The Cyclical Time:
On the Phenomenon of Time in Arte Povera
Essay by Christiane Meyer-Stoll
Meyer-Stoll’s essay, On the Phenomenon of Time in Arte Povera , explores time across multiple registers: cyclical and perennial, measured and experienced, objective and subjective, embodied and personal. The essay highlights how Arte Povera artists (Giuseppe Penone, Mario Merz, Michelangelo Pistoletto etc.) attempted to engage with the mystery of time by interweaving philosophical, sociological, biological, and cosmic perspectives with their direct, personal experience of it. In this framework, time emerges as elastic and ungraspable, yet always embedded in lived experience. Not a neutral background, but a vessel for matter and energy, a receptacle for movement in perpetual occurrence.
The approach that resonates with me most deeply is Penone’s Albero di 2,30 metri (1976), which embodies an engagement with the cyclical, perennial time that turns, returns, and reflects. Carved from a fir tree, the work traces the visible record of its growth, peeling back layers to reveal what is both past and still present. In this way, Penone makes time tangible by turning it around, and letting the material speak. For me, the sculpture enacts a cyclical temporality where memory, growth, and decay are continuous and intertwined.
In my own practice, I engage with cyclical time through intertwined recollections of forms, materials, and gestures like braiding, weaving or shaping hair into springs. I work with living materials like carraway seeds, which carry the latent potential for rebirth, and use fire as sustenance to rebuild my belonging. This cyclical temporality becomes a home within time: like the form of springs representing recoiled time, experiences compressed by the passage of time, and once focused on, can spring back into life. A lived, personal perception of belonging that loops and preserves, constantly repeating and in motion, like an intimate and cosmic horizon held within the eye/I, a larger circle within a smaller one.
Giuseppe Penone, Albero di 2,30 metri (Cod 0298), 1976. Fir tree. 230 x 15 x 19 cm. Photo: Archivio Penone.
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