Giuseppe Penone’s gilded bronze cast of a tree at the Whitechapel
In June, clusters of gilded bronze leaves by Rachel Whiteread unfurled on the facade of the Whitechapel Gallery; now, as autumn approaches, a gilded bronze cast of a tree will be spreading its branches through the building’s interior. The idea behind this year’s site-specific Bloomberg Commission (from 5th September) by the Italian artist Giuseppe Penone, is to highlight “hidden nature in the city” by bringing the outdoors in.
An artist who explores man’s relationship with nature, Penone began his career as part of the “Arte Povera” movement, using only poor man’s natural materials, but in the late 1980s he started casting trees in bronze for public spaces. Now bronze vegetation seems to be sprouting everywhere. There were two bronze trees in the 2003 Turner Prize—the Chapman brothers’ Goya-inspired gibbet tree hung with rotting carcasses (sculpted) and an apple tree by Anya Gallaccio hung with rotting apples (real). Since then we’ve seen bronze casts of pine cones by Sarah Darby, Espaliered Girl by Laura Ford, more bronze twigs and chestnuts by Gallaccio and a bronze and acrylic tree by Stephanie Carlton Smith in last year’s summer exhibition at the Royal Academy. If this signals a revival of the old-fashioned idea of communing with nature, it’s a surprisingly laborious way for contemporary artists to be going about it. There are easier ways of bringing the outdoors in, as we do at Christmas.
You won’t find any casts of vegetation in the Royal Academy’s autumn exhibition “Bronze” (from 15th September), although it does include an Etruscan branched lampstand in the form of a tree. The RA’s 5000-year history of this venerable medium in 150 objects only allows for a thin sprinkling of modern and contemporary examples—there’ll be a Louise Bourgeois spider, a Jeff Koons basketball and Jasper Johns’s ale cans. This is not for want of material to choose from. The sculpting medium consigned to the scrapheap in the 1960s is back in fashion. We’re living through a new age of bronze, though we might not know it, as postmodern artists like to avoid the taint of traditionalism by concealing the medium’s lustre under a coat of paint. To look at them, you’d never guess that under the plasticky surfaces of Hirst’s giant anatomical toys, the Chapmans’ sex dolls or Koons’s inflatable Hulks lurks the gleam of Rodin’s The Age of Bronze.
Bronze casting is an expensive process, so why waste money on something we can’t see? Because it repays the investment several times over. Contemporary collectors who would never buy an art object made of plastic will buy one that looks like plastic but is made of bronze. Tap it and see! It has the ring of metal, and with it the ring of artistic authenticity. Billionaires who pay millions for bronze replicas of plastic probably also believe that the ancient alchemy of the bronze casting process places Koons and Hirst in a sculptural lineage that goes back to Phidias, the ancient Greek master. Forget Arte Povera—in a nervous market the persistence of a “bronze standard” gives a semblance of stability and permanence to the art of the banal and ephemeral. Bronze carries weight. Compare the £1m paid in 2000 by Saatchi for Hirst’s giant anatomical toy Hymn, made of painted bronze, with the recent Christie’s auction price of £46,850 for Sarah Lucas’s sculpture Tit Teddy Make Love, made of tights, kapok and a wooden school chair. The price difference reflects more than the decline in the market and the difference in scale.
Almost alone among her Young British Artist generation, Sarah Lucas has resisted the lure of bronze. She even has reservations about using brass. “You might make a concrete sculpture,” she told the Guardian last year, “but it might be better than that brass one even if the brass one is worth more… that’s not where the value is.” Her throwaway materials—nylon tights, fags—are defiantly non-collectable, stubbornly refusing objectification as passive art objects. If Penone’s art is povera—or was before he took to gilding the lily—Lucas’s is skint. Her work is about the thrill of recognition, not the thrill of ownership. For years her non-commercialism infuriated her friend and patron Hirst, but she stuck to her guns and her concrete sculptures of marrows. And now, while Hirst’s Tate Modern retrospective has underwhelmed the critical establishment, Lucas is enjoying the professional accolade of a survey show, “Ordinary Things,” at the Henry Moore Institute (until 21st October), where her intrinsically valueless works are being positioned “within an art historical lineage that addresses the materials and processes of sculpture.”
Lucas’s idea of tree sculptures, incidentally, are logs of wood with jutting stumps shaped into plaster penises called “Tree Nobs”—funny, bawdy, poignant and wonderfully economical. The concept of truth to materials may be outdated, but there’s still an artistic virtue in simplicity. Laboriously mimicking reality, natural or manufactured, in ponderous bronze adds nothing to our understanding of it. It belongs in the realm of artifice rather than art.
