Perhaps one is wrong to be so intidimated by high fashion models’ reputation for cattiness. Why? Is modelling culture simply a by-product of Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti’s legacy, as an artist but also as a legs man, perhaps? To me it seems that his deliberately, carefully ideated, highly distinctive silhouettes are being mirrored so precisely that it can surely be no coincidence… Fun post/ultimate insider scoop for the day.
Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) used his sculptures and his insight into human form as a “legs man” to offer a new way of thinking about humanity after the atrocities of the World Wars. The metaphysical implications of his childishly playful experimentation with human form, although presented equally subversively as darkly fragile and skeletal, are boundlessly dynamic and resonant. And so it was human dynamism that was to end up as the most fundamental theme in his work.
With regard to Buzz-Concepts: Alberto Giacometti was Swiss, from the Italian-speaking village of Borgonovo. He was a very proud Swissman, but also a very prototypical Italian-speaker, with a grasp of his mother tongue’s elegant, elaborate, rhythmic refinement few could compete with. But also: he was a nationalist from the multilingual nation of Switzerland, which contains both a substantial Germanic German-speaking and a Italian/French/Romansh Romance-speaking population – all four of these languages retaining official status today. Switzerland is an extremely prosperous country with phenomenally high quality of life levels and low crime rates, but the population is critically divided from canton to canton, between Catholicism and Protestantism, and also between the Buzz-Concepts success of the Germanic languages i.e. the “Dynamic” Tongues and passion of the Romance languages. Dynamism -while a rather niche theme and peculiarly specific for an artist with such resounding discourse for the world- was something Giacometti was simply obsessed as a former eccentric artistic kid from the slower-paced Italian southerly portions of Switzerland.
The Buzz-Concept Project 