Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Alberto Giacometti
Swiss; 20th-century
St. Petersburg, FL: Salvador Dalí Museum (Exhibition: Alberto Giacometti & Salvador Dalí: Through & Beyond Surrealism)
67%
Disagreeable Object. 1931. Bronze
Most of this artwork's aesthetic energy resides at the point where its title collides with its material component. That's a fancy way of saying that as a sculpture, it's just okay, but as a gross-looking pupal thing in bronze that's outright called "disagreeable," it's funny, and in a way that's pretty open-ended and therefore artistically substantial. There are all sorts of untoward sexual and organismic and violent resonances to the artwork's physical appearance; it's a Brancusi gone bad. The "disagreeable object" appellation serves to underscore these meanings but also sort of to neutralize them, as if this were some totemic device that's been yanked from its own natural context and stultified. (That's basically what it is, but self-consciously so.) It bears mentioning, however, that there are limitations to how good an artwork can be whose main engine of aesthetic significance is a conceptual flourish like this work's object-title interaction. The well of possible experiences to be had with Disagreeable Object is somewhat shallow: you note its physiognomic weirdness, you note the way the title detaches that weirdness from the thing itself and turns it into a conceptual object for consideration, and then you move along. There's little reward for sustained attention. (TFS, 2026)
St. Petersburg, FL: Salvador Dalí Museum (Exhibition: Alberto Giacometti & Salvador Dalí: Through & Beyond Surrealism)
58%
Disagreeable Object to Be Thrown Away. 1931. Painted plaster
This is a weaker work than Giacometti's Disagreeable Object, mostly because it's just less disgusting. Since the joke here is that calling the thing "disagreeable" somehow minimizes and aestheticizes its disagreeableness, the ickier and more uncanny the object is, the better it ends up being as an artwork. The horn-forms are kind of disquieting, sure, but as a group the three of them actually convey a sense of balance altogether, and the slight curve to that plane they're jutting out of is actually a little pretty. That this object is "to be thrown away" is pretty funny since it's plaster painted to look like bronze, but that part of the joke doesn't really go anywhere aesthetically. (Apparently Giacometti gave this object this particular title more than a decade after he made it; for awhile it was just known as an "object." It doesn't succeed much more on plain sculptural terms, however, than it does on these humoristic-conceptual ones.) (TFS, 2026)