Seeing Brancusi's First Cry, A First Time, Again

• Published in: Janus head Vol. 20; no. 1; pp. 33 - 40
• Main Author: Miller, Ellen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• ISSN: 1524-2269
• DOI: 10.5840/jh20222014

Constantin Brancusi’s sculpture The First Cry (c. 1914; cast 1917) asks questions that overlap with the concerns of contemporary existential phenomenology, namely, temporality, the relation between art and truth, the nature of embodiment, and the lived experience of perception. In this paper, I put Heidegger and Merleau- Ponty’s writings into dialogue with one of Brancusi’s many ovoid sculptures. Even though Heidegger is not commonly included by those involved in body studies, his writings—especially the later writings—sketch out a philosophy that is at least open to the materiality and physicality of artworks and beholders. We will move through several entrances into this moving work: the work’s shining, listening, mirroring, and temporal dimensions. The phenomenological method employed follows Heidegger’s fundamental claim that art opens up entrances to the truth of the world around it. Brancusi’s work allows us to experience Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the chiasm, Heidegger’s idea of the fourfold, and reveals the ways in which philosophy needs art. When we stay with First Cry in our philosophizing and in the gallery, we experience the motion and movement within Brancusi’s work; the experience is at once essential and sensuous.