Timber Merchants

Date: 21-02-1989
Owning Institution:
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999          
Subject:   20th Century        

Giuseppe Penone at the Arnolfini and Georg Herold at Karsten Schubert Gallery

NOT CONTENT with finding tongues in trees, books in the running brooks and sermons in stones, Giuseppe Penone - who has, in the past, made a considerable quantity of art out of trees, water and rocks - discovers aesthetic potential in dust samples, human hair, nail-clippings and much else besides. On the evi-dence of his slimline exhibition at the Arnolfini, Penone, an inheritor of late 1960s subversiveness (he gradu-ated from Turin Art School in 1968) is still busily addressing the preoccupations of an era that spawned myr-iad alternatives to the mainstream. What he makes could be described as (take your pick) Earth Art, Land Art, Body Art, Process Art or Conceptual Art.
 
Instead of flower power, Penone proposes tree power. Five Metre Tree is characteristic, an arranged marriage of perversity and elegance. He has taken a thick wooden plank and, patiently gouging and chipping away, has carved it back into the sapling it once was. It is important to Penone that he arrives at his hard-won, hardwood resurrections (something of a trademark - he is represented by two more planks-restored-to-treeness in the Royal Academy's current survey of 'Italian Art in the Twentieth Century') by, as it were, following nature's instructions. He traces twigs back from the knots in a given plank, carefully peels back the years recorded in the ex-tree's growth rings. The result, rubbed and burnished to a shine, is a neat encapsulation of Penone's attitudes to art - not, essentially, an act of creation, but of retrieval, a literal getting back to nature.
 
Penone is a leading exponent of arte povera, a loose grouping of Italian artists who forsake traditional materials like marble or oil on canvas for urban refuse or natural ephemera. He has become, it would seem, the movement's ecological conscience. Certainly an ecological message of sorts lurks behind Five Metre Tree: if the world becomes any more denatured, if acid rain and mass deforestation proceed apace, then perhaps, someday, trees really will become cultural exhibits, things you have to visit in a museum.
 
Penone's vision is, essentially, an updated form of pastoral. Urban existence, for him, is a succession of experiences of loss, a continual reminder of man's alienation from the land; he sees cities, he has written, as 'orchards with their trees contained in doors, tables, floors, planks, beams . . .' The closest thing to straight figurative sculpture at the Arnolfini is a piece called Pages of Earth; a row of agrarian implements are hung on the gallery wall, the blades of pick, shovel or hoe acting as plinths on which Penone places small, folded lumps of clay that carry anatomical (mostly genital) associations. The result is sculpture that looks as if it has, literally, been dug from the ground, art that affirms its creator's would-be closeness to Mama Nature.
 
Penone is more than averagely preoccupied with death, which he seems to envisage as a kind of pas-toral fulfilment - the realisation of an old Romantic dream, a condition of oneness with nature in which your remains get to be rolled round in earth's diurnal course. Hence, for example, his curious, raised bier titled Breath of Leaves. This consists of a mound of leaves bearing the imprint of the artist's reclining body, said mound having been cast in bronze and speared on six wooden branches so that it is raised to eye-level. Testifying to Penone's stated ambition 'to give permanence to the ephemeral', it is better, and rather more effective, than it sounds. An odd, late 20th- century response to one of the oldest traditions of statuary, it is a funerary monument of sorts, a dream of dying shrouded in leaves.
 
Penone treads a thin line between banality and expressiveness. Elsewhere, he has arranged a mound of olive leaves on some sacking, has, again, lain down, and then blown with all his might. The 'sculpture' consists of body-imprint plus the breath-shaped speech bubble of leaves displaced by the act of blowing. Breathing becomes art; the point is, presumably, to emphasise man's interconnectedness with nature, but it is little more than a demonstration of lung capacity with philosophical pretensions.
 
Penone celebrates the most temporary features of the human anatomy, homing in on the parts of the body where we already begin to cross the threshold dividing self and nature, the bits we are constantly shedding into the environment. His gigantesque glass-and-marble Fingernail lies like a Brobdignagian fossil on the gallery floor. A large untitled work consists of a wall floor-to- ceilinged in sheets of white paper; Pe-none rips each sheet in several places and uses the consequent extruding tears as shelves, on which he places a multitude of white plaster casts of his fingernails. It is one of the most unusual self-portraits you are likely to see, an image of the artist as an accumulation of his own nail-clippings. Very odd, but it does have a sort of logic, as another of Penone's visions of death, of the final white-out when the body permanently rejoins the natural world, becomes fossil, dust or plant food.
 
Georg Herold is a German artist, and exact contemporary of Penone, whose work displays a similar fondness for raw materials and ephemeral effects. But, where Penone addresses a range of specific, com-prehensible issues, Herold - if his work at Karsten Schubert Gallery and Interim Art is anything to go by - opts shamelessly for impenetrability.
 
Like Penone, Herold makes art out of bodily trace or residue (his Nosepressing consists simply of a sheet of glass bearing the greasy imprint of the artist's proboscis), but does so, it seems, merely to baffle. The result is like a parody of Kunsthalle modishness, the ultimate in Obscure Modern Art. Herold flings fish eggs at his canvases and fixes the results, which look like pastiches of Abstract Expressionist interstellar configurations. Hinting at some form of socio- economic awareness, he uses Beluga caviar for the works exhibited in central London, while visitors to his show in the East End make do with lumpfish abstractionism. The paintings smell.
 
At Interim Art, Herold bangs a nail through a couple of timber off-cuts, rivets the result to the wall and calls it Statement. It seems somehow appropriate that his most striking work should be constructed from two short planks. Maybe that is uncharitable; Herold's banality is, it seems, entirely intentional. The mystification you are liable to experience before work as visually and conceptually unrewarding as this, or No Room for Wood (a room-sized box-frame of untreated timber, sculpture as put-up job) is, the artist has stated, very much to the point.
 
'What we get dished up to us every day is nonsense anyway,' he told Artscribe a couple of years ago, 'so it's nice to oppose it with something that will meet with total incomprehension. Once you learn to live with absurdity, it's the things you used to think were normal that come to seem absurd.' Which suggests that Herold has arrived at a reductio ad absurdum, if such a thing is possible, of absurdist philosophy. The trouble is that Marcel Duchamp has already exhausted this barren territory. Maybe Herold, as Duchamp did, should give up art for chess; or perhaps he should try something less mentally taxing.