Un metro cubo di scultura, 1993

In 1967, Pino Pascali exhibited 1 mc di terra and 2 mc di terra: wooden parallelepipeds covered in earth, suspended from the wall, presented at the Attico and then, on Celant’s initiative, at the Bertesca in Genoa in the exhibition that gave Arte Povera its name. The title states a quantity with the precision of a construction site unit of measurement, but the volume is hollow and the actual measurements do not match those stated. The deception is twofold: the earth is a skin stretched over an empty frame, and the certificate is false.

Twenty-six years later, Cavenago revisits that formula and changes the noun. Not one cubic metre of earth, but one cubic metre of sculpture: the declared material is no longer a substance, but the category itself, quantified by volume just as concrete is measured. It is an explicit homage, but not a replica. It is the way in which a subsequent generation takes up a statement and examines its logical consequences, taking it as far as its own language allows.

And Cavenago’s language, in 1993, is that of the workshop. Wood and earth are answered by stainless steel sheet and turned aluminium. The sheet metal is, too, a skin: this cubic metre, too, encloses air, not mass. But it does not conceal this. The steel does not pretend to be solid in the way that earth pretended to be; it declares itself to be a surface that delimits a volume, and thus shifts the meaning of the title. If the sculpture is the cubic metre, then the sculpture is the contained space, not the metal that contains it.

A wheel is set into each vertical edge, at the top and bottom: eight in all, at the eight vertices of the hexahedron. They rotate on pins, are machined from solid aluminium and perfectly turned; the light plays across the concentric circles left by the cutting tool, making them appear as the most precious part of the object, set in the corners like a stone in its socket.

It is here that the work takes a different turn. In geometry, the vertex is the most abstract element of a solid: a dimensionless point where three planes meet and nothing else happens. Cavenago replaces it with a mechanical component. The cube is no longer defined by eight ideal points but by eight manufactured objects, and the most immaterial element of the figure becomes the most functional. Geometry ceases to be a property and becomes an assembly of parts.

The contrast between the two manufacturing processes is part of the discourse. The faces are made of sheet metal: broad, satin-finished, gently rippled by the light, with that soft curvature that every large metal surface possesses and does not conceal. The wheels are turned: rigorous, precise to the hundredth. The leather is approximate; the points of contact are exact. In Pascali’s work, the approximation lay in the stated dimensions; here it has shifted to the body, whilst the dimensions – and what makes them functional – have become impeccable.

The four lower wheels rest on the ground and lift the structure just slightly off the floor. The four upper wheels serve no purpose, and it is precisely for this reason that they convey the most important point: the cube has no top and no bottom. Turned over onto any face, it would behave in exactly the same way. It has no base, no orientation, no ‘correct’ position. It is a solid that has renounced its own base by incorporating it eight times over.

A cubic metre of steel in an exhibition hall inevitably resembles a plinth. But there is nothing on it: the title states that the plinth is the sculpture, and that it is so by virtue of its quantity. It is the same reversal as in Piedistallo (1989), where the plinth took the place of the statue it was meant to support, and of the 1993 exhibition L’Arte stanca at the Pecci Museum, where the museum benches rested on supporting spheres and transformed the waiting area’s furnishings into a mechanism that shifted the viewer’s position. This is the essence of the series: ancillary elements of the exhibition system — the plinth, the seat, the unit of measurement — elevated to the status of content and set in motion.

For the wheels are not a mechanical ornament: they are the very condition of the work. They make the cubic metre movable, and with it the space it encloses. What Pascali had fixed to the wall—a false volume of inexact measurement—here rests on the floor, exact, and can be pushed. The sculpture no longer occupies a place: it traverses one. And its quantity—the cubic metre stated in the title—remains the same wherever it goes—which is exactly what one would expect from a delivery, and what one had never expected from a sculpture.