Energy to escape death

"As if rediscovering the aesthetical tautology, the sea is water, a room is a perimeter of air, cotton is cotton, the world is an unperceivable unity of nations, an angle is a convergence of three co-ordinates, the floor is a section of a tile-covered surface, life is a sequence of actions" (this is Germano Clement’s tautological description of the so-called "humble art" (1) A stone is a stone, too, and Giovanni Anselmo knows it well, for he is an artist who began his career with the humble art and who still represents the truest spirit of it, which is concrete and essential, reduced to a minimum and led back to its origins and to its extreme consequences. It is a radical, wholesome humbleness. It is a deep tie to the inner energy of the earth, so much so, that Anselmo’s works are often placed close to the ground, lying onthe floor, or disposed according to a horizontal arrangement which suits the contact with the ground. In the idea of the critic who first named it (after the name given to the type of theater first proposed by Grotowski’s) and who was the main representative of the whole movement and a partner to most of the artists who formed it, the "humble art" was "an extremely lively period of time tending to an "un-culture" and to a return of the image to a pre-iconographic stage; it exhalted the trivial and basic element as well as nature, which was understood according to Democritus’ theory of particles, and man considered as a mere ‘phisical and mental fragment" (2).
"To accept oneself as part of an endless process brings about the non-concealment of one’s work behind the illusion of a future freedom, but on the contrary, the work is understood as a detail, outside time categories. Giovanni Anselmo’s work seems to enhance this quality, melting the reality of the aesthetical research to create an anonymous and incidental unit, so that it is given a basically undefined character. What is at stake is the body without its shadow which carries within itself its own inconsistency. Entering deep into that body, Anselmo tries to bear witness of this situation, even though that same evidence can’t be but just one moment of the body’s infniteness and invisibility." (3).
According to Achille Benito Oliva, Anselmo’s work has to be placed within the "processual art", which is a kind of art minding the artistic process rather than the results of it, centering upon the moment of the accomplishment rather than on the devising or the final product and giving importance to the ephemeral values rather than to the eternal, imposing ones: "He works within the boundaries of the processual art, enhancing the space and time relations of abstract categories of thought, such as "all", "particular" and "infinite". The particular element is marked by a luminous area created by a spotlight on the walls or on the floor of the gallery, which is considered as the total space. So the word identifies with the object it expresses as it exists in time and space.". (4) At the exhibition Le Stanze held at the Castello Colonna in Genazzano, Anselmo accentuated the space- and time-categories by means of phisical objects: his work Oltremare a nord e il paesaggio a est ("Overseas northwards and landscape to the east") is made of a few ultramarine-blue marks on the wall and of a granite block which is orientated according to a compass needle. The stone, the material, already has in itself the energy necessary to orient it in the direction of the cardinal point by which it is attracted. "Me, the world, things, life, we all aren’t but energy-situations and the point is precisely not to let those situations crystallize, but rather to keep them open and lively, for our life depends on them. Seeing as there must be a way of acting for each and every way of thinking and of being, my works are in reality the phisical expression of an action’s power, of a situation’s energy, or of an event; they are not just an experiencing them as mere annotations or signs, or as a still-life" (5). The spare style of Anselmo’s works is really made of few simple elements, but through those elements there flows a mighty current of energy which is the life-principle of matter. The entire work of Anselmo aims in fact at the reifying of abstract concepts often taken from science. It is founded especially on the concepts of physics: energy, mass, weight. One of his first pieces, dating back to 1966, is a sort of a challenge to the law of gravity: the artist places iron rods vertically one on top of the other, using wood supports passing through them to reach as high as possible; when he does not employ wooden supports he bends iron so that it turns into a self-supporting structure able to show its energy by means of its movements at even the slightest breath of air. "The traditional object is reduced to a minimum and anyway it exists only depending upon tension and energy. The work is energy and it exists only in order that I might live." (6). In 1967, he had a few Masse ("Masses") built, the purpose of which was just that of creating an energy-situation. Direzione ("Direction") also dates back to that same period; it is formed by a "mass" to which a magnetic needle is attached. "This work - just like others