut
Face to face with surrealist violence
Instead of an imaginary scenario, this is a genuine account of my own encounter with a surrealist work of art. I describe seeing it reproduced and then making the journey to Paris, and later Edinburgh, to view the real thing. Meeting this sculpture, however, was a provocative, cinematic experience that fired up my imagination. I hope you feel the same!
I’d seen it reproduced in art books and it had frightened me. It was half-insect, half-woman. A tense, confused set of body parts in bronze that seemed to be writhing. It had spider legs, and seaweed pods or enlarged leaves instead of arms and feet. At the top, the vestigial head was thrown back in agony. It was stiff with trauma and screaming in pain. The title confirmed the worst: Woman with Her Throat Cut. This was a representation of the rape and murder of a dehumanised woman and was designed to be seen from above, from the point of view of the rapist. I dreaded it and was drawn to confront its message of female vulnerability as if it was a test or an initiation into the darkest area of surrealism, the art movement that I loved for its life-affirming joy and playfulness.
As I stared at the illustrations in art books, this sculpture by Alberto Giacometti from 1932 took on a symbolic role in the novel I was writing. One of my main characters has suffered sexual abuse when incarcerated in a mental asylum and I gave her horrible hallucinations in which she transforms into this sculpture; she feels as if she is petrified into metal by her ordeal. I hated and loathed Giacometti's artwork passionately, but remained endlessly fascinated with tracing its contours on the page.
Then I saw the real thing.
We were in Paris at the Pompidou, and I was going from exhibit to exhibit greedily consuming all the glorious surrealist art I had come to see. Then, on the floor in the middle of the gallery, there it was. And I had the biggest shock.
It was tiny!
It wasn’t a monumental life-size figure in agony. It was a strangely-enlarged beetle, as if an earwig or cockroach had been scaled up but, at just three feet long, it wasn’t on a human scale at all. I was confused by this. Of course, a more highly-trained student of art would have taken note of the measurements given in the art book illustrations but I had simply assumed it was woman-sized since it was entitled ‘Woman’.
I (almost) laughed. I paced around it, unafraid and glad to have the chance to analyse the way in which the different parts fitted together in 3-D. I’ve since had the chance to see the work in Edinburgh’s Modern One gallery where they have it on a low pedestal. In fact, Giacometti stipulated that it should be exhibited on the floor to increase the sense of vulnerability of the figure as we look down on it. The surrealists very often rejected traditional gallery design and were the first to abandon the tradition of white walls in favour of installation-style, immersive exhibitions. Displaying art on the floor was a revolutionary change from standard, waist-high pedestals for small sculptures.
I took in Woman with Her Throat Cut from all four sides, starting at the head which is a small thick rod with ridges all the way up like a spinal column and has the infamous slit throat and wide open scream of a mouth. The neck and head are the smallest elements of the object, as if the personality and identity of the victim are of no importance.
Standing on the long side to the left of the neck, two ‘arms’ can be seen. One is a huge three-leaved paddle. The other comes across to try to protect the neck and it is in the form of a club attached by a ring, making it a moveable part. According to the information board in Modern One, Giacometti said that he wanted to show the state in which one wants to move but can’t, as in a nightmare. The central column has two uneven breasts which, again, are small in relative terms. The fact that one is larger made me think that I was entirely in the rapist’s head and looking out of his eyes at one breast in particular.
At the opposite, short, end we have a pornographic view of splayed-open legs and a taut, arched body which is bracing itself with a vestigial foot against the ground. I have seen this sculpture described as depicting a woman who is ‘sexually available’. This phrase makes my feminist blood boil because women's sexuality is not available, it belongs to the woman herself to share (or not) as she pleases. But here is the abhorrent male fantasy: woman as sexual object.
The fourth and final, long, side has another leaf-like shape, this time growing out of one of the legs making it a swollen, grotesque foot-equivalent expanded to equal the body's length. Having surveyed the entire work from above, I dropped down to look at the sculpture from the floor, level with it.
This changed everything.
From this position, I saw pathos. I did not sense that the artist felt empathy for this victim of what is, I confidently assume, male violence but I did see for the first time a study of suffering rather than an indulgence in power. The vegetal and insectoid aspects of the sculpture came more into focus from this lower-level viewpoint and I could console myself with the idea of its death as a return to nature: a slow decomposition rather than a sudden, brutal crime.
As I left the gallery I was still aware of the menace of the thing out of the corner of my eye. Afterwards, I read Michael Brenson’s review of the piece in the New York Times from 1988 entitled ‘The Disturbing Allure of a Giacometti “Woman” ’ and agreed with his analysis of the impact of the work while deploring the appearance of that phrase ‘sexually available’ again. (Brenson actually writes ‘she makes herself sexually available’!)
Brenson makes the interesting general point that ‘nothing in sculpture is more important than size’ and my differing reactions when looking at a reproduction in a book or onscreen of what I thought was a human-sized figure, versus the three-feet-long sculpture in reality, definitely bears this out. For Brenson, three feet long is just right. It is: ‘too small to be truly menacing’ but ‘too large to be totally vulnerable’. He implies that Giacometti took his cue from Kafka’s famous story ‘Metamorphosis’ in which the man-turned-insect has about the same dimensions.
A telling phrase to describe the sculpture used by Brenson is ‘truly menacing’. Many male critics have described Woman with her Throat Cut as a praying mantis, in other words, as a threatening, castrating or deadly creature and even the enlightened folk at Modern One have included the Venus fly-trap as part of their description of the work. This is a classic case of taking the male view as the normalising one. I can’t imagine any woman viewer of this work who would find it personally threatening. Instead, the woman represents the nightmare of the worst possible thing that a man might perpetrate upon us: violation and death.
Where the sexes do meet as viewers of this sculpture is in its extremely unsettling depiction of helplessness and degradation by a malign, violent force, thus proving yet again that art is frequently not as sexist as the art criticism about it.
To say that this surrealist work is powerful is an understatement. To say that it represents the threat of the female is to allow only male views of art. Giacometti’s genius may be that each viewer of Woman with Her Throat Cut is deeply affected by it but in a different way.
Look at it, then. If you dare.