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 (approxima­ tely 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 tim­ber­line 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. Hence the inhabitants’ capacity to be both within and without, to view the alpine world of Piedmont with Ligurian eyes and the maritime world of Liguria with Piedmontese eyes, to dialecticize, in other words, the sense of cultural belonging and so go beyond differences of culture to arrive at an anthropological core, a common denominator represented by human beings’ Fig. 3 La Raccolta delle castagne (The Harvesting of Chestnuts) from immediate relationship to nature. Critical detachment from the signs of the book Garessio: La perla delle Alpi marittime (Turin, 1932), photograph cultural identity goes along with a more acute perception of their natural by F. Rubba, Biblioteca d’Arte della Fondazione Torino Musei, Turin

84 85 had its impact on the population, which rose to more than nine thousand between 1900 and 1920, while working conditions grew harder, as factory employment was often combined with agricultural labor on personal plots. The landscape too was transformed, with the rationalization of the course of the Tanaro and above all the felling of chestnut plantations, the sale of wood for tannin being more profitable than the harvesting of chestnuts. Finally the arrival of the train also promoted another activity: tourism. The numbers of the worker-smallholders were swelled in summer by those of the middle-class holidaymakers from the Po Valley who came to breathe the mountain air, accommodated in vast hotels, some converted from former military barracks, like the Grand Hotel Miramonti, opened in 1923 but today in ruins (fig. 6). For none of this lasted very long: the second half of the twentieth Fig. 4 Rock engraving known as Mappa di Bedolina, Capo di Ponte, century saw a new metamorphosis, this time manifested in economic Val Camonica, Lombardy, Italy, Iron Age (c. 1500–1000 BCE) retrogression. The industrial manufactures became unprofitable (vegetable tannins, notably, being supplanted by mineral tanning agents), upland farming fell into irreversible decline, and tourism shifted to higher ground, abandoning the valley bottoms. This brought a continuous drop in population, which fell from six thousand to five thousand in the course of the 1960s, when Penone was making his early work, to reach barely more than three thousand today. All this saw the big hotels and factory buildings that stood along the river abandoned. The hillside plantations returned to the wild, being replaced by continuous forest cover where amid the crush of smaller trees one can still see here and there, like ruined towers, the last survivors of those centuries-old chestnuts, their trunks so vast that one could pen livestock in their hollow interiors or even hide partisans, as occurred during World War ii (fig. 7). If the landscape changed like this, it was because people’s relationship to the living world had changed. Nature turned impenetrable, Fig. 5 Clarence Bicknell, tracing of a rock engraving in both senses of the word: physically inaccessible, so dense had become with anthropomorphic figures driving a swing plow with bovids, the woodlands, and mentally incomprehensible as the names, properties, (“Valley of Wonders,” Maritime Alps, France, Bronze Age, c. 1800 BCE), c. 1897–98, black wax on paper, Conseil départemental and symbolic meanings of plants and animals were forgotten. des Alpes-Maritimes / Musée départemental des Merveilles

dwellings and industrial activities that are to be found in the Val Tanaro,2 while the peasant population’s traditional regard for such magical sites as sacred springs, standing stones, and so on, well documented in the local ethnography, is a sign that political and religious change was accompanied by the survival of symbolic horizons deriving from the earliest agrarian and pastoral cultures. This place of transition, however, whose deep structures had so long remained intact, would experience in full force the consequences of the Industrial Revolution, late to arrive but no less violent for that. The close of the nineteenth century saw the railway come to the Val Tanaro, reaching Garessio in 1893 and bringing rapid development in its wake: spinning mills and paper mills took advantage of the river’s abundant and fast-flowing water, while its sand was used for the manufacture of glass; the surrounding forests fed sawmills, and most importantly of all, the tannin in which the wood of chestnut trees is rich was exploited for the tanning of leather.3 This revolution Fig. 6 Postcard of the Grand Hotel Miramonti, Garessio, 1922–23

86 87 impress on the world of human activity (whether industry, agriculture, or whatever) and even, more specifically, to understand this human activity as a violence continually done to the earth, from the first Neolithic clearings to the modern factory. And affectively the young man could not help but see the postindustrial fate of his birthplace in the mode of mourning, given what was being lost, with a declining population and a natural world both violated and neglected. This mourning could find in artistic work either a resonation in which it perpetuates itself as settled melancholy or a means of reparation, a way of taking distance from the trauma and opening up the possibility of new ways of using the world.

III

Fig. 7 A man at work with a plow in Val Casterino, Maritime Alps, Germano Celant in 1978 underlined the importance of Garessio and its Italy, photograph by Clarence Bicknell, c. 1897–1909, Archivio Istituto Internazionale di Studi Liguri, Bordighera, environs for understanding Penone’s artistic practice and the horizon 4 Italy, Foundation Bicknell (n. 14795) of meaning that underlies his work as a whole. This is something the artist himself (who still has a small house in the village, built on the site of his parents’ land) has regularly, though always discreetly, confirmed: “The These two successive waves of change, the industrial and the forest was my playground. It became my laboratory and my studio.” 5 postindustrial, represented the most radical transformations of the European Indeed, following the inaugural actions of Alpi Marittime, he has landmass since the Neolithic period; they were also the most rapid, being frequently demonstrated in his works, most notably in the photographs, how accomplished in the space of three generations, the last of these being crucial to his art are the walks in the woods above his house, toward Penone’s own. It would therefore be wrong to think of the artist as having Capello, along the Luvia, or on the heights of Mindino, where a number of emerged from an untouched traditional milieu to which he remained chestnut plantations survive in good order. In general it is the undergrowth nostalgically attached after its late twentieth-century disintegration. It is of young trees that attracts him, there where the traces of the human are true that in his youth there still survived many traces of preindustrial times: giving way to an ungoverned vegetation: this is what appears, for instance, in the broad trunks of the oldest trees (fig. 8), the brick facades of the in the photographs of 1977 in which the human presence is reduced to no churches and a few baroque mansions, or the boulder walls of old peasant houses (fig. 9). Yet the environment had already been profoundly transformed by the arrival of industry and modern communications many decades before. On the hillsides the chestnut plantations were shrinking, signaling the return of the wilderness banished by the first Neolithic cultivators. And it is precisely this return to wilderness that is addressed by those first actions of the young Penone, lost in the undergrowth of young trees that was taking over the countryside outside the village. At the same time there appeared the specters of industrial decay and tourist disaffection, as if the modern world responsible for the disappearance of the old was itself now disappearing. The place that Giuseppe Penone knew as a child was thus both highly complex and continually changing. Far from any Rousseauian idea of a simple, agrarian paradise, it combined agriculture with industry and tourism, but these three pillars of the local economy were all in rapid decline, heralding the advent of a postindustrial age of depopulated valleys where a land returned to wilderness is traversed by systems of communica- tion—roads, electricity transmission lines, telecommunications towers—that slash and puncture the landscape rather than shaping it. Fig. 8 A chestnut tree near Garessio

From this follow two major consequences. Intellectually, life in Fig. 9 A local house made of stones from the Tanaro river, Garessio might well prompt one to pose the anthropological question of the located at 63, via Armando Diaz, Garessio

88 89 more than a mist of breath in a clearing of chestnut wood (see fig. 10 in Soffi [Breaths] booklet). It is in the region of his birth, too, that he has found some of the tree trunks, slender or monumental, that he has chosen to cast in bronze (such as the 150-year-old chestnut that served to make the tree for the sculpture In limine [see Idee di pietra (Ideas of Stone) booklet], commemo- rating the 150th anniversary of the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 2011, or the monumental trunks of larch or pine selected in 1978–79 from Mont Bégo, in the high mountains beyond the far end of the Val Tanaro). Beyond the woods Penone has followed the course of the Tanaro, with its banks of large, water-rounded stones: in 1971 one of his actions consisted in throwing one of these back into the water of the river, with the imprint of his fingers upon it (Svolgere la propria pelle – pietra [To Unroll One’s Skin

