Elizabeth Mangini at Artforum:
Throughout the late 1960s and ’70s, the heyday of Arte Povera and European conceptualism, Anselmo continued to create objects that use the slightest material intervention as a means to heighten viewers’ awareness of the relativity of human existence and the natural forces that determine it. They provoke interrogation without offering resolution. He was invited to take part in Daniela Palazzoli’s groundbreaking Con temp l’azione—a punning title that refers to both contemplation and time-based actions—which was an exhibition that spanned three different Turin galleries and issued a foldout broadsheet as its catalogue. Fittingly, Anselmo created works for this show that reinforced reflection on the way we exist in a nexus of natural and built environments. Direzione (Direction), 1967–68, for instance, is a low triangular slab of schist with a small compass embedded in its surface. The stone is a metamorphic rock, meaning it was formed in response to environmental heat or pressure, and the compass responds to Earth’s magnetic field, indicating the point of reference we call North. Brought together into this succinct arrangement, which reflects the logic of Duchamp’s assisted readymades, the natural material and the manufactured tool offer palpable traces of the ever-present natural forces that determine our sense of the world, even in the supposedly neutral white cube of the gallery.
more here.