Arte | povera Stephanie White
w e come from a lumber producing country, yet the most moving statement about the relationship between trees and how they are fashioned into lumber comes from an Italian artist, Giuseppe Penone in his ongoing series Albero , started when he was 22 in 1969. The first time I saw one of his trees was in the National Gallery in Ottawa — a 12 x 12, about thirty feet long, leaning against a wall. Half the beam had been carefully stripped lengthwise, annular layer by layer, to show the young tree buried in the beam, with the beam’s knots teased back to show the branches that knots actually are. One understands this work in an instant; it shows how, whenever we can, we eliminate the connections and communications between nature and our constructed world. Fir beams are not exploited for their tree-ness, but for their relatively inexpensive strength and workability: tree qualities to be sure, but not the powerful experience of touching, in a wet, green forest, a tree . A recent book in Phaidon’s Themes and Movements series is Arte Povera , a movement that developed in the late 1960s mainly in Italy. These Themes and Movements are wonderful books that provide a descriptive overview, works by the artists involved, their original statements, voices and manifestos and critical texts on the work. It’s forty years on from the emergence of arte povera , long enough for widely scattered, often temporal work to be understood collectively. Arte povera emerged as a response to the increasingly brittle and coded Cold War world that called up other responses such as the student riots in Paris in 1968, Vietnam War protests throughout the 1960s, the rise of the FLQ as a liberation force in the early 1970s — it was a rough and turbulent time.
To architects came the realisation that the supposedly clean aesthetics of modernism were semiologically compromised and appropriated by a barely suppressed militant capitalism. This same realisation by arte povera artists led to an art that purposely was not enriched with meaning or materials and where phenomenology was more interesting than commodity, while architecture plunged even more deeply into an arch sophistry of signs and symbols. Arte povera strove for clarity: Jannis Kounellis’ Untitled (12 horses) , twelve horses tethered in a gallery for three days, was heroic, unsellable and completely present. Giovanni Anselmo tied granite blocks insecurely and precariously to walls high above viewer’s heads: a clear and graphic illustration of the phenomena of gravity. Richard Long made a path in a field by walking on it, Penone fleched wooden beams. Art povera ’s high end principles — ‘a work of art is an attitude become form’, ‘art is related to a quest for authenticity and truth’ — do not inform as much as this description by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev: ‘shared characteristics [of arte povera ]: a reference to domesticity and habitat, a human scale, a layering of diverse cultural references, a rejection of coherent style and artistic signature, as well as the distinction between the literal and metphoric, real and virtual, natural and artificial, live and inert, through the transformation of the installation into a type of ‘poor theatre’ where nature and culture coincide’ 1 .
We could do with more of this sort of thing in our brittle and coded world. g
1 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn editor. Arte Povera . London: Phaidon, 1999. p74
Stephanie White is the editor of On Site.
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