– Stone]; see fig. 15 in Svolgere la propria pelle [To Unroll One’s Skin] booklet); Fig. 10 Stones collected by Giuseppe Penone during his walks in 1981 he took seven stones from the river where it passes the hamlet of on the Alpine paths above Garessio in the 1970s Trappa, just above Garessio, and reproduced them in marble from the little quarry of Eca Nasagò, between Garessio and Ormea, to create seven identical pairs of boulders, one the work of water, the other that of the sculptor’s from memory forever has undoubtedly fascinated Penone. In the early 1970s hand (Essere fiume [To Be a River]; see booklet); and in 2010–11 he set huge he used to collect stones, while out walking, whose form or cleavage suggested boulders rounded by the river waters in the branches of trees cast in bronze ancient artifacts rendered barely recognizable by the usury of time, so shat­- (Idee di pietra [Ideas of Stone]; see booklet). tered and worn as almost to be returned to nature (fig. 10). This old quest for Finally, he has frequented some of the workplaces—industrial or meaning in the stones of the ground, here married to archaeological fancy, he agricultural—of his native locality, including a former industrial sawmill in shared with one of the inaugurators of the idea of prehistory, Jacques Boucher 1969, where he carved out from a wooden beam his Albero di 11 metri (11-Meter de Crèvecœur de Perthes, who, in the 1860s, when excavating the lower strata Tree; see fig. 15 in Alberi [Trees] booklet), the second of the Ripetere il bosco of the gravel pits of the Somme Valley, near Abbeville, in northwest France, (To Repeat the Forest) series: “For 20 days every day,” he noted, “following a had imagined that the stones of curious natural form that he found alongside labourer’s schedule, I work near Garessio, my town, in an abandoned shed; the true flaked hand axes were likewise shaped by human hands. fact that it is a former sawmill, while accidental, is significant.”6 In 1977–78 In this fascination, however, the anecdotal, the picturesque, and he dug a plot on an agricultural holding to grow potatoes and squashes in nostalgia for the authentic give way to a search for the anthropological struc­ molds in the form of his own face (Patate [Potatoes] and Zucche [Squashes]; see tures that define the relationship between humankind and nature, which figs. 5 and 6 in Soffi [Breaths] booklet)—an exercise to be understood in the the artist endeavors to rediscover, that is, to recover through the physical light of this note of 1969: “In 1881 on the 25th day of the month of September expe­rience of gestures, techniques, and practices of immemorial antiquity. Penone Giovanni Battista bought . . . a plot of land located in Garessio Borgo What he seems attracted to, in his own relationship to Garessio and the Val Ponte. . . . In 1969 Pasquale Penone continued to farm this land using the Tanaro, is not, properly speaking, of the order of the cultural: no specific same systems. . . . One hundred and sixty, one hundred and seventy hours of customs or typical figures or fragments of local dialects figure in his work, work go into this land every year. In eighty-eight years about fourteen thousand for this would be no more than folklore making its appearance in art as five hundred and twenty hours have been put in.”7 His relationship to his native on the theater stage. The intention is precultural, in the sense that in order landscape is thus deeply personal without for all that being autobiographical: to arrive at the common basis of human experience it focuses first of all on the it’s not a matter of telling his own story—hence his reticence, even silence, about living body and its connections to the natural environment. “The interest some of the best-known works’ connection with Garessio—but of adop­ting I have always had in the Neolithic,” he writes, “is prompted by its wide distri- what had been collective practices and connecting to an “agrarian culture” and bution across the world. I wanted, and still want, a form of expression that a “secular peasant background,” in the words of Celant,8 that in the course of can be shared by people of different countries; and the past, even though the twentieth century suffered spectacular erosion throughout the Maritime apparently gone and forgotten, perdures in our culture; it is enough to shut Alps. Physical and mental traces of their long existence survive as flotsam: our eyes and the memory of our cells recalls it to us.”9 The Neolithic, in other the scattered remains of ordered plantations in woodland returned to the wild, words, is not of the order of the romantic; it is not a typical regional folk tale stories still told or whose telling is still told of, the half-tumbled walls of to be retold but rather a universal agropastoral poetics, an existential tone peasant dwellings, tracks that lead nowhere. that cut across cultures and that continued to resonate physically, beyond all The emergence in his native land of this agrarian culture that goes articulate memory, in the everyday gestures of rural life in the Maritime Alps back to the Neolithic or the Bronze Age and is now at the point of being lost until the 1960s.

90 91 the alphabet and, on the other, the numbers: the metal tool, the writing, and the enumeration (i.e., conceptually, technological violence and symbolic abstraction) thus find themselves associated in order to manifest the con­nec­ tion between the woodcutter of the first clearings and the foundations of post-Neolithic culture after the first phase of agrarian sedentarization. We shall see later how such artistic practices signal an ambivalent relationship to our Neolithic inheritance, in this echoing some of the most deeply rooted contradictions of our collective representations. Similarly the artist has always shown a particular interest in techniques such as terra-cotta, bronze casting, and weaving, emblematic of the same culture (or better, of the same relationship to the material world as the earliest sedentary cultures, from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age). One thinks, for instance, of the shards of terra-cotta to which he added the impress of his Fig. 11 Giuseppe Penone, Vaso (Vase), 1975 (detail), bronze and terra-cotta; dimensions variable; Stedelijk Museum, cupped hand on gesso (Cocci [Shards], 1979; see fig. 1 in Gesti Vegetali [Vegetal Amsterdam Gestures] booklet), as if in echo of the many shards found at Neolithic settlement sites in the Maritime Alps. As for his interest in bronze, Penone has often indicated that it is derived from the great antiquity of a technique contemporaneous with the emergence of many of the key categories of modern culture (the distinction between town and country, the crystallization of the first polities, of class society, etc.). In this context the human interest in bronze casting seems to Penone to go beyond the strictly utilitarian (as in its military applications, for example), being motivated by a desire to enchant the world of technique itself. Bronze, in other words, carries with it both the pride of the first attempt to appropriate and manipulate the world and the memory of (nostalgia for) an older state of fusion or symbiosis with the natural world in general and plant life in particular: “Bronze casting is an ancient art which has its roots in an animistic conception of reality. The similarities between bronze and plant-life are astonishing and must assuredly 11 Fig. 12 Giuseppe Penone, Vaso (Vase), 1975, bronze and terra-cotta; have had a great importance in the development of the technique of casting.” dimensions variable; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam Occasionally Penone has even combined bronze with terra-cotta vessels—a way of expressing the importance of both these types of production in the inauguration of technical culture as a whole.12 In Vaso (Vase, 1975; fig. 12; This now endangered persistence of the Neolithic—of an agropastoral see also Soffi [Breaths] booklet), for example, an ancient terra-cotta vase relationship to the natural world—in all of us is what Penone’s art seeks (the uncertainty of whose dating highlights the continuity of human practices to give form to, making it present to us not by producing more or less ima- in terms of utilitarian pottery) is shown alongside four bronze castings ginary representations of past circumstances but by importing some of their of enlargements of some of the original fragments, in which the fingerprints basic elements into his own practice and into his own modern forms. It is of the artist are added to those of the anonymous potter. An action carried this that prompted him in 1975 to walk the ridgeways of the Alps, following out in parallel saw one such large bronze fragment half buried in a field at in the footsteps of our Neolithic forebears as they penetrated the new Garessio, to look like some archaeological find, the now illegible vestige of an territory offered to them by the retreat of the ice, moving from one valley imaginary monument to the glory of early technology (fig. 11). to another by the easiest and shortest paths. And it is this, above all, that Another of the key practices at the origin of our technological culture throughout his career has underlain his simultaneously intimate and violent is weaving, seen by Gottfried Semper (fig. 13)—one of the great nineteenth- relationship to wood, the relationship of a woodcutter who cuts back, fells, century theorists of the origins of culture—as the first fount of all construc- and uproots, as the people of this valley have done for millennia, transform- tive activity, which had its beginning in the walls of woven branches of the ing the wilderness into the great European “garden” the artist has always first Neolithic dwellings.13 To tell the truth, Penone has never featured textiles marveled at.10 In 1969, in an action titled Scrive, legge, ricorda (Writes, Reads, as a central element of his artistic practice.14 He did, however, go back to Remembers; see figs. 1 and 2 in Alberi [Trees] booklet), he hammered into a the origin of origins, as one might say, to the first cell of the line, when tree trunk an iron wedge on which were inscribed, on one side, the letters of he intertwined three young tree trunks in one of the Alpi Marittime actions.

