Platea, 1994

The 22nd Gubbio Sculpture Biennale is entitled ‘Emergenze’ and focuses on the relationship between metal, earth and concrete, bringing together Jan Vercruysse, Jaume Plensa, Gilberto Zorio, Nicola Bolla, Vettor Pisani, Costas Varotsos and a new generation of young Italian artists. In Cavenago, the exhibition occupies a room in the Casa di Sant’Ubaldo, a building recognised by Gubbio as the home of its patron saint, built between the 13th and 14th centuries for the Accoromboni family. The walls are plastered white, there is a monumental stone fireplace, and the floor is laid with terracotta hexagons. There is already a lectern in the hall. It is a piece of furniture, not a work of art, and like all furniture, it presupposes what is missing: the audience. Cavenago does not simply add a sculpture to the room; he completes the sentence the room had left unfinished, and creates the audience.

Three rows, three rectangular wooden benches, resting on galvanised steel cubes fitted with supporting spheres: the same system installed the previous year at the Pecci Museum in Prato for L’Arte stanca. The material of the seat has changed; here it is not a steel blade but the thick wood of a school or canteen bench, and its purpose has changed, for the structure no longer serves contemplation but listening. The principle remains the same: the furniture that is supposed to ensure immobility is, in fact, the very point where immobility breaks down. Those who sit down can slide sideways, and the cubes lined up beyond the footprint of the benches indicate that the available travel is longer than the row itself.

The irony operates on two levels of language. Teaching is, by definition, static: the teacher stands at the lectern, occupies a fixed point, speaks from a position that is not open to question. In this classroom, however, the students have variable and movable points of view, and they exercise these whilst remaining seated, without any dramatic gestures, simply by sliding sideways. This shift of just a few centimetres is enough for the frontal geometry of teaching to lose its prominence. The installation does not challenge the lectern; it leaves it where it is: it merely makes everything else mobile, and in doing so calls into question the idea that certainties are transmitted from a fixed point to an equally fixed audience.

This is the approach that has run through all of Cavenago’s work since the late 1980s. In Piedistallo(1989), it was the plinth that took the place of the sculpture it was meant to support. In L’Arte stanca(1993), it was the museum bench that became the mechanism shifting the viewer. Here it is the floor, that is, the silent and subservient part of the hall, that becomes the artwork and reorganises the space, in a medieval room that holds many of these handed-down certainties. The subversive element, as always in Cavenago, lies not in the gesture but in the mechanics: four spheres beneath a wooden board are enough to render provisional an order that was thought to be established.