The Object as Catalyst: The Enigmatic Mask
Daniel Barbiero
May 2018
Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object), Alberto Giacometti
1934 (casted 1954-55), Close-up image courtesy of David Cowhig
In Mad Love, Breton tells of going to a Parisian flea market with the sculptor Alberto Giacometti and finding a mysterious mask. The mask was made of metal and was designed to cover the top half of the face; its eyeholes were striated with slats and its nose was a long, straight conical fold running from top to bottom. Neither Breton nor Giacometti—nor the dealer—knew what the mask was for, but Breton and Giacometti were struck by what they saw as its self-assured, even haughty, expression and imagined it as representing the cross between a helmet and a velvet mask. After some hesitation, Giacometti bought it.
According to Breton, Giacometti’s encounter with the mask happened at a time when the sculptor had reached an impasse while trying to finish his Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object)—a large sculpture of a female figure whose hands appear to hold empty space, or an object whose presence is implied by its absence. Up until the time of the excursion to the flea market, the evolution of the sculpture’s face had gone slowly enough that Breton doubted that it would “ever reveal its expression, by which alone the unity of the natural and the supernatural” could be accomplished and Giacometti freed to move on. (For Giacometti the sculpture indeed was something that would mark a turning point after which he would move on: it represents the last large-scale Surrealist sculpture he would create. Soon after, he broke with the group over Breton’s prohibition against working with a live model, something Giacometti had been moving toward.)
Breton seems to have felt that the incomplete face needed some kind of referent in the world, some material basis in relation to which it could arrive at a sense of wholeness. The mask, fortuitously run across, would seem to be just such a referent. For Breton, it was a catalyst, a kind of intervention responding to a desire on the sculptor’s part to finish the sculpture as well as a desire on Breton’s part to see the sculpture finished. The confluence of these desires and an object that could respond to them was for Breton a coincidence. But it also was more than that.
Chance and Confluence
In order for the object to work as a catalyst, it has to be encountered unexpectedly, as a matter of chance. Chance was a crucially important phenomenon for Breton and Surrealism, particularly the variety of chance Breton recognized as hasard objectif–objective chance—a coincidence that has all the marks of something predestined or preordained.
Objective chance may or may not have been Breton’s own idea, at least in the way that he intended it. He variously cited Hegel and Engels as his sources— quoting the latter as having written that “causality can only be understood in relation to the category of objective chance, which is a form of manifestation of necessity.” The quote has variously been attributed to Anti-Durhing or Dialectics of Nature, but it seems not to appear in either. Breton’s citation in this case may have been apocryphal, but his understanding of objective chance was substantive in its own right. The definition he offered to André Parinaud in a 1951 radio interview captures the meaning and ineffable power this idea held for him: “philosophically, objective chance…is nothing more than the geometric locus” of certain significant coincidences. Expanding on this, he declared it “the problem of problems” that could “be put this way: how can phenomena that the human mind perceives only as belonging to separate causal series come so close together that they actually merge into one another (although, to tell the truth, they rarely do)? Why is the glow resulting from such a fusion so bright, albeit so ephemeral?” In short, objective chance is the coincidental meeting of things, persons or events that portends something of deep significance for the person caught up in it.
For Breton, objective chance embodied a certain dialectic, a reconciliation of the apparent contradiction between an objective situation—the unrelated causal histories of two persons, objects events, and so forth—and the subjective desires of the person or persons involved. In Mad Love he made this quite clear when he declared that “chance is the form making manifest the exterior necessity which traces its path in the human unconscious.” It was, as he claimed, a “bold” attempt to square Marxist materialism with Freud’s doctrine of unconscious desire; simply as a practical matter, it allowed him to interpret coincidences in a provocative and creatively fertile way.
We know something of the causal history that brought Breton and Giacometti to the mask: the latter had hit an impasse with a creative work. But what of the mask’s own causal history? At the time Breton and Giacometti encountered it, it was unknown to them. After Breton’s account was published, he received a letter. The correspondent was Joë Bousquet, a poet and friend of Breton’s who had been paralyzed after receiving a bullet while leading a raid during the Third Battle of the Aisne in the Argonne, on the night of May 26-27, 1918. (A coincidence that seems worth noting: While I was formulating that last sentence, the bus I was traveling in passed an apartment building whose name, clearly lit up in the morning dusk, is: The Argonne.) According to Breton’s biographer Henri Béhar, Bousquet identified the mask as similar to one he was issued at the front in July 1917. The purpose of the mask was to protect lookouts in the trenches from incoming projectiles, a task for which it was useless. Bousquet’s letter to Breton, which Breton lost but part of which was published in 1969 by Gallimard in Bousquet’s Correspondance, tells of a “metal masquerade mask [loup de métal]” that “completely blinded” the soldier wearing it, its bottom edge bumping up against the rifle and obstructing his aim. In short, “the primary use for this utensil of war was to put an insuperable obstacle between the soldier’s eye and arm.”
