DAMARA PRATT RECOMMENDS

A Giacometti Portrait by James Lord & The Artistic Struggle

For all the pleasures of reading, writing is often a pain—and if not, you’re either a Frank O’Harian genius or you’re just not very good. After months of letters to my poetry mentor that belied this pain (Isn’t the aim of all writing, all art, to resemble what exists in our minds? And isn’t that impossible?), she was reminded of the tortured A Giacometti Portrait by James Lord: “I usually ask my students to read it but I realize some think I’m crazy. You won’t.” In its 132 pages, the canonical Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti paints American writer James Lord’s portrait in eighteen sittings. Or rather, compulsively paints, effaces, and repaints Lord’s face while bemoaning the misery of this undertaking (descriptions such as “He moaned, he whined, he almost sobbed” are a thread upon which the reader may rely). Giacometti is inconsolable. He rips his sketches to shreds, muses on the most courageous way to enact suicide (“cutting one’s throat from ear to ear with a kitchen knife”), and occasionally levels wisdom well applied to any artistic discipline (“One might imagine that in order to make a painting it’s simply a question of placing one detail next to another. But that’s not it. That’s not it at all. It’s a question of creating a complete entity all at once.”)

Is it strange to want to be more like Giacometti, who is clearly miserable? For all the pain of writing, it’s also punctuated by flashes of pleasure. These stem, I believe and Giacometti may agree, from a full inhabitance of the struggle. They are the pleasures of answering the compulsion. Pacing in my office, ranting about how opaque even the concept of metaphor is—that’s often where my pleasure lies. Giacometti, too, complains at his loudest when he’s onto something. And if he isn’t, if morale is bleak and the work best destroyed, he might shake his head, pull out his wide brush dipped in erasive white paint, and offer characteristic consolation: “There is always some progress, even when things are at their worst, because then you don’t have to do over again all the negative things you’ve already done.” As Lord did, all humans and artists alike should take note.

Damara Atrigol Pratt is a poet, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist based in New York City and Paris.
www.damarapratt.com