It has been a pleasure to present this series over the past two months. Each scholar provided their insight into how artists of the period challenged traditional methods of production and systems of value, framing their experimentation within the broader socio-political unrest of the period as protests against industrialization, consumerism, and class inequality swept across Italy.
The lecture will last approximately 45 minutes and be followed by a Q&A session and reception with light refreshments.
Reserve tickets on Eventbrite. Guests must be able to provide proof of vaccination in order to attend.
Material Matters: Artistic Labor in Giuseppe Penone's Sculpture
Elizabeth Mangini, Chair and Associate Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture Program at California College of the Arts
April 30, 2022, 3:00-5:00 p.m.
Is a sculptor’s work equivalent to the movements of a stream, the force of a storm, or the germination of a plant? Giuseppe Penone’s artworks prompt such questions, exploring the notion of artistic labor as a reconfigured and often reciprocal relationship between the artist's body and the material world. This lecture will explore a selection of the Italian artist’s works, from the late 1960s to the present, in order to understand his repositioning artistic making as a negotiation of forces, rather than domination of raw materials. Some projects propose the artist as a relatively passive force and the material as active one, while others demonstrate an interdependent entanglement. When Penone sculpts a piece of wood to rediscover the form of the tree from which it came, he creates a portal through which viewers can compare familiar experiences of time – such as that which it would take to carve wood by hand – with the vastly expanded temporal frame that characterizes a tree’s organic development. Such projects are rooted in aesthetic concerns, yet they inevitably reflect aspects of the social and intellectual milieu of 1960s-1970s Italy, in which bodies and time figured predominantly in ongoing debates about labor, political power, and human experience.
About Elizabeth Mangini
Elizabeth Mangini is an art historian specializing in social and material histories of postwar and contemporary art. She regularly contributes to Artforum magazine and has authored essays in several international books, journals, and exhibition catalogues. Her book Seeing Through Closed Eyelids: Giuseppe Penone and the Nature of Sculpture was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2021. Dr. Mangini serves on the editorial board of the Italian contemporary art journal Palinsesti and is a member of the scientific committee of the Mimmo Rotella Institute in Milan. She is an Associate Professor at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and is the Chair of the History of Art and Visual Culture program there.
Design by Waterhouse Cifuentes
