The End of the Neolithic

The End of the Neolithic Rémi Labrusse I The overall title of this series of actions designates an existent, a geographic territory. The subtitles attached to each of them then designate To title one of his first works Alpi Marittime (Maritime Alps) was not really what happened, whether the artist’s gesture itself (“I have interwoven three the best way for a young artist to set about making his mark in the most trees”) or its consequences (“[The tree] will continue to grow, except at that advanced circles of Western contemporary art in the 1960s. Nothing there point”). Once named, the space in which the creative act takes place tran- obviously corresponds to the dominant codes of the milieu: no ideological scends its merely physical reality to become a field of action, an environment stance, no poetic image, no self-referential formalism, no critical irony. subject to constant transformation. The ideas of mountain and sea no longer Just two geographic allusions, to mountain and sea, in a title that suggests allude to a stable, objective referent, an ontological substrate, but reference a holiday postcard (fig. 1) more than a work intended for the international a filigree of sensations arising from bodily experiences that also impact gallery circuit. the environment: walking in the snow, rubbing one’s skin against a tree trunk, Yet that is the title Giuseppe Penone gave to the series of actions testing wood’s resistance to muscular effort, manipulating metal wire in a he carried out and photographed in the snowy environs of Garessio, the thicket, walking up a stream through the undergrowth. In short, the title and Piedmontese village of his birth, in the winter of 1967–68. Today, when subtitles of this first work declare that the land and the acting individual these actions have come to be recognized as a key moment in the history are united in a continuous reality, mobile and malleable, that they form of twentieth-century art, the intention behind the title is clearer, its quiet one single dynamic system of exchanges, and that the boundaries between audacity expressing not a desire to provoke but simply the young artist’s different levels of being drawn by the analytic eye are superficial, if not need to name reality without metaphor. And the first reality he named false, and in any case foreign to the deepest motion of life. The artist thus was that of a place, the world he came from, that of the Maritime Alps. formulated, on the very threshold of his career, a kind of moral and aesthetic Unlike the sovereign artist of cliché, who dominates external reality, Penone manifesto that can today be seen as having guided the whole of his work. felt the need to situate himself within it, that is, to understand himself as rooted in an environment that he believed had both formed him as a creative subject and inspired the actions by which he now sought to affirm II himself: to grasp the trunk of a young tree in his hand; to plait together three other young trees; to embrace the trunk of a tree with arms and legs, If we attend, then, to the message of that programmatic title, Alpi Marittime, as if to climb it; to draw two trees together at mid-height, using a band we realize that to grasp the work of Giuseppe Penone we must make our of cloth; to enclose a tree trunk within a spiral of copper wire; to set a wire way to the Maritime Alps, a landscape shaped by thousands of years of cage around a young tree; and finally to lie down on the ground, arms human activity. The site that witnessed his first art actions was also the place stretched out, so determining the dimensions of a plaster frame bearing of his birth, of his childhood and youth, in the upper valley of the Tanaro, the imprint of his hands, his feet, and the top of his head, a frame that a tributary of the Po that descends from the Alps to join it on the plain. More would be placed in the waters of a stream and there abandoned (see Alpi precisely, it was along the Luvia, a mountain brook that flows through a little Marittime [Maritime Alps] booklet). woodland belonging to the artist’s father just outside the village of Garessio, that the actions were carried out and photographed. What is Garessio (fig. 2)? First of all, it is a frontier zone. Lying at the bottom of the valley at an elevation of some six hundred meters (approximately 2,000 feet), this substantial village is surrounded by peaks that rise to more than two thousand meters (approximately 6,500 feet), making the world of the high mountains a constant presence—the spare world above the tim ber line where the snow continues to lie through much of the year, feeding the mountain streams that hurtle down the slopes to fling themselves into the Tanaro below. Early each evening the shadows of these peaks begin to stretch across the