Giuseppe Penone vs PHILTH HAUS

Across generations, artists have used materiality to render difficult connections visible. The use of material, whether in image-making, sculpture, or performance, reflects the changes of its time. One of the masters of Arte Povera – Giuseppe Penone – is famous for his interventions into the natural world and his precise replicas of geological erosion. His groundbreaking work emerges from a period where raw materials imbued with their own significance became paradigms of the moment. Yet, he maneuvered within a scene very different than our contemporary environment. Even at the time, criticisms towards the socially exclusionary framework of Arte Povera appeared such as by the feminist collective Le Nemesiache. Heeding these calls, the future does not need single positions of socio-political privilege to discuss our relationship to nature and planet earth but rather, multiplicities and choruses. While Penone himself is not responsible for the patriarchal conditions of 1970’s Italy, his position in history is connected to these unapologetic institutional practices of exclusion which are finally coming under revision.

As a master of conceptual sculpture, Penone consistently made works on nature, porosity, time, and identity. Through his oeuvre, he has established a visual philosophy on our relationship with trees, rivers, and oceanic time. For his first solo exhibition in 1968 at the age of 21, Penone presented works made of lead, iron, wax, wood, plaster, and burlap at Turin’s Deposito D’Arte Presente. This focus on raw material continued in works such as Corda, Pioggia, Sole, (1968), and his most well-known piece It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point (1968). In the work examined here – Essere Fiume (1981) the simplicity of materials remains with references solely to stone and time.

In Essere Fiume (1981), Penone found the rounded shape of stones in a riverbed. Fascinated by this slow sculpture, the name of the work refers to the artist becoming a river. He traced the river to high mountains where bits of stone are carved off and broken over centuries of storms and make their way down the twisting waters. At these mountains, he broke off the original rock and replicated at an accelerated rate the work of the river with artistic tools. Carving the stone by hand, he created the effect of centuries of water carving at the rough outlines molecularly. Time is compressed into instantaneous production and the power of the sculptor is paralleled with nature. The smooth stone is produced not by centuries, but by cutting, filing, and buffing, to achieve a smooth outline identical to nature’s weathering. The final work is two identical stones indistinguishable between nature and the human hand. This play on aesthetic and material is based on premises of power and control, of the ability of humankind to replicate and produce nature.

This consideration of material is still highly relevant today – in a world in which spatial networks create complex meaning across semi-autonomous works of art. The collective PHILTH HAUS similarly investigates the charge and power of materiality in relation to the subjectivity of the body. Working with materials comparable to Penone such as lithium or algae, the collective’s sculptures contain the ability to change the function of the mind or gendered identity. Bodies undergoing transitions are likened to tectonic movements or marine urban ecosystems. If Penone’s works seek to warp or replicate nature with the power of the artist’s hand, PHILTH HAUS proposes a radical shift where nature is instrumental in defining the human body.

The young trans-artist collective PHILTH HAUS describe their practice as a “material activation of the immaterial.” Actions, sculpture, video, and installation make visible the chemical links that straddle seemingly-incompatible species. In early works such as Coly 2.0, the artists display algae which have begun to biologically collect feminizing hormones after exposure to contaminated water from human activity. During the performance, an estrogenized human body currently undergoing hormone replacement therapy ingests algae collected from the Dutch coast. The pumping of the algae and movement of the performer are accompanied by a musical track written and recorded by PHILTH HAUS called “Lullaby for Coly.” Tubes twist around the body reminiscent of Rebecca Horn’s “Overflowing Blood Machine” (1970) that meshes the insides and the outsides of the body, and asserts a need to redefine the relation between the body and organic material in biochemical synergy.

By comparing two works – Giuseppe Penone’s Essere Fiume (1981) and PHILTH HAUS’ ISDIY (2021) concerns of the anthropocene and identity are investigated four decades apart to create work that offers not only different, but opposed proposals.

In the installation ISDIY (2021), PHILTH HAUS comes together for the first time with all of its members. Several works co-exist within this installation to create the whole. The central work PHILIP:ISDIY is a container that holds a Lithium-carbonate pool. Within the milky liquid, porcelain shards emerge from the surface, breaking the liquid tension as a robot swims in the cloudy water creating subtle disturbances. Lithium is commonly used to treat bipolar disorder as well as to charge the batteries of our handheld devices and here reminds us of the material connection between psychology and technology. This piece is surrounded by the multi-screen video installation SYLLA:ISDIY whose sound transcends the space through rhythmic poetry. On the ground, the sculptural installation COLY:ISDIY is made of algae-infused charcoal – a material also heavily cited in Arte Povera.

It is in the work Lylex 1.0 that the strongest opposition to Penone’s proposal is put forth. In this sculptural assemblage, a black camera case stands upright and the custom-cut foam houses a blood bag, valves, and a mushroom grow-sack. Here, the artists use their own life source and blood to grow edible, medicinal mushrooms creating a circular economy of the human body. Suspended from the ceiling, Andra: Transfusion (2021) presents the upper body of Andra on a printed glass surface. Free floating cancer cells mesh with autumn leaves on wet stones and estrogenized algae. The work was made in order to raise funds for Andra’s Angel Feminization Surgery, achieving the goal made it possible to perform life-affirming surgery. The work of PHILTH HAUS turns the work of Penone inside out, it proposes the human body as a malleable, temporal, and transcendent entity that inherently relies on outside matter and chemistry for its day-to-day functionality, appearance, and improvement. The video work SYLLA that plays inside of the installation ISDIY (2021) PHILTH HAUS member Sylla reads out a poem about their desires and the images they have of young girlhood received via mass media.

I want a transformation as easy as falling into bed.

I want my face to shift its skeletal structure with the immensity of earth tectonics.

I want my breasts to fill with the same ease and excitement of a kid in summer making water balloons.

And I want my gender to be treated with the same preciousness of a suburban mother informing a stranger that her golden retriever is a she not a he.

I want to be loved in the perfect and uncomplicated ways of a Pixar film.

I want to be seen with the same clarity as the picture on flatscreen televisions.

I want to be touched like a river smoothing the edges of a stone.

I want to be heard like a pop ballad.

As opposed to the integrated idea of the human body within a chemical and physical world created in ISDIY, Penone’s Essere Fiume still imagines the identity of the artist as an outsider in the natural order. Through his carving, he identifies himself as a river and sculpts a stone out of stone. For PHILTH HAUS, this river is already within them, as are millennia of tectonic shifts, and climate anxiety fueled ecological degradation. If Penone’s interests can be described as “the connection between man and the natural world” – the term “man” is not gratuitous. In the work of PHILTH HAUS, the philosophy is not only non-binary, but leads towards the non-human. Through this collective of trans-entities, we take a step forward towards transcendence into a monic realm where the planet and body can only be conceived as one.