92 93 Immobility, mimicry, its advance, insinuation, rising, its abandonment, everything in it brings us back to the plant, to fluid, to gliding. Its adherence to things is continuous; its entire body participates in the tactile reading of the surrounding reality.” 18 In this he stands in the line of the ethnographic speculations that since the nineteenth century have linked snake worship— ophiolatry—to tree worship, seeing in both “if not the oldest . . . at least among the earliest forms through which the human intellect sought to propitiate the unknown powers,” in the words of James Fergusson, architectural historian and student of Buddhist India, in his celebrated Tree and Serpent Worship (1868).19 In other words, a fundamentally nonnarrative, anthropological stance can come very close to a more or less ethnographic approach that evokes

Fig. 13 Gottfried Semper, “Das Geflecht,” Der Stil in den mythic narratives (fig. 14), as when in 1992 Penone installed twelve cast-off technischen und tektonischen Künsten; oder, Praktische Aesthetik: snake skins mounted on crystal sleeves in the refectory of the Romanesque Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde abbey of Tournus, setting them opposite a block of marble sculpted so (Frankfurt: Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1860–63), p. 184. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (86-B18560) as to bring out the veining in the stone (Mute [Molting; figs. 15 and 16]). In the same spirit, verging upon the sacred, there has been, throughout Penone’s career, a long series of installations of heaped or standing stones, evincing an insistent sympathy for the megaliths of Neolithic Europe: in 1968, for example, a large slab of cut stone was dragged through a field by a rope before being stood on end by the same means (Pietra, corda, albero, sole / Pietra, corda, albero, pioggia [Stone, Rope, Tree, Sun / Stone, Rope, Tree, Rain]; see fig. 16 in Alpi Marittime [Maritime Alps] booklet) or, in 2005–06, in a private house on the island of Aegina, in Greece, three walls resembling the ruins of a cairn formed the heart of an installation of stone, steel, bronze, and black terra-cotta (Tre muri e pelle del mare [Three Walls and Skin of the Sea; see fig. 9 in Giardini (Gardens) booklet]). These evocations of the symbolic (and not only technical) cultures of the earliest sedentary civilizations are not fortuitous: they reflect both Penone’s intellectual interests and his own taste—he has in his own collection

Fig. 14 Great Serpent Mound, created by the Native American two female statuettes in chlorite and calcite from Central Asia, of the type cultures of the Ohio Valley, Ohio, c. 1000–1200 CE known as Bactrian princesses, dating from the third millennium bce. For

And later he would associate his attraction to the snake with a universal poetics of the knot that itself finds its culmination in textiles: “I like to think that the very invention of textiles, in the making of a plait or knot, is based on consideration of the snake . . . or indeed the vegetal. The knot is the origin, the principle of the woven and of many other human constructions, a principle of the highest importance in every age, even today.”15 Or again: “[The snake] is the pursuit of the reeds that form the basket, the interweav- ing of threads that make the fabric: one of the foundations of our culture.”16 At this stage the artist’s practice stood at the interface between a poetics of the technical gesture and the evocation of mythic significance. Even though he took care to emphasize that in his interest in snakes it was the plastic and constructive aspect that prevailed and that the “mythological, literary or magical dimensions,” while not “lost,” were not the “subject” Figs. 15 and 16 Giuseppe Penone, Mute (Molting), 1992 (and detail), glass, 17 of his work, his association of the snake with the vegetal easily took on snake skin, and ink on paper; dimensions variable. Installation view in the a neo-animist tone. “The form of the snake is vegetal, its thought is vegetal. refectory of the Benedictine abbey of Tournus, France, 1992

94 95 while he may well have maintained a certain distance between his creative and stock raising, and the new importance accorded to technology in the work and his intellectual interests, refusing the posture of the artist-theorist, context of an overarching endeavor to domesticate the world. As a result, he could not help but be informed by the exceptional vitality of ethnology more or less confusedly, the idea of a radical break, of a Neolithic Arcadia and anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s, all the more as such studies were coming to an end in an industrial hell, finds itself overlaid by its contrary, systematically supported, in Italy, by the Turinese publisher Giulio Einaudi, the idea of a continuity in which industrial modernity represents not the who in 1977 offered a complete collection of the works he had published antithesis but the culmination of a process that has its beginning in the in the human sciences in exchange for a piece by the artist, who had become technicist turn of the Neolithic. The true break would then be situated not his friend. between the Neolithic and industrial modernity, but between the Neolithic and the Paleolithic, whose way of life was based on hunting and gathering and whose technical armamentarium remained limited and more or less IV unchanging for millennia. Since the early twentieth century Western scholarship has insisted The monuments of stone and bronze that Penone has raised across Europe on the continuity between the “Neolithic Revolution” (the term coined by since the 1970s could be seen as melancholic celebrations of ten millennia the Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe in the years between the of post-Neolithic civilization at a time when the latter seems on the verge wars) 20 and the “Industrial Revolution,” even as it has disagreed on how of disappearance. His work could chime with an idea much in evidence in this is to be understood. Childe himself celebrated, in Marxist and produc- Western thought at the turn of the new millennium, the idea of “the end tivist mood, the Neolithic’s inauguration of millennia of progress. In the of the Neolithic.” United States during the same period, the economist and social scientist Accelerating urbanization (the world’s urban population first came Thorstein Veblen and after him the writer and urban historian Lewis to outnumber the rural in 2007), the systematic industrialization of agricul- Mumford identified the Neolithic as the starting point of a simultaneously ture, and individuals’ ever-increasing emotional disinvestment from the creative and destructive alliance between “technics and civilization” that natural world, now displaced by a world of images, have indeed given would bring not only technical advances but also social control, worker credibility to the idea of an “end of the Neolithic” in the sense of a world alienation, and unequal distribution of wealth.21 After World War ii the idea of manual cultivation, of closeness to a nature gardened and domesticated, of a millennial civilizational continuity from the Neolithic to the present and of a sense of the sacred arising directly from this symbiotic relation emerged as a major theme in anthropology and prehistory. The ethnologist between the individual and nature. The second half of the twentieth century and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan argued in 1945, for example, “If saw the idea of the end of such an intimate and “animistic” relationship a break is to be marked in the technical development of Homo sapiens, it is to the natural world—animistic on account of its intimacy—pass relatively between the Paleolithic and everything that follows, the Neolithic being rapidly from the learned disquisitions of philosophy and anthropology to a preface to the Metal Ages; one then understands how metallurgy and enter the common culture. It sometimes took on a progressivist hue—with mechanization only amplified, in bringing them to semi-industrialization emphasis on physical emancipation from nature and social emancipation and then to industrialization, techniques that had already emerged in the from the constraints of so-called traditional societies—but increasingly Neolithic.”22 often had a pessimistic and melancholic tinge—with regret for the shattered From then on, under the influence, notably, of the horror of harmony of an agropastoral golden age and emphasis on the social alienation Hiroshima and the terror of nuclear war, one is struck by the increasingly lurking in the seeming liberation, the economic destruction wrought by negative characterization of the Neolithic rupture in scholarly discourse. frenzied production, the psychic and ecological catastrophe sold under the Operating from very different methodological bases, two of the leading name of progress. In all these cases the starting hypothesis is the same: anthropologists of the 1960s and 1970s, Claude Lévi-Strauss in France and that industrialization represents a major rupture in the history of humanity Marshall Sahlins in the United States, both contrasted the economic and that the modern, techno-industrial world, disconnected from nature, and social violence proper to the Neolithic with the harmonious relationship stands opposed to a “Neolithic” world that existed in intimate contact with to nature of the hunter-gatherer societies of the Upper Paleolithic. They it, just as white-collar employees and manual workers from the city differ saw in the Stone Age (understood as that of the hunter-gatherers) an age radically from the farmers and artisans of the countryside, now on their way of abundance, when, supported by an intimate knowledge of the productions to extinction. of nature, a small amount of work was enough to meet needs themselves Yet this contemporary sense of rupture between the Neolithic and the limited, leaving the best part of people’s time available for religious and modern is not unambiguous. Its force and productivity are in fact derived artistic activities.23 The invention of cultivation and stock rearing, in contrast, from its internal contradictions, contradictions found in their native state in initiated a process of “engagement” with the real, as Lévi-Strauss put it, works such as Penone’s. In characterizing the Neolithic way of life, emphasis based not on human integration in nature but on the domination of the is generally laid on both the authentic relation to nature, through cultivation latter, thanks to the regular acceleration of technological progress and the