That this causal chain was unknown to Breton and Giacometti was in all probability of crucial importance to their having selected, or as they might have it, being selected by, the mask for its role in suggesting a solution to Giacometti’s problem. After having learned of the mask’s use, Breton—who, having himself spent several weeks at the front near Verdun in late 1916 as a stretcher bearer and performing triage on combat casualties, surely had had the experience to draw upon in making this judgment—lamented the “evil role” it undoubtedly had played not only for Bousquet, but in the lives of the men who had to suffer its use. In light of its history, it would have been a strange choice for Breton and Giacometti to settle on.
The two causal chains that converged with the meeting of Breton and the mask could hardly have been any different. One ran through the death and confusion of war, the other through an unfinished sculpture. And yet both intersected at a Parisian antique shop.
Desire-Concern-Preoccupation
For Breton, desire was the central term in the equation that describes objective chance, and the motivating force that brought him and Giacometti to their meeting with the mask. It is through desire that we recognize in things not just a significance, but a significance peculiar to us and for us. These things we see as fostering, fulfilling or frustrating our desires.
Breton tended to frame the question of desire in erotic terms, but desire as such plays a broader and more complex role in our lives. At its simplest, desire is an attitude toward something we need or want. Put another way, desire is a psychological mode through which we recognize a lack in ourselves and at the prodding of which we are driven out into the world in order to fill that lack. For at the heart of desire is lack: if desire is a psychological state, lack is an existential condition that encompasses what we need and/or what we want. (Desire makes no distinctions between needs and wants. It’s truly egalitarian in that regard.) Desire in effect is an attitude toward lack–it is the psychological means through which this lack makes itself known to us.
Desire is thus a psychological phenomenon or mood through which the world is encountered and disclosed. It is through desire that we know the world and indeed, give ourselves reason to know the world. Desire, in turn, gives rise to concern. Where desire drives us into the world, concern reveals it as mattering to us. Concern in a sense is desire brought to self-awareness. And this leads to another divergence from Breton’s idea of desire as an unconscious force. Because it can, and very often does, rise to the level of concern, desire need not remain, if indeed it ever is, unconscious. This is especially true when concern intensifies into preoccupation: through an intensification of concern, desires themselves can become preoccupations.
In concrete, actionable form, desires precipitate into the specific projects meant to meet them. Giacometti’s project consisted in the satisfactory completion of the sculpture. As a concrete possibility for the fulfillment of that project, the mask would have been recognized as such rather consciously, as the formal solution to a formal problem that itself was preoccupying Giacometti. Finding the mask represents the discovery of a possibility that is actually possible for the completion of the project. Given Giacometti’s interest in stylized features of the human figure—Cycladic statues, for example, were a significant influence on him—it would make sense (and with Breton one might be tempted to say it would seem inevitable) that the mask, with its flat features and triangular suggestion of a nose, would provoke a solution to the formal problem of completing the face on the sculpture. If, like Breton and Giacometti we knew nothing of the mask’s history and designated use, we might see it as akin to the faces of Cycladic sculpture: the features reduced to a geometrical simplicity, the expressionless immobility of the unlined forehead. Purely in terms of its flatly linear aesthetics, the mask was compatible with the overall figure Giacometti was working on; one supposes that he would have felt some sense of recognition when he saw it, albeit without the metaphysical implications Breton divined. It is through his preoccupation with finishing the statue that Giacometti would have been drawn to the mask; from the point of view of craft, hypothesizing a mysterious, unconscious motivation seems an unnecessary embellishment.
Because desire is something that leads us to search, the object-catalyst takes on the role of something like a signpost on that search. If the lack driving desire is a situation in need of a solution, then the object-catalyst is like a piece of evidence or a clue, perhaps even a fragment of the solution pointing the way toward the rest. Follow where the object leads and you may find what you’re looking for. If you know how to look.
Availability and Preoccupation
Knowing how to look meant, for Breton and the other Surrealists, opening oneself to the possibility of finding. Looking thus presupposes a certain state of mind—disponibilité, or availability. This state of disponibilité represents a way of being in the world that sees in the world certain possibilities as they are illuminated or disclosed through our desires. Disponibilité just is the availability or openness to the unexpected, a susceptibility to noticing the strange coincidence and chance meeting that turns out to be of unanticipated significance. We might say that availability is an intentional state: availability always is availability to something, even if that something is at first pass largely undefined. Availability is thus a term of relationship defined by lack and recognized by desire; one is available to something that one desires.
It is particularly in relation to a project that availability comes into play. It is the lack at the heart of the project—the need or want that it is meant to fill—that puts one in a state of availability to the solutions, materials, tools and so forth that can play a part in completing the project. Availability is in a sense a shading or variety of concern or preoccupation. It is often true that when one is preoccupied with something, one is likely to see relationships to the preoccupation in the things, events or people encountered. By way of the susceptibility that preoccupation fosters, a problem in a sense brings its own solution by indicating possibilities in what otherwise would be unexpected places.
