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Guiseppe Penone ‘A Tree in the Wood’. At Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) Ignore my effusions but see it!

I could have had a better day to see this exhibition. Temperatures neared 30, with its accompanying UK humidity, in the Exhibition environs and, although I have been looking forward to this so much, we had to rigorously ensure, we gave no energy to anything other than the Penone exhibition (although I caught the nearby lovely Miro sculptures, it had to be en passant).

I knew nothing about Penone before going nor of the movement with which he was once associated, which Germano Celant (1969:6) calls art povera (poor art) (1). I bought Celant’s book at Ilkley Book Festival that I visited the next day – the day I write this - (also hot and stormy). Celant enigmatically describes his book on the movement as an object that:

I read this to say that art is both an object and the emergent state of consciousness it enables. The latter seems of uncertain – to me anyway - ontology but is probably equated with what art povera calls ‘reality’. That 'reality' continues after the object is left to its own fate. Art is both an object and an 'emergent state' but is incomplete unless it is both. However, it is also ungraspable in its existence as a 'mere state' with no to-be-present-at-sometime potentiated objective existence.

Personally I love these conundrums. However, it seems unsafe to equate the 'art povera' work of Penone with the larger pile of objects that is the artworks-of-Penone-to-date. This work, as we see it now at the YSP seems not even to be contained by that partial definition above.

Here is a conundrum I found. Much of the work seems – or is attributed as doing so in the descriptions in the YSP exhibition guide – to continually reference ecological, historical and mythical past(s). Indeed I felt that even in more innocent views of the art which I saw. They were innocent because, as it were, I saw the exhibition from the tail-end backwards uninstructed by the helpful guide or the diaspora of labels in the exhibition from the guide. Emerging groggy from the visitor centre, I pushed up the hill to the golden stricken tree at the top of the garden, therby missing the appointed route and the guiding labels. 

The first work that puzzled me only coalesced as a visual pattern as I passed it – and more as I moved in passing that when I stopped and gazed. It was Senerio 6 (Pathway 6). I look back to the guide and still cannot recreate what I saw and felt and what grew in this passing glance. This is perhaps because the photographs of the guide show the works in situ in their Italian venue, set against Renaissance garden walls in decay. What I saw almost immediately suggested metamorphosis – something of the feel of remembered but distorted Ovid and Bernini on the changing state of Daphne pursued by Apollo.

This fleeting perception is less than the whole of many viewings and perspectives but it does link very obviously (once I caught up with the commentary of the guide) of Respirare l’ombra (to breathe the shadow) 2008. The latter work refers, in what we can capture in the documents of Penone’s intention, to both Ovid and Bernini versions of Daphne and Apollo – although fragmented and dispersed and somewhat worn by their history as an object. For instance laid on a segmented wall of laurel leaves we are told that the reader smells the laurel leaves. Not so when I saw them in Yorkshire on a very hot humid day in July. No sense captured anything that might, in the form of a sense of smell, share life, any more than the Apollonian gold which catches the edges of the mask into which Penone has cast a careless impression of his face.

Not that this ‘spoils’ the work of art. It makes it even more inseparable from the mutable environments in which we sense it and that will change even after we are no longer able to sense it. In fact, it suggests that even what is captured through the organs of stored and containing memory and sense-perception (those very uncomfortable but nevertheless eternal bedfellows) as an intellectualised reading. My Ovidian metamorphic readings may be precisely that and weak for thyat reason. Yet the truth is that these readings are not necessary to the reality of what is seen in an emergent space in which no one viewer holds the right to stay forever. Art and death, art and life: these are the same thing surely for artist and viewer.

Do see these works and don’t concern yourself with what I or perhaps anyone else sees! You will see differently. That is undoubtable. One work (Patate 1977), I found difficult to see without the presence of small guided tours. Latterly was one by a group of infant children and their teacher. This work is literally a pile of potatoes but amidst it are potatoes (once ‘real’ potatoes) that were forced to grow against bronze casts of parts of Penone’s body and which took on their shape ‘naturally’ – only then to be cast in art-bronze and placed amidst the pile. What did those minds in formation see here? Of what impression will they take the cast? This thought so lost me, I had to leave.

When you visit, you will be told not to touch the objects, yet touch is very inviting here. Contact between the boundaries of ‘things’ as they assert and then perhaps even lose their ‘thingness’ (haeccitas perhaps in Joyce’s version of Aquinas) is of the very core of the experience of art here. 

Skins that become internal marks (as in a trees growth), bodies that impress on things soft and hard. The very hardness of the hard is even queried – in the use of both marble and gold (representing in part the ‘material’ of that elite past of the Italian Renaissance. The boundaries of smoke. All ‘material’ by virtue of being material has only a liminal ‘thisness’. To be harmed by a touch is the conclusion that rationales curatorial advice here and in other exhibits (I remember it being emphasised for similar reasons but dissimilar effect in the Baltic Bonvincini exhibition). It is a question asked by Bernini of Apollo and his Daphne, but also of the air we 'breathe in' (inspiring us) and that hardens into tree like structures in many sculptures. It is like the bark that loosens its sensitivity to growth and a harder and perhaps antagonistic exterior (perhaps even a bronze facsimile). Air, blood, water – veins, grooves, pores and channels. Are these things metaphors of each other or are these impressions of likeness actually more than that – an issued of shared nature. Tell us – art povera. If not, let’s anyway celebrate Penone’s achievement in moving the intellect, sense and emotion thus nearer.

(1) Celant, G. [Ed.] (1969) Art Povera: Conceptual, Actual or Impossible Art london, Studio Vista