96 97 corresponding increase in the quantity of work required of the individual.24 common participation in a spiritual life that unites them beyond all The “Neolithic Revolution” (Lévi-Strauss having taken up the term coined apparent physical difference—essentially implying the need to reinvent an by Childe) and the revolution of “modern science” were the outcome of the “animist” way of life to answer to the aporias of the present age.29 same “quantified” and classifying thought that circumscribes and “attacks” In short, to the analytic eyes of philosophers, anthropologists, and nature through science and organizes social values around productive labor, prehistorians, the social, economic, and techno-scientific revolution of in a gigantic millennia-long effort to transform the human environment modernity is not the gravedigger of the Neolithic but rather inaugurates a into an object of production.25 While in the Neolithic and the modern ages higher stage of the culture of technology and accumulation of material wealth this strategy of industrious attack on natural resources takes “two different embodied in cultivation and stock rearing from the very start. The regime routes, one very close to, and the other more remote from, sensible intu- of instrumental detachment from nature—what Lévi-Strauss would call ition,” 26 it is nonetheless the case that productive labor and its correlate, “engagement”30—that was inaugurated by the Neolithic “revolution” is only the tool, will constitute for Lévi-Strauss the central axis or spine of all the perpetuated in the scientific and industrial revolution that takes place in late cultures that succeed the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. Throughout the entire More recently the American environmentalist Paul Shepard has process the social horizon of action has been defined by the appropriation followed in the line of Mumford in denouncing the Neolithic “domestica- of a world treated as pure exteriority, as opposed to a sense of unity with a tors” as responsible for the “madness” that sees nature as an object to be homogeneous substrate of life, an “interiority,” as Descola has it, shared with possessed or a “pot” to be remodeled at will.27 Even for a thinker critical of all beings. The continuity of a living fabric comprehending both human the idea of a Neolithic agrarian revolution, like the ethnologist Alain Testart, and nonhuman is said to have been gradually sundered, giving way to a regime the fundamental structures of modernity can be traced back to a decisive of detachment from nonhuman realia, which are separated off from us, moment, a radical change that begins in the last of the hunter-gatherer expelled from the community of interiority and set before us (this being the societies and comes to completion in their Neolithic and later successors. etymology of the word ob-ject) to be analyzed and instrumentalized. For Testart the change is not technical but social in origin, being the inven- This being so, it’s evident that the idea of the “end of the Neolithic” tion of “wealth” defined as “material object[s] useful or attractive to man, that haunts the collective imagination at the start of the third millennium capable of being appropriated and conserved for a considerable time without ce cannot but be complex, if not frankly contradictory. At the theoretical significant deterioration and thus of being accumulated or exchanged.”28 level modernity is clearly seen to be the culmination of, and not an attack It was the shift to the accumulation of material goods, he claims, that brought on, the Neolithic, whose end would equally be the end of the modern reign with it not only sedentarization and the mediation of technical innovations of technology, labor, and the accumulation of material wealth pursued by but also major social transformations that would culminate in the establish- cities, states, and empires. “The end of the Neolithic” here means “the ment of cities and states. Yet this argument too postulates an objectification end of modernity,” this “end” being prescriptive in nature, involving the of the environment, systematically transformed into productive “wealth,” over-throw of a now well-established order whose bases were laid down in this last be­coming the conceptual foundation of human development from the Fertile Crescent some ten thousand years ago, in the first sedentary the Neolithic to the present. By the late twentieth century, then, the human societies of agriculturists. Such intellectual certitudes, however, have no sciences had come to a more or less unanimously critical assessment of equivalent at the level of feeling. In our concrete existence, in fact, the the Neolithic techno-productive order and of the mental processes associated transformation of the material and symbolic environment brought about with it, both individual and social: the identification of value with material by the Industrial Revolution is seen as a violent rupture originating in objects and their accumulation, the subjugation and destruction of nature, eighteenth-century Western Europe. In less than three centuries, landscapes and the alienation of the great majority of people through the political were changed beyond all recognition; the manual skills and the intimate violence of war and the economic violence of labor. intercourse with nature of the earlier culture were lost to most of the popu- In reaction, neo-animist modes of thought pitched between science lation, now urbanized; and finally, and above all, accelerating demographic and political commitment have come to more or less overtly colonize growth and increasing per capita consumption brought with them an the literature, championing the reestablishment of harmony between human ever-growing demand for production and with that an exponential increase and nonhuman, beyond the distinction of nature and culture, as one might in work performed and hence the economic alienation of the “workers.” say, to paraphrase the title of the now celebrated book by the anthropologist The shock represented by these dizzyingly rapid changes in the world of Philippe Descola. For him, what is distinctive of Western modernity since experience prompted us to isolate the advent of industry as an autonomous the Renaissance is its establishment of a dualism between nature and culture “revolution” that put an end to a stable, agropastoral existence (as it appeared that he calls “naturalism,” which involves the exteriorization, the radical in regressive fantasy). Considered in this way, the “end of the Neolithic” objectification, of the whole of the nonhuman sphere. Opposing this, Descola is of the order of melancholy observation, identifiable with the climax of a marshals under the category of “animism” conceptions of the world based modernity accused of having shattered ancient pastoral harmonies whose on the idea of an inner continuity of the human and the nonhuman, of their reestablishment calls for an about-face.

