Sebastien Fitch, Phd.
Following Giacometti: Art as Research
“Trying to copy an existing painting is absolutely impossible; colours are too subtle, textures too chaotic. You can copy a photograph of a painting because you're not actually copying the painting, but the photograph; you're copying a copy.
The painting you've tried to paint already exists. You're doomed to fail.
The only avenue left open to me is to create paintings by Giacometti that don't exist.”
- sketchbook notes, 2005
This project began, as many such projects often do, with what was meant to be a quick, one-off exercise. My long-standing interest in the works of the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) led me to try to replicate the style of his painting in order to better understand his working methods. I was just messing about on a canvas for a couple of days to assuage my curiosity; a week or two at the most, if it went well.
Days quickly turned to months, however, and suddenly I found myself surrounded with half-finished canvases amongst a chaos of catalogues, books and photocopies. That was in 2005; I was still working on this project when I finally exhibited some of the resulting pieces in 2011 at Concordia`s Faculty of Fine Art Gallery in Montreal.
As an area of study, art certainly does not suffer from want of attention; aestheticians, historians, psychologists, sociologists, critics and cultural commentators are ever at the ready to analyze and deconstruct. In these analyses, however, the focus is generally placed on either the biography of the artist or on the art object itself. Yet artwork is only what is left behind once the artist has left the building, so to speak. To narrow the focus of research on the product is to examine art after the fact.
In the last decade, a new emphasis has been placed in academic circles - and especially within the field of Art Education - on the potential for artistic studio practice as a site for the creation of knowledge. Terms such as "art-based" or "studio-based" research, and discussions concerning "tacit knowledge" and "material practice" are all part of a new paradigm based on the theory that new knowledge can be gained through the process of creating artwork.
In essence, what is being explored is the potential of the artist as researcher.
How, then, does one go about understanding the process of creating art? At its core, this project is anchored on the belief that it is only through doing art that one can truly come to understand it. Furthermore, it stands to reason that the best way to begin to understand the work of a particular artist is to experience the creation of that work as closely as possible - which is to say, to copy it.
My methodology is a form of hybrid research that melds art history, studio-based self-reflective research and qualitative analysis. Rather than trying to create a replica of a particular Giacometti painting, however, it is his artistic methodology that I am replicating by a process of exploration informed by written and recorded sources, photographic reproductions, my own observation of his work in situ, and a great deal of experimentation and intuition.
Within the context of this project, perhaps the use of the term copying is a misnomer as it is not so much the product - a particular painting - that is being analyzed, but rather the process. Not only are the resulting paintings not meant to be duplicates of Giacometti's work, the knowledge stemming from this research cannot be readily discerned from their examination: the knowledge stems from the process itself.
Therefore, I propose instead the concept of mimogenesis: creation through the act of mimesis. Mimesis and copying essentially share the same meaning, however the former is more open-ended and places a greater emphasis on the mimicry of actions and behaviour over that of visual representation.
This designation also serves to place emphasis on the role of creation within the process embodied in this project: not only is the creation of artworks involved, but more importantly, creation of knowledge.