Breton’s availability to the mask’s catalyzing effect was a matter of his emotional stake in Giacometti’s sculpture. He saw the developing piece as embodying “the very emanation of the desire to love and to be loved in search of its real human object.” When he asserted that he understood Giacometti’s sculpture as embodying that desire, he in fact described it in terms of the fundamental desire motivating much of his own life’s work. His concern with it seems thus to have been an instance of a kind of projection underwritten by what he hoped would be a possibility for himself. The absence of the real human object was the lack animating his project, a project that took on a transcendental meaning of its own. Giacometti may have been facing a formal problem in need of a correspondingly formal solution, but for Breton, the sculpture represented something deeper—a metaphysical problem in need of a metaphysical solution. Was this a reading that put the sculpture itself in the position of an object-catalyst?
Thus it is when grasped in an attitude of availability that an object, event, person, or state of affairs can have a catalyzing effect. A catalyst must catalyze something, and that something must be a problem to be solved, a conundrum to be resolved, a riddle to be answered, a preoccupation to be assuaged. Only in this connection can it act like the oracle we take it to be.
The Object as Oracle
The power that the object-catalyst holds for us isn’t something inherent in it qua object. Instead, it is a matter of interpretation, of our capacity to read events and the things that play an important part within them as signs. We understand them and attribute specific meanings to them through a hermeneutic of the omen. The object is a catalyst because we read it that way and to that extent it serves us like an oracle.
An oracle was above all a response to a question. One went to Delphi with a specific question for the oracle; the answer would then be interpreted within the framework the question set up—or better yet, presupposed. Breton approached the mask as a querent approaching an oracle or an omen—as a revelatory if obscure fact that would bring insight into a specific problem. What the episode with the mask shows is that virtually any object can be a catalyst, just as any out-of-the-ordinary event could be read as an omen. Unusual or unfamiliar objects, objects whose meaning and context are obscure or unknown, objects encountered under strange circumstances—these are most likely to take on the resonance of signs relevant to the settling of some outstanding problem. (When one is searching for something, one will have a tendency to find it, even in unclear or unlikely places.) The object-catalyst is a function of the desire to reach a decision, and its job is to shepherd the querent, to point him or her toward a solution. It is an indicator in matter, a sign solidified.
The object-catalyst derives its oracular meaning from our purposes, from what it promises to say about our projects. As such a sign, the object-catalyst is an envoy from a future in which one’s desire is filled and need is met. But it is a fallible envoy. The future it seems to promise doesn’t have to be. The essential part of a project—its trying to bring about a projected future state—is that the future is open: It does not have to be. We may have to be a future, but our future does not have to be the desired future we project ourselves toward. And in this regard, the object-catalyst can only suggest; it can’t guarantee. It has to be interpreted, and interpretation can always be mistaken.
“Misreading” and Meaning
It is one thing to recognize a sign, and another to understand what the sign means. The former consists in an initial shock, the latter in the deeper interpretive move that requires us to know something about the lack or project that led us here to begin with. Even so, as with any oracle, the meaning of the object-catalyst is not unambiguous and must be divined. Preoccupation creates its own network of meanings in terms of which the object’s significance will be framed; the object in turn is an inert thing that accepts what meanings are offered it and thereby takes its place within a network of meanings, even if the latter turns out to engender a misreading of what the object “really” is.
Consider Breton’s speculations regarding the mask. The meaning he divined certainly bore no resemblance to its original purpose or effect; at the most literal level, it represents a misreading. His encounter with the mask shows that objective chance may in some circumstances work through a kind of phenomenology of misperception whereby the misinterpretation of a word or the misidentification of an object is taken as revelatory. As with the mask, what is revealed is revealed more about the misperceiver—of the way he or she can detect an occult world of connections ordinarily hidden in full view—than about the object. Within this phenomenology of misperception coincidences are instances of objective chance, meetings with the unexpected are somehow fated, and objects or persons are endowed with layers of meaning they may not originally have had. One reads into the object as much as one reads it.
Breton’s reading, if it was a misreading, was a creative misreading. His interpretation of the mask’s meaning, so far removed from the original meaning it had—to Bousquet and undoubtedly to others who had to suffer its use—created an interpretive or hermeneutic overlay of meaning that owed more to his imagination than to the material reality of the object. We could describe his reading of its meaning as mistaken, although it was a reading that was purely and admittedly speculative, as it would have to be for someone unfamiliar with what the object actually was and what it possibly could have represented. But to characterize it as a mistaken reading would be to misread Breton’s purposes, which weren’t empirical but rather imaginative. There isn’t a question of right or wrong in a case like this, only a question of inspiration. In order for the hermeneutic to work properly, the object need only have the catalyzing role we wish for it to have.
The object-catalyst is an instance of mute matter which, concealing its actual meaning from the person who encounters it serendipitously, provokes a new meaning, one peculiar to the person encountering it. To some unavoidable extent, it’s a semi-blank screen on which one can project what one needs and what one feels the object has to “say” about that need. What specific need, presumed or real, is filled by this new, projected meaning of the object? To ask this question is to ask what concrete possibility it represents for the person querying it. It may speak to us, but it requires our collusion in a way; we must fit its enigmatic answers into the framework we bring to it.
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Daniel Barbiero is an improvising double bassist who composes graphic scores and writes on music, art and related subjects. He is a regular contributor to Avant Music News and Perfect Sound Forever. His recent releases include Non-places, with Cristiano Bocci, and Fifteen Miniatures for Prepared Double Bass.
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