98 99 Echoes of this shock to the feelings can be heard even in the work of anthropologists and prehistorians, whose analysis of the development of the regime of technology from the Neolithic onward is colored by a sense of rupture proper to our own time. Lévi-Strauss, for example, not only describes but specifically denounces the modern disaster represented by the multiplication of material needs and thus of the growing demands of production amid an ever-increasing population. Interviewed by Paolo Caruso in 1963, he said: “I see humanity moving not toward emancipation but, without a doubt, toward a gradual, ever more complete subordination to natural determination.”31 This new development, he said, is linked to the totalizing logic of technology, which ends up destroying all other forms of mediation of the external world—hence his highlighting of a third rupture, which he locates toward the end of twentieth century: the collapse of symbolic mediations, the weakening if not disappearance of the constructive role previously played by founding myths. Our present is said to be charac- terized by the absolute ascendancy of material determinations over individu- Fig. 17 Giuseppe Penone, Tra scorza e scorza (Between Barks), 2003, als deprived of any symbolic horizon: “With agriculture, stock breeding, bronze and living tree, 374 × 169 3/8 × 110 1/4 inches then industrialization, [humanity] had increasingly to ‘engage’ the real. . . . (950 × 430 × 280 cm). Installation view on the terrace of the And from the nineteenth century to the present, that engagement came park of the Château de Versailles, France, 2013 about indirectly, through the intermediary of philosophical and ideological conceptions. The world we are entering at present is completely different: a as a victory to come, and negatively, as a catastrophe to be redressed. This world where humanity finds itself abruptly facing harsher determining ambivalence—attentive to the violence characteristic of post-Neolithic factors. These are the result of its huge population, its increasingly limited humanity in general as well as to industrial modernity’s destruction of the quantities of the free space, pure air, and unpolluted water required to satisfy intimate relationship to nature in particular—is also to be found in Penone’s its biological and psychological needs.” 32 Based on the idea of a fundamental works, nourishing their inner movement and no doubt explaining their qualitative change, of the irruption of an “entirely other” within a conceptual power of signification in the contemporary world. horizon otherwise unchanged, this sense of deterministic catastrophe is accompanied in Lévi-Strauss by a melancholy,33 an anguish even, provoked, toward the end of his own life, by the transformation of the contemporary V world and the disintegration of the processes of transmission of traditional knowledges. We know how widely such a mood is shared and consciously Unquestionably one does hear in Penone the voice of regret at the ruin of articulated by broad swaths of the world population, for whom the present is the agropastoral by modernity, of sadness in the face of a present that is not an age of gray apocalypse, with no hope of revelation at hand, entailing only what it was before, an environment unrecognizable as that of his grand- the inexorable deterioration of conditions of life until the point of final parents, that of his own childhood: “Garessio,” he says, “has changed a great self-destruction of the species—an “apocalypse without eschaton,” 34 in the deal since the 1960s. Above all, the peasants are gone, and the gardened words of Ernesto de Martino, another leading anthropologist of the 1960s, hillsides have been abandoned.”35 Correspondingly, his works sometimes to whose thinking we shall later return. seem driven by an impulse to resist these changes by conserving what is still In short, the conceptual continuity between neolithization and there, as noted by Celant: “Penone feels the anxiety of conservation, almost industrialization is accompanied by a powerful, lived sense of rupture as though nature, agriculture, and botany were collector’s items, museum between agropastoral and industrial civilizations. Within the same recurrent pieces, inestimable values to conserve for future history.”36 As much as his motif of the “end of the Neolithic” one thus finds contradictory ideas works deliberately foreground the fragile and ephemeral character of human super-imposed: on the one hand, lamentation over the disappearance of a productions, so do they tend to monumentalize nature in a gesture of pro- supposed agropastoral golden age destroyed by the advent of technical tection that sometimes suggests the consecration of a relic, as when he modernity and, on the other, quite contrarily, speculation on the ten- installs a small, living tree in majesty upon the airy nest formed by the roots thousand-year-long development of one single reign of technology whose of an inverted cast-bronze tree trunk (Le foglie delle radici [The Leaves of Roots, postmodern present may herald its “end,” its own apocalypse, when at the 2011; see fig. 16 in Idee di pietra (Ideas of Stone) booklet]); or again, when he highest stage of development the intensification of a dynamic leads to grows a tree within a kind of sanctuary formed by the twin casts of the bark its dialectical reversal. The “end of the Neolithic” is thus seen both positively, of an enormous tree trunk (Tra scorza e scorza [Between Barks, 2003; fig. 17]).

100 101 the floors and stairways. . . . The dating of the building coincides with the industrial development of cast iron founding, traces of which can still be found in the vicinity.”37 If there were a nostalgia in Penone’s work, it would thus be as much for “the first phase of the industrial economy,” with “its myths and problems,” as for the old, agricultural world, both of them in the process of fading from our cultural horizon.38 But here again, to reduce his stance to a form of lyrical nostalgia, be it for the old heart of the Industrial Revolution, would be to miss the com- plexity of the relationship he generally maintains to the world of technology, whether agricultural or industrial. Both the intrinsic violence involved in humanity’s taking systematic control of its environment and the correspond- ing inclination to treat nature as means and not end, to bend it to the requirements of a productivity rationalistically conceived, echo throughout his work: metal wedges and barbed wire embedded in the living flesh of trees; bay leaves imprisoned behind grilles; trees bent, uprooted, turned upside Fig. 18 Back of the building of the “G Mill” from The former down; tubers and squashes constrained to take on the unnatural form of a Crossley’s Carpets factory, Dean Clough Mill, Halifax, UK (1867) human face; and so on. To so stage acts of aggression and dominion over nature, in the process bringing out what looks much like a destructive drive, This protective reverence for an endangered nature goes together with a tragic testifies to a profoundly ambivalent relationship to an inescapably violent framing of its destruction, In limine no doubt representing one of the most post-Neolithic human culture. violent examples, spectacularly capturing a 150-year-old chestnut tree, as old Penone’s creative process, then, is animated by a dual impulse of as the Italian nation, at the very moment of its fall, “on the threshold,” as the fascination with and rejection of that culture. This ambivalence distinguishes Latin of the title has it, of decay and disappearance. his standpoint from any unyielding attachment to the past, fueled by the As we have seen, however, one cannot reduce Penone’s work to the regressive dream of an ancestral golden age. But it distinguishes it too from nostalgic or tragic recollection of a bygone age, that of the traditional the utopian dream of the tabula rasa, such as one finds, for example, in agrarian culture of Europe, at a time when postindustrial culture is complet- the anticulturalism of Jean Dubuffet. And finally it distinguishes it as well ing its eradication from landscape, from human practice, and from the from the nihilistic and antihumanist counter-utopia of Robert Smithson’s collective consciousness itself. Life in Garessio in the mid-twentieth century, postindustrial environments, such as Spiral Jetty (1970) or Broken Circle / with its factories and its plantations, its industrial tannins and its chestnuts, Spiral Hill (1971), paradoxical monuments to a universal process of entropy suggested not an opposition between agriculture and industry but their in which the human is fated to dissolution like all else. Penone’s work, by association as agents in the shaping of the social and natural environment. contrast, starts from a complex emotional reaction to post-Neolithic humani- Despite the apparent conflict between them and the destruction of ty’s relationship to its environment to arrive at an attitude of critical interro- agricultural ways of life—and thus of landscapes—wrought by the Industrial gation. A double and contradictory initial impulse—both love and fear of Revolution, the two systems evidently shared the same project of appropria- humankind’s ascendancy over nature—finally leads in his works to an open tion and rational control of the world by means of technology, and this questioning of the processes of production that confer its identity on shared spirit could be observed, or rather directly experienced, in situ, post-Neolithic humanity. To put it another way, the artist has never claimed in the close contiguity of the two types of activity in the Val Tanaro (Penone, to detach himself from such a relationship to the world, but continuing to as noted, often recalling that many of its people worked the land as well inhabit it, he draws out from the constant fluctuation between attraction as working in factories). and repulsion a question without an answer, presented as such to the viewer. As a result, for the artist mere nostalgia for an ideal landscape, that is, Emotional ambivalence and critical interrogation are two faces of the for a preindustrial peasant world, could only be superficial and romantic. same coin, in works that resonate—in all their many contradictions—with On the contrary, he has often shown his awareness of the structural continu- the idea and the sense of the end of a world in which both artist and viewers ity between the agricultural and the industrial exploitation of the world. nonetheless continue to make their habitation. This is clearly reflected in his attachment to old industrial buildings, whether In Penone, this interrogation bears first of all on the artistic process the old sawmills of Garessio or the former carpet factories of Dean Clough, as such. His works take themselves as subjects of study and astonishment; in Halifax, one of the heartlands of nineteenth-century British industry they assume a “tautological” orientation, to use a term favored by the artist, (fig. 18): “Dean Clough. The building bears the marks of one hundred and in the modernist tradition of the critique of representation: in 1968 reflection fifty years of work. Generations of workers wearing clogs have worn away on framing was prompted by the construction of an empty frame matching

