Penone draws a tree

I'm still thinking about the implications of last week's post on the fold. I remember seeing a video of Giuseppe Penone holding his hand around the trunk of a young tree. His fingers could almost completely encircle it. He then had a cast made of his hand in that clutching shape, going on to replace his flesh and blood hand with the cast, which I think was in metal. He then left the tree to its own devices, filming it every now and again over the following years. The tree gradually shaped itself, folding its form around the hand. I thought it one of the most sensitive drawings I had ever seen. The tree was making its own shape, as it grew it responded to the intrusion of the artificial hand, flowing gracefully around it, acknowledging its presence, but not letting it get in the way of its growth, it revealed a relationship, that many of us have seen before, but not as clearly.

Tree and remains of old fence combine energy fields: Digital print

I have in the past made images myself of situations such as a tree and fence becoming entwined as the tree flows around the metal that has been erected next to it. (As above, where I thought it looked as if the tree was eating the fence.) In these images I tried to show how energy flows were intermingled; but Penone took his time and made sure his idea had properly conjoined with the life flow of the tree; making the work in 'tree-time', rather than human time. 

Giuseppe Penone: I have Been a Tree in the Hand, 1984-1991

Penone's was an art work made over many years and it reminded me that we rarely take into account the different time frames within which the world works.

Tree and gesture 1985-1991 wood with iron

During the late 1980s Penone would return to the idea several times, in the case of the image above, it is perhaps much easier to see that he was thinking of this growth event as a drawing; it being finished once the branch of the tree is removed and transported into a gallery. 

The animated short film 'Rocks' (2001), by Chris Stenner, Arvid Uibel and Heidi Wittlinger, reminds us that rocks, trees, the wind, the sea, plants, bacteria, birds, insects and other creatures, all have their own particular time signatures within which they operate.

 

Das Rad

However, these rocks as observers make a fundamental mistake in their view of what is happening, they are in fact part of a much larger pattern, woven into being by a series of interrelationships, part of an, as Bohm put it, "undivided wholeness", (1995, p.134) in which the observers are not separate from what is observed. 

Penone's tree creates an analogy, whereby the tree accepts the iron grip of the hand as part of its reality and rather than rejecting it, it flows around it. This for myself clarifies the relationship between consciousness and the material world. We often think of our consciousness as being something separate from the world, it is the seat out of which we can observe the world. But as Bohm goes on to explain in the final part of 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order', "consciousness and matter in general are basically the same order" (1995, p.208), they can affect each other, "mind enfolds matter in general and therefore the body in particular. Similarly, the body enfolds not only the mind but also in some sense the entire material universe." (p.209) The atoms of our bodies being enfolded throughout all space and time, the mind and body being one. Bohm then goes to to state that, it is therefore misleading to "think of ourselves as independent entities, that interact with other human beings and with nature." (210), all are projections of a single totality. At a deeper level of order, the tree and the hand are one, the thought that brought the hand into contact with the tree, being of the same order of reality as the tree itself. 

When I make a drawing or a ceramic object there is no separation between my hand, my thoughts and the materials with which I am engaged with. Whether I'm making a drawing of the landscape in front of me or constructing a drawing out of my imagination, both are again projections of a single totality. 

Notebook drawing 

In my notebook drawing made to remind myself of an experience of how a tree had grown in response to an old wire metal fence, an old moment of consciousness is frozen and becomes as physical as the initial experience. Then at a later date, this drawing becomes a starting point for a digital image, one that I have just now used as an opening image for this post, one thing triggers another into existence. 

For Penone, a tree is a perfect sculpture/drawing/work of art. A living entity that like ourselves, records every instant of its life and experience in its structure. He comes back to this several times, sometimes bringing the tree together with stone forms, as in his project for the Garden of Stone below. In this case a drawing of a possibility, comes into existence as a solidified idea, one that in its turn, becomes another reality. 

Project for the Garden of Stone: 1968

Penone at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

At other times he takes rubbings or casts from trees, in the installation “Pensieri e Linda”, below, he makes a frottage of elderberry leaves on a linen canvas, of the trunk of a thirty metre high acacia tree. 

“Pensieri e Linda”

At one point during the late 1960s Penone decided to build a ring of wax around a tree. As he did this he realised that the wax registered two impressions; the bark of the tree and the press of his fingers; a double identity, tree and human conjoined. His drawing 'I felt the breath of the wood', reminding myself of how closely humans can find themselves identified with a tree and that shamanic practices can still be integral to how contemporary art is constructed. 

Giuseppe Penone: I felt the breath of the wood

"When you have your eyes open, the space outside goes inside your mind".
Giuseppe Penone

Reference

Bohm, D (1995) Wholeness and the Implicate Order London: Routledge

The perfection of the tree An interview with Giuseppe Penone

See also:

Ilana Halperin: Minerals of New York

Letting things happen

Charcoal

Drawings as entanglements of life

Drawings as aesthetic transducers