10. Repetition and difference
Nature does not produce copies.
Even when two elements belong to the same species, share the same origin or derive from similar conditions, they always retain a singularity of their own. No leaf coincides perfectly with another. No cloud repeats itself. No fragment of rock can be superimposed on another without differences emerging.
Some have tried to prove otherwise. In 1981, at Konrad Fischer’s gallery in Düsseldorf, Giuseppe Penone presented Essere fiume: a stone collected from the bed of a stream and a stone that the artist extracted from the mountain the first had come from, carving it until it was identical. To arrive at the copy he does not imitate the form: he repeats, blow after blow, the work of the water.
Here too a found stone and a made stone stand side by side. Here too sculpture does not impose a form: it retraces a process.
But the paths soon part. Penone starts from a specific stone and wants to arrive at that stone: his work tends towards identity. In the river, he writes, “No element, none of its forms are accidental.” The Erratici start from the opposite. They have no model to reach, only a rule.
Penone produces a stone out of stone, with the same matter as the mountain. The Erratici are made of what the mountain is not: steel, plastic, gold, wood. They do not try to blend in with nature; they declare their distance from it.
In Essere fiume the sculptor’s hand takes the place of the water. In the Erratici the rule leaves an empty place, and chance enters that place.
Nor does the procedure produce copies.
Same cube, same calibre, same eight truncations: and never the same object. The rule establishes how many times to cut, not how deep or at what inclination. It fixes the number, not the measure. It is in that gap that chance enters.
A cast produces identity. This produces a family.
The first test is a pair. Erratico accidentale calibro 100 n. 1 and n. 2 come from the same ten-centimetre cube and the same score: placed side by side, they resemble each other no more than two pebbles picked up in the same stream.
The rule can also change hands. With Erratico commissionato, in 2022, the score becomes a written instruction, entrusted to Hannes Egger, who carries it out in Swiss stone pine. The author sets the rule, someone else performs it: chance changes performer.
The elements are recognisable as belonging to a set, same origin, same grammar, same number of faces, and yet none can be superimposed on another. This is exactly the condition of natural fragments: relatives, not twins.
Something follows from this that could not be foreseen at the outset.
Repeating the procedure does not lessen the singularity of the pieces: it produces it. Each performance adds a variant that did not exist before, and the longer the rule is applied, the more evident it becomes that the rule does not determine the result. The only way to know what form will come is to carry it out.
It is the same condition as the mountain that crumbles. There is no plan that establishes what the next block will be like: there is a process that repeats itself, and each time something different falls.
All these objects, like the boulders they derive from, are solid.
Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago
Installation on a rock at the Gotthard Pass. Several elements with different shapes but the same calibre. 3D print in PLA
Giuseppe Penone, Essere fiume, 1981
at Konrad Fischer’s gallery in Düsseldorf
at Konrad Fischer’s gallery in Düsseldorf
© Archivio Giuseppe Penone
Photo © Nanda Lanfranco
Erratico accidentale calibro 100 n. 2, 2018
3D print in PLA, 10 × 10 × 10 cm
3D print in PLA, 10 × 10 × 10 cm
Erratico commissionato, 2022
Swiss stone pine, 2 elements, 31 × 31 × 31 cm each
Swiss stone pine, 2 elements, 31 × 31 × 31 cm each