102 103 his body in height and width (Alpi Marittime. La mia altezza, la lunghezza of artistic production in comparison with the magnificent animal processions delle mie braccia, il mio spessore in un ruscello [Maritime Alps. My Height, of Paleolithic parietal art, it nonetheless logically entailed the systematic the Length of My Arms, My Girth in a Brook]); in 1971 the Specchietti (Mirrors) primacy of the visible—the realm in which it is possible to distinguish, to set interrogated the notion of mimesis through small mirrors set on trees along apart each thing in isolation—and gradually subordinated the sensible as a wooded track, arranged to mirror one another; all the works based on a whole to this objectifying vision. There resulted a process of proliferation imprint suggest a semiological reflection on the distinction between sign of the image that has continued at an ever-accelerating rate, to the point that and index, notably the Paesaggi del cervello (Landscapes of the Brain) of 1991, the universal spectacle characteristic of today’s postmodernity can be enlarged drawings of the impress of the brain on the cranium in which the considered as the outcome of the Neolithic inflection in the course of which humanist idea of the image as cosa mentale is ironically inverted into a cosa humanity undertook to replace the inner thrum of life throughout the fabric cranica, as one might say, linking an ideal representation to its original, of the real with an array of stable, objective realia rationally distinguished physiological condition of possibility; finally Penone’s sculpture always one from another. Sedentarization, which fixes every reality in its place; the offers, in different ways and to different degrees, a reflection on sculpture city, which separates the human world from “nature”; the use of tools, which itself, in its confrontation of animate and inanimate, its transpositions of introduces ever more complex mediations between individuals and things; one material into another. and finally the machine, which breaks the link between bodily gesture and Yet this reflexive critique of the image by the image cannot be reduced the production of the object: all are elements of a global logic of reification to a strictly formalist stance that abstracts aesthetic form from all context. and of separation of self from world that is perpetuated today in the “specta- What Penone’s works seek to explore is not their own, pure, formal essence cle” as Guy Debord defined it in 1967 in the second paragraph of The Society but the relationship between form and the creative gesture, that is, with the of the Spectacle: “The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of physical, bodily interiority of the artist. “Tautology,” he writes, “is the basis life, and, as such, the autonomous movement of the non-living.”40 In contrast, of all the art of the second half of the twentieth century. A tautology of Penone’s work is motivated by the desire to produce an antispectacle, to the gesture, of the object, even.” 39 Thus develops a very particular reflection breach the hegemony of representation, although always, paradoxically, in on the relationship between gesture and object and hence on the relationship the spectacular mode that is precisely that of the work of art in the modern between the action of the hand and the vision of the eye, which leads to sense of the term. questions such as: How is it that the visible systematically tends to cover over the tactile, to the point of its obscuration, to produce a substitute world in which our primary physical experience of the real, its resonance within the VI living body, finds itself annulled? And conversely: How is it that the produc- tion of an image-world in self-critical or tautological mode, as Penone would Ernesto de Martino, one of the great anthropologists of the twentieth put it, is capable of raising to perception, if not the tactile as such, at least century, devoted most of his work to defining two structurally opposed the fundamental tension that exists between the tactile and the image? modes of relation to the world, one he called the “magical,” the other, our This type of interrogation might be described as an anthropological own, the “modern.” The distinction was first elaborated in Il mondo magico: formalism, inasmuch as the image thus subjected to critique is grasped as the Prolegomeni a una storia del magismo in 1948, which was followed by an most acute symptom of a desire to set the world at a distance, as an object. expanded edition in 1958 and then by Sud e magia in 1959, this last being More precisely, the critique of the image here coincides with the critique of the fruit of a field investigation of surviving elements of the magical way of what might be termed a Neolithic relationship to reality. What the Neolithic thinking in Lucania, in southern Italy. On the one hand, “modernity” is inaugurated was in fact a stabilization, a fixing of the distinction between defined by the a priori stability of a “given” structured by clearly distinct humans and the things about them, set apart from them in such a way as to ontological categories: “Reality conceived in terms of the independence of make them graspable, appropriable, and transformable. Such a detachment the given, the inauguration of an observable world, an alterity determinate from objects, conceived as entirely separate from us, is opposed to another and guaranteed, is a historical configuration distinctive to our civilization sense of the real that sees it as a continuous milieu or fabric in which entities and hence correlated to the determinate, guaranteed presence characteristic never become completely distinct. The analytical contemplation characteris- of it. This kind of reality, which we might also call ‘naturality,’ can be tic of the reign of technology, in other words, finds itself opposed to a more expressed as follows: I find myself as given within the world, and I find the ancient relationship of symbiosis; the regime of separation of beings to the world as it presents itself to me, without this double ‘invention’ [of self original regime of the continuous flux of life. and world] posing a problem.”41 The “world of magic,” on the other hand, The universal expansion of the realm of images over the last millennia is characterized by a “labile” reality in which the human “presence” is always is an integral part of the first of these regimes, that of the separation threatened by dissolution within a living, moving milieu that spans every between (active) subjects and (passive) objects. Though the Neolithic’s new order—human, animal, vegetal, and mineral: “In magic, presence is still fascination with the technical was first accompanied by an impoverishment concerned to recognize itself as a unity in the face of the world, to contain

104 105 and delimit itself. . . . In this historical situation, in this cultural drama, ‘presence in the world’ and ‘the world that presents itself’ are in continual dispute over the boundary between them, a dispute that involves acts of war, victories and defeats, and also truces and compromises.”42 The whole cultural edifice that is “the magical” is intended to continually shore up a fragile “presence,” “to achieve and to consolidate the basic being in the world, or presence, of the individual,”43 through among other things the representation and enactment of any “crisis of lability” within a social, mythico-ritual framework. What is distinctive of the social and its rites is to be an engine for the consolidation of presence when by nature the distinctions or boundaries between beings are always threatened Fig. 19 Giuseppe Penone, Metamorfosi (Metamorphosis), 2015, fossilized wood, 21 5/8 × 17 3/4 × 57 1/8 inches by “lability.” And this very process of consolidation involves the representa- (55 × 45 × 145 cm). Installation view in the garden tion of the danger that it endeavors to avert: “In the world of magic, the of Reggia di Venaria Reale, Turin, 2016 individual drama seamlessly finds its place in the culture as a whole, where it finds the reassurance of tradition and of defined institutions, where it can turn to the experience slowly accumulated by past generations: the whole structure of civilization stands ready to deal with the drama, which is common to all.”44 The key agent in this, the pivotal figure who enables the always precarious transition from lability to stability is what de Martino calls the sorcerer: “With the sorcerer, the risk of lability is purposely em- braced within the demiurgic activity of the human, becoming a moment of the cultural drama. . . . The sorcerer, in fact, is the one who has acquired the power to control the lability of others.”45 As a communist intellectual de Martino had a negative conception of this constitutive lability of the magical world and welcomed its historic retreat in the face of the guarantees offered by the ontological delimitations imposed by modernity, that is, by Western rationalist objectivism. Further-

more he never explicitly associated this rationalism (this “quantified Fig. 20 Henri Matisse, L’arbre enchanté, plate XLII thought,” in Lévi-Strauss’s terms) with the Neolithic, no more than he did from Florilège des Amours de Ronsard (1942), lithograph “magic” with the culture of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. His historicization in sanguine on wove paper, 15 1/4 × 11 5/8 inches (38.5 × 29.5 cm), The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of the birth and development of rational science, in opposition to the world of Dorothy Braude Edinburg in memory of Bessie Kisloff of magic, took him no further back than the thought of Classical Greece. Braude, Esq. (2014.498) Nevertheless, his work—which found a following among a number of Italian anthropologists supported by the publisher Einaudi—played a major role in contextualizing (and thus relativizing) the subject-object distinction and folklore; it is, more fundamentally, the lability of the boundary between in radically reformulating the concept of “presence” in the world, designated the body and the rest of the natural world—a condition that Penone poetically as the central concern of all cultural construction. valorizes in his art whereas de Martino deprecated its persistence. Penone would read a number of works of Italian anthropology In fact, many of the artist’s works take the form of a nostalgic fantasy influenced by de Martino’s thinking—Anita Seppilli’s book on the relation- of the interpenetration of the realms of nature: in them, for example, marble ship between poetry and magic (Poesia e magia, 1962) and the work of her may have veins like animal tissue (Pelle di marmo [Skin of Marble, 2004]); son Tullio Seppilli among them—that were important to intellectual debate cast-off snake skins verge on tree branches (Mute [Molting]); branches them- in Italy in the 1970s, opening up new horizons of thought and offering selves become like mineral fragments dispersed on the ground (La luce dei information on the last hunter-gatherer societies in Amazonia and the passi [The Light of the Steps, 2003–07; see fig. 12 in Giardini (Gardens) booklet]; archaic customs of the Italian peasants of Umbria. Given this background, and prehistoric wood turned stone fossil seems to come to life again in it’s easier to understand that his critical vision of modernity addresses a becoming covered with moss (Metamorfosi [Metamorphosis, 2015; fig. 19]). much wider and deeper anthropological transformation than the simple Begun in 1983, the series Gesti vegetali (Vegetal Gestures; see booklet) is parti- transition to industrial society from the traditional Piedmontese agriculture cularly revealing of this desire for ontological entanglement, this time of his ancestors. What was lost with modernity, for him, is not just agrarian involving the human: here mannequins were partly covered in a layer of clay,

