Giuseppe Penone and Cleverness
February 2004

As an artist, in the process of sorting through the possible connotations of the choices I make in my own work, I often find myself saying, “No, I can’t do it that way, that’s too damn clever.” Of course, if ever anyone hears me say this, they have to ask me what the hell I mean; after all, isn’t cleverness a good thing? It would seem that to call an artwork clever would be to call it intelligent, innovative, logically sound and clearly presented. People generally aspire to be clever, and should hope to make clever artwork if artwork is what they make, so why wouldn’t I want to make clever work?

“Well,” I explain, “there are a few reasons. Some of those have to do with the specific ideas I hope to address in my work, but others have more to do with the state of cleverness in contemporary art - and indeed contemporary culture – today. People know when they’re seeing cleverness in artwork these days; they can smell it… they also know that whoever made the work knows it’s there, and they know that people seeing it know, and that people seeing it know they know….” But this is ridiculous. Why care about this? “Look around,” I reply, “and you’ll find that wherever there’s cleverness, there’s fussy pretense, there’s slimy trendyness, there’s elitist smugness… there’s an awful attitude which basically says, ‘I’m so smart, and you’re so lucky to be seeing my artwork,’ and I don’t want to have anything to do with this, even if I don’t have such an attitude.”

Giuseppe Penone’s work, currently on view at the Drawing Center, has forced me to somewhat revise my rather cynical attitude on cleverness. In opposition to what we might call gratuitous and/or simulated cleverness, as outlined above, we might posit the existence of a kind of honest and/or simple cleverness in contemporary art. This variety is unfortunately rare, but through Penone’s work, we can see that it is there, and it can be rewarding.

Let’s first turn to the 1997 series of drawings made with adhesive tape and charcoal on paper. These include Forehead, Eye, Ear, Mouth, as well as Oak and Medlar Tree. As is normally the case with drawings, these are recognizable, two-dimensional images, made with the materials denoted in the description of the work, representing the objects referred to by the titles. What is interesting about these pieces is that they have taken these rules, followed them, but have made something very different from what is normally made this way. In Ear, for instance, charcoal had been applied to the real ear, and then adhesive tape had been systematically brought into contact with it, picking up charcoal from the high spots; the tape had then been attached to the paper in the proper order and configuration to produce the image of the ear. This is clever: this is finding a new idea in old parameters. It’s crafty, it’s cunning, it’s a twist on something, it’s inventive – clever, in a word. Instead of being a showboating complication of an issue, though, this is a simplification, a collapsing. And, what it implies, what it gives us to talk about, is a thing quite outside of the work; in other words, the spotlight is on the viewer’s broadened horizon, not on the artist’s “notable” achievement. These images and the process by which they were made give us new categories of representation and documentation, and lead us to consider the definition of the word “draw.” What does it mean if tape takes the place of the eye, the mind, and the hand which traditionally draw? Or does this process do that?

Another related piece, Acacia Thorns (Forehead), of 2002, could also be called clever in much the same way. It constitutes a playful yet meaningful “messing with” of the conventions and expectations of drawing. There are two moments of “Ah-ha!” with this piece: the first is when you realize that the “marks” which compose the image are in fact thorns – although their shape resembles pencil or paintbrush marks. The second “ah-ha” is when you realize that what had appeared to be some abstract, all-over composition is in fact an image taken quite accurately from the aforementioned Forehead of 1997. This forehead is enormous though, covering an entire wall: an unexpected distortion of scale, which is especially interesting considering that an image of only a forehead implies a “zooming in.”

Many of the pieces in this show function by applying a certain sort of witty ingenuity to questions of representation. To construct an image of a thing, to represent it, is a process we tend to take for granted. Hasn’t all the experimentation already been done? Isn’t any new work attempting to put a novel twist on representation just contrived and gimmicky? This work shows us that the answer is no. A good number of artists in recent years are apparently very afraid that the answer is yes to these questions though, and in being so consciously, carefully, intentionally innovative, as they do in response to this fear, they end up making some kind of simulation of cleverness, a twist which brings confusion, when it ought to bring clarity. Penone’s work is a refreshing reminder that art can be honest, direct, and smart, as it does bring clarity.