preceding and following it - begins exactly where it is and ends where there are the earth’s magnetic fields, the centre of the earth, etc.; these in turn remind me of other poles or centres of the universe.". A second Direzione was built in the same year on the floor at the exhibitions Prospect ‘68, in Düsseldorf, and RA3, in Amalfi, which were both held in the same year: I take a 3 x 6 mt. cloth soaked in water and I drag it on the floor to obtain a trail, following the direction given by a magnetic needle placed in a glass vase. There is finally a third direction which I construct aiming at the same purposes as with the two previous ones and using a large stone that I have found in the workshop of an artisan who works for the cemeteries. I use the stone here, for the universe is not only mass, it is weight as well, and the stone interests me precisely because of its weight." The use of the stone originates therefore in the issue of weight. It is also a basic material, a symbolic material whose symbolic value cannot be underestimated: it is namely part of nature and of art at the same time. In his Torsioni ("Torsions"), the artist gives energy to the work and this energy is immediately returned with exactly the same strength with which the wooden pole piercing through the skin or the the iron pole stuck in fustian exercise a real (recovery) thrust". This remains true even though the tension has slackened in time due to entropy, as Yves-Alain Bois remarks in the catalogue of the exhibition L’Informe ("The Formless"), held at the Beauburg centre in Paris, where a version of the work has recently been displayed (7). A similar problem is posed by the work Per una incisione di infinite migliaia di anni ("For a cut thousands of years long") (1969): "There is an energetic compensation, attenuated and reduced in speed by the superimposed fat, which is a tender gesture aimed at the preservation of a death; this is unavoidable and yet protracted as much as the human thought is able to bear it; at the same time it is also the assertion of a new life (the trail) over a death, and it all gives rise to an osmotic energy-exchanging" (8). In Struttura che mangia ("Swallowing structure") two blocks of granite are tied together: the smaller one does not fall as long as the salad which is squeezed between the two is fresh: when it dries up, it looses volume together with its freshness (so the salad has to be changed often to keep the balance). It is a work on the ephemeral, where the perishability of the vegetables can change the situation. The balance of the forces subject to tension is always unsteady. To the element of weight the artist couples that of color: His Grigi che si alleggeriscono verso oltremare ("Greys becoming lighter overseas") are stones tied together in pairs and suspended, hanging on the wall like paintings, while the word "oltremare" can express the color (="ultramarine") as well as the place (="overseas"), as Lea Vergine has remarked. The fact is that Anselmo continues pursuing its aim of neutralizing the law of gravity, as in his work entitled precisely Pietra alleggerita ("Stone becoming lighter"): " Due to a certain law of physics, the stone becomes slightly lighter when it is taken further from the centre of the earth; we could therefore assume that if we should take it even further, to a certain point of the universe, let’s say for example to a place between the sun and the earth, then it would lose all of its weight and it could be perfectly identified with the idea of flying.". Color is very important to acquire lightness and start to fly, so much so that the slabs which were hung on the walls of the Padiglione Italiano at the 1990 Biennale were assigned a prize by the jury for painting; it was a paradoxical act, which did nonetheless catch this peculiar aspect of color. Thus the artist comes to his work Mentre il colore solleva la pietra e la pietra solleva il colore ("While color lifts up stone and stone lifts up color"), which displays a pair of stones hanging from a window. In this case, in the "city of the towers", the two stones are tied with a rope and suspended from the balcony over the courtyard of the Palazzo del Comune, which dates back to the 1200’s. The artist is not interested as much in the moment of the flight as in the tension preparatory of the flight. Above and higher, the decrease in weight will perhaps allow the stones to fly in the air someday.Notes
1) G. Celant, Un’arte povera (1968) in G. Celant, Arte Povera, published by Umberto Allemandi, Torino, 1989, Page 21.
2) Ibid., page 20.
3) G. Celant, Per un’identità italiana in Ibid., page 427
4) A. Bonito Oliva, Europe-America. The different avant-gardes, published by Franco Maria Ricci, Milano, 1976, page 74.
5) In T. Trini, Anselmo, Penone, Zorio e le nuove fonti d’energie per il deserto dell’arte, in "Data", # 9, Autumn 1989, Year III.
6) Statement made by Anselmo in 1973, quoted by G. Celant, Arte Povera, op. cit., page 233.
7) Y. A.Bois, Le valeur d’usage de l’informe in L’informe. Mode d’employ, catalogue for the exhibition edited by Y. A. Bois and R. Krause, Centre Pompidou, Paris 1966, page 120.
8) Statement made by Anselmo in 1969, quoted by G. Celant, Arte Povera, op. cit., page 228.