106 107 This experience is fundamentally tactile in order. In a silence punctu­ ated by the drip of water, the darkness and humidity bring nonvisual sensation to the foreground, and when vision does come into fugitive play through the use of artificial light, the sense of contemporaneity with this lost world arises directly from the physical freshness of the traces: the remains of hearths, the imprints of hands, the finger painting on the walls, the holes dug by human hand to create a basin in the still damp clay. There thus takes shape, against a background of real and symbolic obscurity, a physical, blind, intuitive rapport with a world not remembered but immemorial. What is the immemorial? It is the presence in us of an unquantifiable past that densifies and enriches our relationship to the world, beyond narrative, beyond chronology. Time there manifests itself as an indeterminate thick- ness, in which every one of our most commonplace gestures contains in itself those of all our predecessors, making of the human not an essence but

Fig. 21 Palaeolithic painting in the cave of a persistent coloration, a sustained note in the thrum of life. This sense of Chauvet–Pont d’Arc, Ardèche, France, c. 30,000–32,000 BCE being physically traversed by latent presences irreducible to representations can be compared to the experience of lability evoked by de Martino, if one allows oneself to think of this not as a threat of collapse but as a positive which was marked with the imprints of the sculptor’s fingers, the clay sections transgression of the conceptual boundaries by which the modern subject then being removed and cast in bronze. The casts were set on the ground is protected but at the same time imprisoned—an emancipation evoked in to be invaded by the vegetation that eventually grew through these modeled, Penone’s account of his experience in the Chauvet cave. cast, and perforated bodies, now finally returned to nature, as if they had It nonetheless remains that a visit to the cave is precisely no more given way to what Pierre Schneider called, in connection with Henri Matisse than that, that is to say, a practice in which the seen necessarily takes (fig. 20), a desire for “daphneisation.”46 primacy over lived experience. The desire for the tactile that it prompts is The prospect of such a merging of the human subject with the living blocked by archaeological injunction, and as a result the fantasy of inter- fabric of the world echoes certain modern fantasies about Upper Paleolithic penetration of realms and of expansion of the boundaries of the self remains cultures. Penone has often spoken of the overwhelming effect on him at the level of image, like all fantasy. Just as the actual experience of the of the sight of the cave of Chauvet–Pont d’Arc in 2012 (fig. 21). He revealingly tactile is distanced in and by the brief and uncustomary descent into the described the experience as an immersion in a world in which objects Paleolithic cave, so in Penone’s work does the tactile dimension remain were no longer distinct from subject, thanks to the extraordinary sense of metaphorically figured within an image: it presents itself in visual mode, having descended into the interior of a gigantic skull: “For me it was a real as mental representation rather than as physical experience. For this visual revelation in relation to the things I’ve seen up till now. . . . In the Chauvet staging of the confrontation of the visual and the tactile, the performance cave, the cavity becomes a skull and its sides support the projection of Rovesciare i propri occhi (Reversing One’s Eyes; see booklet) of 1970 represents images, which are the sensations and emotions of the reality of the period. a kind of inaugural manifesto as the young artist had himself photographed It’s this dimension that I find most extraordinary.”47 In other words, blinded by the silvered contact lenses he was wearing and thus confined the most spectacular example of Paleolithic parietal art yet discovered is to a strictly tactile relation to self, while the visible world finds itself reflec- said to offer the viewer not an identifiable cultural representation but the ted in the mirror eyes. Many later works will see the two dimensions of paradoxical sense of immediate participation in something that is not intangible, spectacular monument and the movement of living matter—of known in the mode of representation. The impossibility of ever decoding the representation and action, in other words—developed in tension with each cultural meaning of these creations locates them in the realm of the unknow- other: on the one hand, the work as object, inhabiting pure visuality, is able, leaving those who come into contact with them free rein to invent powerfully asserted by the use of the imperishable materials associated their own futures, disencumbered of any nostalgic inclination to return to with the tradition of monumental sculpture (bronze, gold, marble); on the the past. The sense of anthropological filiation conveyed through strictly other, the same visuality is frequently undermined by traces of the maker’s affective, nondiscursive channels is all the more acute and forceful for gestures and by natural presences (trees, water, ground, leaves, etc.), all this complete cultural impenetrability. There is no question of reliving some evocative of a vital dynamic irreducible to images. fancied Paleolithic moment; it is rather a matter of drawing from the immedi- Images are also stories, a world of myths and memorial narratives, ate experience of the decorated cave a revolutionary energy untainted by individual or collective, embodied in representations, so that the tension cultural references. between image and action is in Penone’s work also a tension between the

108 109 historical relativity, internal contradictions, and self-destructive character of a mode of life thousands and thousands of years old. The great works of our time are those in which these contending horizons are experienced and make themselves most clearly manifest and in which, then, we recognize the truth of our condition. In this context, far from any apocalyptic catastrophism, Penone’s work stages a critical appropriation of our Neolithic inheritance in all its complexity, one in keeping with the ever-growing awareness of the need for an anthropological and not merely cultural revolu- tion. It is no doubt this that explains its wide appeal to a global audience that sees, and loves, these works as zones in which critical thought, there raised to incandescence, is transformed into refoundational action.

Fig. 22 Giuseppe Penone, Struttura del tempo (Structure of Time), 1992, terra-cotta, wood, and rope; dimensions variable. Installation view in the Durand-Dessert Gallery, Paris, 1992

memorial and the immemorial. On the one hand, his works sometimes resemble dreamlike archaeological narratives drawing in fragmentary fashion on myths of the old world. On the other, they refuse to take narrative as their horizon of operation, rather giving form to modalities of existence in which the human comes to experience itself as a fragile sedimentation of living matter. Struttura del tempo (Structure of Time, 1992; fig. 22), a precari- ous stack of roughly rolled clay cylinders balanced on a cut branch, is perhaps the most singular example: it wouldn’t take much to transform this into a memorial, a monument to the invention of pottery, but in the end, as hinted by the title, the images thus presented to the viewer tell of nothing but an existential tension at work in the gestures of modeling and construction since time immemorial. In setting into image the inadequacy of images, and into narrative the inadequacy of narratives, in the face of the general flux of living being through time, Penone adopts a position that might be described as Neolithic, dialectically enriched by the depth conferred by self-critique. Yet to remain at the level of this internal critique would be to miss the revolutionary effect of an art that cannot be separated from its context of emergence and reception. When humanity as a whole finds itself at a major turning point in its history, what might be no more than an inturned speculation becomes an affective prompt to the transformation of our relationship to the world. The early twenty-first century finds humanity, beyond all difference of culture, living the disembodiment inherent to the society of the specta- cle—apogee of the age of technology—as an essentially unhappy experience of exile from self. Our pronounced separation from the living world produces both addiction and repulsion, from whose coincidence has emerged the idea that the Neolithic is coming to its end, that is, both completely realizing itself and undoing itself. With this, two paths open up before contemporary thought and feeling: that of an apocalyptic catastrophism in the face of the end of the world or that of a revolutionary activism increasingly aware of the

