Idee di Pietra (Ideas of Stone)

Giuseppe Penone (b. 1947)

Completed 2004–2007
Installed 2010

Granite boulders with steel and bronze
Height x length: 504 x 120 in. (1280.2 x 304.8 cm)

Located at Booth School of Business, Charles M. Harper Center
5807 S. Woodlawn Avenue

“[Penone’s] sculptures were metaphors of the ‘vitality’ and the cosmic power of the small details of nature, that nuance which regenerates itself in the flesh. Inside the works, nothing is determined or definite; everything develops and changes.”

Germano Celant, “Giuseppe Penone: Memories of a Contact,” Giuseppe Penone: The Hidden Life Within

Ideas of Stone—fondly known as “the tree”—is a large-scale, outdoor sculpture created by the Italian artist Giuseppe Penone in 2004, with eight granite rocks lodged in the branches that Penone carefully collected from a river near his home. At forty-two feet tall and over thirty tons, and with an additional base buried six feet underground, Ideas of Stone is one of the largest pieces in Penone’s series of an unknown number of sculpted trees. Both sculpture and base are made from bronze, with a stainless steel core to provide structural support. Before coming to Chicago for installation in the courtyard of the Booth School of Business, this artwork stood in a small town in Penone’s native Italy.

The work plays with the notion of legibility and exists as a double irony: on the one hand, despite its monumental size, the work is often mistaken for a real tree found in nature. The creation of the tree, however, actually involved a lengthy process of molding and casting, and called for great finesse from the artist. The rocks that create an uncanny effect and that serve as the cue to the work’s status as a piece of art, on the other hand, are the most natural part of the entire sculpture.

For centuries the desire to leave a mark—whether personal, cultural, or historical—has been one of the distinct qualities shared by many artists. Even among his Arte Povera contemporaries, who all shared an interest in using simple materials, traces found in nature or everyday life, or even bodily movement and mundane experiences as their major sources of inspiration, Penone was known for his strict adherence to these tenets, spending his entire career leaving simple messages via seemingly ubiquitous and uneventful arboreal themes. Through trees (large and small, natural and artificial) and his own experience with them, the artist was able to ask an array of self-reflexive questions, including what it means to complete a work, who the real artist is, and why artists desire to make at all.

To better contextualize this particular tree on campus, one would need to take a panoramic view of Penone’s entire career and his half-century love affair with many other trees. At times, it seems to emerge from both an ongoing personal obsession and a collective amnesia shared by the generation of postwar Italian artists who were burdened with the pride of experiencing Italy’s rich history as well as its tarnished, recent fascist past. In one prominent example of Penone’s early career, the artist cast a bronze model of his hand and had it grasp the trunk of a live tree—as the tree grew, it wrapped around the model exactly as if the hand was gripping into the bark, and the sculpture became part of the environment that intervened and conditioned the tree’s growth. The work, surviving now only in photographs, was probably the best example of Penone’s interpretation of sculpting as well as the epitome of the Arte Povera ideal. It was ephemeral, introspective, and lacking formal grandeur or high-reaching political statements of any sort, yet it engaged with particular experiences man could have in nature—experiences that are often palpable rather than visual, phenomenological rather than material.

A closer look at Ideas of Stone, then, suggests just how different it is from the artist’s early experiments, despite their seeming thematic similarity. Critics naturally questioned Penone’s later productions (roughly starting from the 1980s) as they became increasingly grander and refined, more permanent, more visually tangible, and no longer discernible as “poor art.” The criticism also extended to his closer connection with major institutions, museums, and galleries, including the prestigious Guggenheim and Versailles Palace, which was seen as part of a growing predilection for blockbuster aesthetics in his work.

One of Penone’s later works, Essere Fiume (“Being River,” 1981-1995), provides a key answer to the two seemingly disjointed modes of art-making in his career. With Essere Fiume, one encounters two large rocks lying juxtaposed on the gallery floor: gray, solemn, and almost identical. Nothing dramatic at first glance. What strikes the viewers later is the revelation that only one rock was directly collected from the riverbed near the artist’s home, worn by the natural stream of water—Penone found the other in a quarry and meticulously carved it to resemble the natural one. The paradox forces the viewer to wonder why on earth he would bother to spend so much time and money, and undertake such an arduous process, to create a rock or a tree from scratch when he can easily find such things that are just as grand and beautiful.

