It seems that most people's encounters with Art with a capital A involve paintings. Or else something two-dimensional. But the Giacometti exhibit reintroduces you to the delight of three dimensions.
When you walk around a sculpture, so many more things come to light. It encourages you to look again. And again. From different angles. "The Spoon Woman" (1926-27) from the front is the not the same as "The Spoon Woman" in profile. Straight-on, you notice the generous girth of her hips rounding out from a tiny waist under a block of torso. But when you look at her from the side, she's impossibly skinny and a small round belly curves out from her waist into the concave lens of her hips. The same is true of "The Nose" (1947), where the dominant proboscis seen from the side disappears when you look at it from behind. Instead, all you see is oblong, hanging fruit. (Analyze that psychoanalytically all you want.)
Sculptures that do not make sense from one angle suddenly coalesce when you look from another. When I first looked at "Woman with Her Throat Cut," all I could see was a mess of metal. If it reminded me of anything organic, it was a stingray. But as I changed my vantage point, I realized that I had mentally placed the "head" on the wrong side of the sculpture. Looking from this different angle, I found her trachea and her open, Pac-Man mouth. The bear trap was her rib cage--and it was actually to the right of, rather than directly below, her suspended, snow pea of a torso. A jagged line of piping wasn't as random as I thought: On closer inspection, I could make out two legs bent at the knees.
Giacometti rewards you for paying attention to his sculptures, for taking the time to walk around them. You engage the object. You remember perception takes work on the part of the perceiver.
Reaction #1: All hail sculpture
Reaction #2: It's all relative
Reaction #3: What a confused attitude toward women