110 111 1. See Françoise Rinieri, “C’est un grand preexisting ideas (such as the idea of 24. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology 31. “Intervista a Claude Lévi-Strauss mystère”: La découverte des gravures du Mont a vessel and the idea of terra-cotta). On Confronts the Problems of the Modern con Paolo Caruso,” Aut Aut, no. 77 (1963): Bégo (Turin: Hapax, 2013). this see Sophie A. de Beaune, L’homme et World, trans. J. M. Todd (Cambridge, ma: pp. 27–45. l’outil: L’invention technique durant la Belknap, 2013), p. 40. This volume reprints 2. See, for example, Marica Venturino 32. Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology Confronts préhistoire (Paris: cnrs, 2008), pp. 77–78, three lectures given at the Ishizaka Gambari and Luisa Ferrero, “Preistoria e the Problems, p. 40 (italics mine). and André Leroi-Gourhan, Milieu et techniques Foundation, Tokyo, in spring 1986. [The protostoria tra Tanaro e Stura,” in Archeologia (1945; Paris: Albin Michel, 1973), p. 397. word that Lévi-Strauss uses is embrayage, 33. See Nathan Wachtel, “Saudade: De la del passaggio: Scambi scientifici in ricordo whose primary sense is “putting into gear,” sensibilité lévi-straussienne,” in Claude di Livio Mano, supplement no. 4 to Bulletin 13. See Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den and whose metaphorical sense here is Lévi-Strauss, ed. Michel Izard (Paris: Éditions d’anthropologie préhistorique de Monaco, 2013, technischen und tektonischen Künsten; oder, to move or even drive nature in accordance de L’Herne, 2004), pp. 345–53. pp. 63–72. Praktische Aesthetik: Ein Handbuch für with human ends via technical mediation; Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde, vol. I, 34. Ernesto de Martino, La fine del mondo: 3. Founded in 1868 by Roberto Emilio hence the earlier translator’s use of Die textile Kunst, für sich betrachtet und Contributo all’analisi delle apocalissi culturali Lepetit, Alberto Dolfuss, and Augusto “engagement” for a process the present in Beziehung zur Baukunst (Frankfurt am (Turin: Einaudi, 1977). The phrase serves Gansser, the Ledoga company built factories author can describe as “instrumental Main: Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft, as the title of chapter 5, “Apocalisse senza on the hillsides between Garessio and the detachment.” It entails then a mediated 1860); published in English as Style in eschaton.” little town of Mondovi, on the plain, in the “engagement with” but also an “ascendancy the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical early twentieth century, before merging over.” This should be borne in mind in 35. Giuseppe Penone, correspondence with Aesthetics, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave in 1915 with its competitor Jemina & Battaglia connection with subsequent references.— the author, July 4, 2016. and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty to become the biggest tannin producer in Trans.] Research Institute, 2004). 36. Celant, “Intertwining Metamorphoses,” the world. 25. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind p. 19. 14. Even in the rubbings of vegetable matter 4. Germano Celant, “Intertwining Metamor­ (1962; London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, of the Verde del bosco series of the early 37. Giuseppe Penone, untitled text (1989), phoses,” in Giuseppe Penone (Milan: Electa, 1966), p. 172 [translation modified, as it misses 1980s to 1987, the fabric support was chosen in Maraniello and Watkins, Writings, p. 188. 1989), pp. 8–27. the active, aggressive side of Lévi-Strauss’s for its tactile qualities and is not the occasion s’attaque—attacks, tackles—rendering it as 38. Giuseppe Penone, cited in Celant, 5. Giuseppe Penone, in Giuseppe Penone: Le of poetic reflection on textile technique “be applied.”—Trans.]. “Intertwining Metamorphoses,” p. 19. regard tactile; Entretiens avec Françoise Jaunin as such. (Lausanne: Bibliothèque des Arts, 2012), p. 16. 26. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, p. 24. 39. Penone, in Regard tactile, p. 59 (emphasis 15. Giuseppe Penone and Michel Merle, Un For Lévi-Strauss, traditional agriculture mine). 6. Giuseppe Penone, untitled text (1976), dialogue sous les faux de Verzy, interviews and industrial technology are both in Giuseppe Penone: Writings 1968–2008, with Chantal Destrez (Annecy: Petite École, 40. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, expressions of the same relationship to the ed. Gianfranco Maraniello and Jonathan 1994), p. 49. trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, world, structured by “two distinct but Watkins (Bologna: MAMbo—Museo d’Arte 1995), p. 11. 16. Giuseppe Penone, untitled text (1990), equally positive sciences: one which flowered Moderna di Bologna; Birmingham, uk: in Maraniello and Watkins, Writings, p. 81. in the neolithic period, whose theory of 41. Ernesto de Martino, Il mondo magico: Ikon Gallery, 2009), p. 92. the sensible order provided the basis for the Prolegomeni a una storia del magismo 17. Penone and Merle, Dialogue, p. 49. 7. Giuseppe Penone, untitled text (1969), arts of civilization (agriculture, animal (Turin: Einaudi, 1948), translated into English ibid., p. 90. 18. Giuseppe Penone, untitled text (1990), husbandry, pottery, weaving, conservation as The World of Magic (New York: Pyramid in Maraniello and Watkins, Writings, p. 81. and preparation of food, etc.) and which Communications, 1972). This is not readily 8. Celant, “Intertwining Metamorphoses,” continues to provide for our basic needs by available, and references here are to the pp. 9 and 13. 19. James Fergusson, Tree and Serpent Worship, these means; and the other, which places French edition, Le monde magique, trans. or Illustrations of Mythology and Art in 9. Giuseppe Penone, correspondence with itself from the start at the level of intelligibility, Marc Baudoux (Paris: Institut d’édition Sanofi India in the First and Fourth Centuries after the author, February 26, 2017: “L’interesse and of which contemporary science is Synthélabo, 1999), here p. 164. Note that Christ from the Sculptures of the Buddhist che ho sempre avuto sull neolitico è per the fruit” (ibid., p. 269). de Martino uses the word presence to denote Topes at Sanchi and Amravati (London: India la sua ampia diffusione nel mondo. Il mio the human experience of being, much as Museum, 1868), p. 1. 27. Paul A. Shepard, Nature and Madness era ed è il desiderio di trovare una espressione Heidegger uses Dasein. (1982; Athens: University of Georgia Press, che sia condivisa da gente di paesi diversi 20. Vere Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself 1998), pp. 35–36. 42. De Martino, Monde magique, p. 164. ed il passato, anche se apparentemente (London: Watts & Co, 1936), chap. 5, “The lontano e dimenticato, è persistente nella Neolithic Revolution,” pp. 59–86, notably 28. Alain Testart, Avant l’histoire: L’évolution 43. Ibid., p. 208. nostra cultura; basta chiudere gli occhi e p. 72, where he writes: “Archaeology alone (Paris: des sociétés, de Lascaux à Carnac 44. Ibid., p. 192. la memoria delle nostre cellule ce lo ricorda.” could justify the presentation of a ‘neolithic’ Gallimard, 2012), p. 209. economy as a universal historical stage 45. Ibid., p. 212. 10. See Giuseppe Penone, “Le jardin commence 29. Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and in the progress towards modern civilization.” au moment où un homme foule son sol,” Culture (2005), trans. J. Lloyd (Chicago: 46. Pierre Schneider, “Figure et décoration,” Jardins, no. 2 (2011): pp. 7–8, and this note of 21. Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of University of Chicago Press, 2013). Descola in Le Maroc de Matisse, ed. Claude Duthuit 1984: “Garden landscape. . . . Landscape has Workmanship and the State of the Industrial does not identify the opposition between et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), p. 174. been missing for a century.” Giuseppe Penone, Arts (New York: MacMillan, 1914); Lewis naturalism and animism with that 47. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Interview untitled text (1990), in Maraniello and Watkins, Mumford, Technics and Civilization (London: between Paleolithic hunter-gatherers and with Giuseppe Penone,” in Giuseppe Penone, Writings, p. 189. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1934); see also the Neolithic agro-pastoralists. Yet inasmuch ed. Laurent Busine (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, same author’s The City in History: Its Origins, as he acknowledges being a disciple of 11. Giuseppe Penone, untitled text (1980), in 2012), p. 13. Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New Lévi-Strauss, it would perhaps not be wrong Maraniello and Watkins, Writings, p. 258. York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961). to see in his notion of the “naturalism” of 12. In this, whether consciously or not, the the modern West the most highly developed 22. Leroi-Gourhan, Milieu et techniques, artist echoes the idea that the transition from expression of the technicist turn that pp. 380–81. the Upper Paleolithic to the Neolithic was Lévi-Strauss associates with the Neolithic. chiefly a matter of “transfer” or of “combina- 23. Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics 30. See note 24 above. tion” of techniques themselves the results (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972), esp. chap. 1, of the encounter between two unrelated, “The Original Affluent Society,” pp. 1–40.

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