Giuseppe Penone’s “Thoughts in the Roots”

From the beginning, Arte Povera was characterized by political contradiction and its failure to cohere as anything like an aesthetically or intellectually consistent movement. The group was effectively willed into being by the critic and curator Germano Celant, though it was always a fragile coalition. Between 1967 and the mid-1980s, Celant wrote a series of texts that struggle to settle on a stable set of artists or ideas that might be considered defining.

In his foundational “Arte Povera: Appunti per una guerriglia” [Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerrilla War] published in Flash Art in 1967, he characteristically throws all manner of discursive matter into the mix—Marx, DeBray, McLuhan—and invokes anti-colonial resistance past and present. Here, the artist is imagined as a kind of cultural Che Guevara: “No longer among the ranks of the exploited, the artist becomes a guerrilla fighter, capable of choosing his places of battle and with the advantages conferred by mobility, surprising and striking, rather than the other way around.”1

The title also summons a more local history, that of the partisan resistance against Nazi occupation and the rump of Mussolini’s Fascist state in the 1940s. If the text’s discursive materials—Marxist economics and new media theory—gesture towards contradictions inherent to the new industrial urbanism emergent in the Italy of the so-called “economic miracle” brought about by vast injections of Marshall Plan monies, the older memory buried in the language of the piece recalls the rural world, the forests and mountains from which the partisans conducted their guerrilla raids and where the SS exacted brutal retribution, as during the Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre of 1944. Gunshots ricochet in the forest of Celant’s text.

By 1969, however, there had been a shift in his position. After the very real displays of political violence in Italy during 1968, Celant’s references were no longer Marx and Uncle Ho but the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, and the artist was not a figurative guerrilla but an “alchemist” or a “magician.” In his book from that year, simply entitled Arte Povera, Celant writes that “What the artist comes in contact with is not re-elaborated; he does not express a judgement on it, he does not seek a moral or social judgement, he does not manipulate it.”2 In Celant’s account, for the artists of Arte Povera form is not something imposed or willed, but rather something produced or activated by process, whether that be spectators walking in front of one of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mirrors or a tree growing round a bronze cast of Giuseppe Penone’s hand. As Celant put it in 2017, “it was a rejection of the death of the object in favour of the life of things.”3

It was in this context that Celant added the 22-year-old Penone to his cohort of Arte Povera artists, in 1969. Penone grew up in a hamlet in southern Piedmont called Garessio. In the accounts he gives of his youth he presents the village as cut off from time, in almost fairytale terms: “My culture,” he says, “was the woods, the river, the forest, it was the natural elements.”4 As Federico Campagna has observed, the political traumas of the 1940s were ghost traces in this elemental field: “[T]he town’s inhabitants played a significant role in the war of Liberation … The partisans took refuge in the mountains, and from there they descended to the valley to attack the German and Italian contingents.”5

Penone’s early work, made while he was still a student, presented a series of delicate, almost Franciscan interventions into this landscape. A series of actions carried out and documented in 1967/68 entitled Alpi Marittime [Maritime Alps] included gestures such as casting his hand in metal and attaching the sculpture to the trunk of a tree that in time would grow round it, or entwining three saplings or placing rocks in branches and boughs, or causing a stream to flow over a concrete imprint of his own body. The photographs documenting these actions are humble, compelling, informal, indexical works, and by giving the geographical location as their title Penone invokes both a subtle poetics of entwinement between the cultural and the natural, and the traumatic history of the region.

Disappointingly, these works are not included in this show at the Serpentine Galleries, somewhat oversold as a retrospective. By 1971 Germano Celant had called for the end of Arte Povera, believing it was no longer equal to its moment, and on the evidence of this exhibition, Penone was a busted flush by then too. It is humbling to see how an artist whose early pieces contain such subtle artistic intelligence allows their work to settle into such blandly decorative and at best conceptually generic, at worst fully reactionary form. Indeed, this exhibition forces one to reconsider that early work negatively.

It is not insignificant that, after Alpi Marittime, Penone rarely uses locations as the titles for his work, preferring names that invoke a vaguely “poetic” resonance. Titles such as (in their English translation) “Book Trees,” “To Breathe the Shadow,” “Breath of Leaves,” “Vegetal Gestures,” and “Forest Green” bring to mind the titles given to expensive paints or perfumes. In a sense this movement from the specific to the generically or corporately “poetic” mirrors the trajectory of Penone’s career, as the work becomes increasingly New Age and global in its scope. In fact, this exhibition unwittingly traces the expansion of the globalized art market all too well. We move from precise and informal early works with traceable if subtle political connotations to a recent life-sized bronze tree covered in gold leaf that only serves to point up the beauty of the real thing and the truth of David Frankel’s statement that “Penone’s sculpture can fail by verging on the kitsch, for although kitsch is sometimes vibrant in art, the kind determined by a chord of beneficent humanism is rarely so.”6

In recent years, Penone’s work has often been considered within the context of ecological crisis, but this is a mistake. Penone’s concept of nature is wholly conservative, when it is not bizarrely erotic. In a recent essay, Penone recalls a 1968 text where he wrote: “At that point, [the sculptor] focuses all their attention and effort on their body, pressed firmly against the earth, allowing them to perceive and feel directly all things of the earth. They may then stretch out their arms, fully savoring the coolness of the soil and reaching the degree of stillness necessary to complete the sculpture. The sculptor penetrates … and the horizon moves closer to their eyes.”7 Those ellipses are some of the most unwittingly comical I have seen in some time.

Although Penone often remarks on the need for a rethinking of the human relationship to nature against the pyramidal structure inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition, you would be hard pushed to find anything resembling a critique or a considered politics in this work. Indeed, in a recent interview he commented of his large bronze trees that “the works’ popularity can be attributed to their suitability for various outdoor spaces, including gardens and parks, where they seamlessly blend in.”8 The corporate blandness of this statement becomes both more understandable and more troubling when one thinks of Penone’s trees at the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

In Penone’s work, “nature” is simply a stand-in for the unchanging. But of course, nature is changing, and Penone’s weak analogic thinking with its cod-profundity—a tree has bark and a human has skin, leaves have veins and so do we, water flows in everything, rocks are more enduring than flesh—feels more like self-help babble than anything of use to the current moment. And in fact, he doesn’t intend it to be. That Penone was added to Celant’s tranche of artists in the wake of 1968 is significant. Penone seeks to avoid didacticism, which is fine, even admirable, but what you get in its place is not productive ambiguity, but the same generic point made over again and again. Here is a pile of leaves he has pressed his body into, here is a wall piece made by rubbing a tree, here is a tree contorted to look a bit like a human. We have skin, trees have bark, we both meet the world at our borders. And so.

The thing is that the human and the natural are currently being mingled in the most unnatural of ways in Gaza, Yemen, Ukraine, the DRC, Sudan, and on and on. Trees in Central Park still contain the toxins produced by the collapse of the World Trade Center; so do people’s lungs. Microplastics enter us through every pore. On the wall before you enter the exhibition is the usual list of donors whose connections to the above entanglements have been well documented. Penone’s work feels almost obscene in this context. The world has overshot the place where this kind of work makes any sense, or where its contradictions can be ignored. All we can do is measure the time between now and then and wonder how we got here, standing under an absurd bronze tree while the real things burst into life in Kensington Gardens, despite everything, in the spring sunshine.