Giuseppe Penone, Alberi libro (Book Trees), 2017
Veteran Italian artist Giuseppe Penone (currently showing at Serpentine in London) reflects in this video on how his work, at this historical moment (the 20th and 21st century), sits loosely within ‘art’, and can be therefore understood to function as a kind of ‘sculpture’. He doesn’t say what else his work might be, merely that there are other possibilities for understanding or qualifying what he does: might he think of it as a kind of ritual? A communing with natural entities? A solo-folkloric endeavour? He certainly speaks of his desire, through the work, to keep trying to look for astonishment, even as this dwindles with age.
It's the gentle but astute observation about how his work passes as and for art that struck me. Leaving aside for a moment that 'art' is also the actual material, financial, social field that enable his work to happen in the first place, I am drawn to the idea that ‘art’ and ‘sculpture’ are merely imprecise, loose or compromised labels or categories: that his work passes for art, but, in a sense, that art isn’t really the point.
I can try and make a parallel with ‘performance’ (or even ‘theatre’, though I’m genuinely less at ease in that label, it has always felt less capacious than performance, and simply not what I studied). I’d say one of the things I’m chasing, through the label of performance, is something like a ‘non-human event’. It’s that sense of the world being alive, in ways that exceed and confound our rational ego, which feeds off of control and all-too-human agency. ‘Performance’, especially when I started the choreographic/conceptual work in the mid-late 2000s (way before I resumed magic) was all about finding a non-hierarchical mode of watching and performing: what if objects were viewed on a par with human performers? Guided by composer John Cage’s 4’33’’, in which any sound or event might be considered music or musical ,and therefore worthy of attention, I asked myself: how can the theatre become a space not to focus on people (let alone characters or fictional stories), but to practice a kind of ecological perception, tuned to events, however small or invisible, that demand we recognise the multiplicity of lives, forms of matters, temporalities and scales that are always already at play, anywhere, at any time? It’s at times an impossible endeavour, or a failure, but that’s unimportant, really. The point is to find why one is doing this. Performance isn’t the point, it’s merely a container or label.
In other words, the work is not about performance (even with all the meta stuff that I love), and it’s certainly not about making performances for the sake of it: it’s about carving out space for a way of watching and being, making space for a mode of, let’s say, ecological perception (and imagination, and poetic, and ethics). Following Penone, I'd say that performance is simply an excuse, or a tool, but it’s not the point.
Veteran Italian artist Giuseppe Penone (currently showing at Serpentine in London) reflects in this video on how his work, at this historical moment (the 20th and 21st century), sits loosely within ‘art’, and can be therefore understood to function as a kind of ‘sculpture’. He doesn’t say what else his work might be, merely that there are other possibilities for understanding or qualifying what he does: might he think of it as a kind of ritual? A communing with natural entities? A solo-folkloric endeavour? He certainly speaks of his desire, through the work, to keep trying to look for astonishment, even as this dwindles with age.
It's the gentle but astute observation about how his work passes as and for art that struck me. Leaving aside for a moment that 'art' is also the actual material, financial, social field that enable his work to happen in the first place, I am drawn to the idea that ‘art’ and ‘sculpture’ are merely imprecise, loose or compromised labels or categories: that his work passes for art, but, in a sense, that art isn’t really the point.
I can try and make a parallel with ‘performance’ (or even ‘theatre’, though I’m genuinely less at ease in that label, it has always felt less capacious than performance, and simply not what I studied). I’d say one of the things I’m chasing, through the label of performance, is something like a ‘non-human event’. It’s that sense of the world being alive, in ways that exceed and confound our rational ego, which feeds off of control and all-too-human agency. ‘Performance’, especially when I started the choreographic/conceptual work in the mid-late 2000s (way before I resumed magic) was all about finding a non-hierarchical mode of watching and performing: what if objects were viewed on a par with human performers? Guided by composer John Cage’s 4’33’’, in which any sound or event might be considered music or musical ,and therefore worthy of attention, I asked myself: how can the theatre become a space not to focus on people (let alone characters or fictional stories), but to practice a kind of ecological perception, tuned to events, however small or invisible, that demand we recognise the multiplicity of lives, forms of matters, temporalities and scales that are always already at play, anywhere, at any time? It’s at times an impossible endeavour, or a failure, but that’s unimportant, really. The point is to find why one is doing this. Performance isn’t the point, it’s merely a container or label.
In other words, the work is not about performance (even with all the meta stuff that I love), and it’s certainly not about making performances for the sake of it: it’s about carving out space for a way of watching and being, making space for a mode of, let’s say, ecological perception (and imagination, and poetic, and ethics). Following Penone, I'd say that performance is simply an excuse, or a tool, but it’s not the point.
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