L'Arte stanca, 1993

The title should be taken at face value: art is tiring. It is not the artwork that tires, but those who enter the art space. Any self-respecting museum takes this into account and provides a remedy: the bench, a discreet piece of furniture, a functional item, a place set aside for the traditional contemplative sitting in front of the masterpiece. The Pecci Museum lacked one. Cavenago provides the missing remedy – site-specific – and makes it the focus of his work, but presents it in a form that offers no respite. Awaiting the weary visitor are thirty-two metres of walking space on a stainless-steel bench shaped like a parallelogram: a shape that resembles a blade more than a comfortable wooden and velvet seat, resting on a row of cubes, each fifty centimetres on a side, fixed to the floor at regular intervals, each fitted with supporting spheres at the top. You sit down and, whilst seated, you glide along. The pause becomes a journey. The irony lies not in a wry nod, but in the mechanism itself: the public are offered a ‘knife-bench’, and those who surrender to it, playing along, discover they have set something in motion.

No motor, no power supply. The energy comes from the public, who, in the act of yielding to fatigue, become the mechanism. It is the reversal of the museum’s topos of static contemplation: one does not look whilst standing still, but moves; and with this movement, the interpretation of the exhibition space shatters into a succession of shifting vistas. Cavenago has temporarily suspended the large wheels of the vehicles and pillars and reduced the mechanics to a ball bearing: from the vehicle to the glide. The machine’s dimensions shrink, but its dynamic potential does not.

The scale, after all, is not sculptural but architectural. Thirty-two metres is not a length; it is the museum’s floor plan viewed head-on: the bench does not occupy a single room, but spans four, crossing the wall partitions and cutting diagonally across them, defying the orthogonality that underpins the building. Architecture establishes the axes, the route, the sequence of spaces; this piece of furniture contradicts them at a height of sixty centimetres, and in doing so takes on a task that belonged to the building: to provide direction. It is the same orientating gesture as the east–west colonnade at the Martin-Gropius-Bau and the arrangement of movable parallelograms in A sostegno dell’Arte. And, as was already the case in Piedistallo, 1989, what serves a subsidiary function in the museum—that of supporting, housing, providing a resting place—ceases to serve art and takes its place.

When stationary, the work presents itself as a serial sculpture: a regular rhythm of cubes, a continuous bar, constructive geometry. When activated, it is a tool. The wall behaves as a taut surface and the steel blade cuts through it, opening up the space beyond, declaring that there is space behind the plane. An operation that, in Milan, forty years earlier, had already been carried out on a canvas with a sharp, definitive gesture, and which is here re-enacted in plan view, slowly, at the pace of a seated viewer. The work exists in this oscillation between piece of furniture and contraption, and it is the weariness of the person entering that determines its nature.

In museums, the bench is the place of contemplative rest and a conventional furnishing element.
The mobile steel bench, L'Arte stanca, (1993), resting on a series of supports fixed to the floor and fitted with ball bearings for sliding, allowed the seated audience to cross diagonally through the halls of the Pecci Museum in Prato by touching their ends.
The apparent piece of furniture, being able to slide from one end of the museum to the other, lost its reassuring static nature: its use and its movement conferred `function,` a property that, not belonging to the sphere of art, introduces a new attribute on which Cavenago's later work would develop.

Umberto Cavenago shifts the focus towards constructive geometry, using his mechanical constructions to decipher the coordinates with which spectators transit in the vicinity.

In the apparent systematic approach of the construction elements – steel cubes meas- uring 50 cm a side, set at regular distances from each other, in a 32 metre long stretch – Cavenago obliges us to indulge in an optical gymkhana that does not allow us to interpret his work in any one direction. Crossing through all four exhibition rooms, Art Tires You constitutes their fulcrum while also underscoring their spatial dynamism, demolishing the obviousness of the architectural axes. Abandoning his previous monumental constructions set on wheels, Cavenago has now reduced the dimensions of his machines, but not their dynamic potential. The little spheres set on the upper sides of the individual structures enable the bench resting on the cubes to move, so that the spectator has a possibility to sit down in every room. Treating the idea of the static perception of the work of art ironically, Cavenago thus focuses attention on the observer’s responsibility and on the need for him to be physically and emotionally involved in the life of art.