valley, making physically perceptible through the sudden cool and the pleating of the light the alpine world that surrounds the village lying at the mountains’ feet. Garessio is thus Piedmontese in the most literal sense of the word as well as by virtue of its location in the region of Piedmont, the Italian Piemonte, its capital, Turin, once the heart of a kingdom that extended to Savoy and Sardinia. Yet only a chain of mountains fifteen kilo - meters (approximately 9.3 miles) to the east, toward Genoa and the sea, Fig. 1 Postcard of Monte Anteroto, Garessio, Maritime Alps, 1925 separates the village from the neighboring region of Liguria. What is more, 82 83 determinants: the slopes one has to negotiate, the plants one grows, the air one breathes. What is more, Garessio offers not only the experience of the relativity of cultures and their common determination by the nature about them but also a sense of their endless change. For the frontier is inherently a zone of movement, movement that may be promoted or discouraged at different times. Friction between worlds inevitably produces a flux of transformations punctuated by ever-unstable equilibriums. Concretely, in this valley that penetrates into the alpine massif, trade has for centuries promoted a centrif - ugal dynamic, counterbalancing the centripetal attraction of agricultural work. We may add that the period lived through by Giuseppe Penone and the earlier generations he has known—those of his parents and grandparents— Fig. 2 Cover of Garessio: La perla delle Alpi marittime, book of 100 photographs by F. Rubba, with a text by G. Colmo (Turin, 1932), has seen especially radical changes. Biblioteca d’Arte della Fondazione Torino Musei, Turin In the mid-nineteenth century the main village and the smaller settlements attached to it—places like Cappello or Mindino, a hamlet perched four hundred meters (437.4 yards) farther up the hill behind—still lived being little more than one hundred kilometers (approximately 62.1 miles) a traditional life based on agriculture, producing crops that were sold on from each, Garessio is equidistant from the two regional capitals of Genoa the coast. It was a very sizable village and relatively well-off, its population and Turin, and Penone likes to point out that two different dialects are still numbering almost seven thousand in 1861, when the Kingdom of Italy spoken in the village, one Piedmontese, the other Ligurian. A little further was proclaimed in the Piedmontese capital of Turin. Demographic growth up the valley, however, in the village of Ormea, a Piedmontese dialect, aside, it would not be entirely wrong to imagine that this little world had different from Garessio’s own, rules uncontested, a fact that perhaps explains hardly changed at all since people first began to clear and cultivate the alpine the ancestral antagonism between two localities only a dozen kilometers valleys seven thousand years earlier, following the retreat of the glaciers (approximately 7.5 miles) apart. Like all frontier zones, Garessio is a place and gradually climbing toward the summits: in the Val Camonica (fig. 4), where cultural differences become sharp across very short distances, from above Brescia, for example, or closer to Garessio, reaching Mont Bégo in one valley to another, or indeed within the Val Tanaro itself. It could be said the Mercantour, an ancient sanctuary rediscovered in the late 1860s,1 today that the balmy Mediterranean air of the Ligurian sea meets the bracingly famous for its thousands of rock engravings celebrating cultivation and alpine air of the Piedmontese mountains almost exactly here, at this point stock raising (fig. 5). The presence of humans in these distant times is of contact between languages, traditions, and even economic practices, with confirmed by the many vestiges of Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Protohistoric montane agriculture, on the one hand, and trade in its product, notably the chestnut (fig. 3), on the other, these being conveyed to the Ligurian port cities that Garessio also traditionally supplied with sailors. Penone, whose father was engaged in agricultural trade with the coast, is happy to admit that he has always felt at least as much Ligurian as Piedmontese, if not more, despite having lived in Turin since 1969. But what is most important is the sense, not untinged by paradox, of belonging to a place of intersection, of being rooted in a landscape in which roots are by nature multiple. Two natural environments—one upstream to the west, the other downstream to the east—come together there without becoming one, and reflecting this ecological separation, human cultures too come to overlap within this microcosm, while still firmly maintaining their differences.

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