It is said that one of the driving forces that motivates the artists’ creation is the desire to “make things special,” whereas the rest of the world seems to function better with the “least effort principle”: an instinctual tendency shared by human beings, animals, and even inorganic mechanisms to search for the solution that offers the least resistance and thus requires the least amount of effort. By adopting self-imposed, excessively painstaking “endeavors to make things ordinary,” Ideas of Stone rejects both ways of thinking and subverts viewers’ expectations, thus attaining a sort of beauty in abstraction. Penone chose to show us a vision through bodily expression rather than words or visual cues. By looking through his lens, we might be able to understand not only what an adventure in the woods can be like, but more importantly how it feels to be a rock-sculpting river, or what might exist in the whispers among trees.

Written by Zhiyan Yang, a doctoral student in Art History

Artist profile

Giuseppe Penone

(Italian, b. 1947)

Biography

Giuseppe Penone is an Italian artist with a long and prolific career. Born in the small city of Garessio (near Turin), Penone studied at the Accademia di Belle Arte in Turin and was exposed to a variety of post-war art during his early twenties. He started practicing as a professional artist in 1968 in the Garessio forest, and quickly became known as a younger member of the Italian Arte Povera (“poor art”) movement.

The trajectory of Penone’s career reveals that his works have always been deeply concerned with the relationship between man and nature. Instead of simply accepting the model of producing installations and two-dimensional works to be displayed in museums and galleries, he walked into the woods and became an artist who focused more on the actions and procedures of transforming natural elements—in both assimilative and interventional ways—to relate them to concrete, visual, tactile, or even olfactory experiences. Later, as he shifted toward conventional exhibition spaces and more orthodox sculptural materials like wood, bronze, and marble, the unremitting devotion towards nature (especially arboreal nature) remained, and still thrives today.

As a renowned international artist, Giuseppe Penone now lives and works primarily in Turin and Paris. He received the Rolf Schock Prize for Visual Arts in 2001. His works are collected by a variety of major art institutions, including the Tate Gallery, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include “Penone Versailles,” Château de Versailles, France (2013); Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2013); Madison Square Park, New York (2013-14); and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2014).

Written by Zhiyan Yang, a doctoral student in Art History

Sources

Busine, Laurent. Giuseppe Penone: Forty Years of Creation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.

Celant, Germano and John Bentley Mays. Giuseppe Penone: The Hidden Life Within. London, UK: Black Dog Publishing, 2013.

Interview with Professor Canice Prendergast, 1 May 2015.

Archival Materials

Photograph of Penone tree with Booth in the background

Photo by Chris Strong

Photograph of students admiring Ideas of Stone

Photograph of details at the base of the sculpture

Idee di Pietra (Ideas of Stone)

Giuseppe Penone (b. 1947)

Completed 2004–2007
Installed 2010

“[Penone’s] sculptures were metaphors of the ‘vitality’ and the cosmic power of the small details of nature, that nuance which regenerates itself in the flesh. Inside the works, nothing is determined or definite; everything develops and changes.”

Germano Celant, “Giuseppe Penone: Memories of a Contact,” Giuseppe Penone: The Hidden Life Within

Read more

Artist profile

Giuseppe Penone

Biography

Related Links

Sources

Archival Materials

Photo by Chris Strong

Further Reading

Idee di Pietra (Ideas of Stone)

Giuseppe Penone (b. 1947)

Completed 2004–2007 Installed 2010

“[Penone’s] sculptures were metaphors of the ‘vitality’ and the cosmic power of the small details of nature, that nuance which regenerates itself in the flesh. Inside the works, nothing is determined or definite; everything develops and changes.”

Germano Celant, “Giuseppe Penone: Memories of a Contact,” Giuseppe Penone: The Hidden Life Within

Read more

Artist profile

Giuseppe Penone

Biography

Related Links

Sources

Archival Materials

Photo by Chris Strong

Further Reading

Completed 2004–2007
Installed 2010