MASSIMO GRIMALDI INTERVIEWED B...
MASSIMO GRIMALDI INTERVIEWED BY MASSIMILIANO GIONII want both of us to be totally frank in this interview and I particularly do not want any of that self-congratulation or annoying complicity that you always find in this kind of interview. I have to tell you that I am more interested in my cousin’s sobriety and total normality than in the presumed exceptionalness of art. In other words, I think that art’s new frontier is its normality and I do not share the general opinion that still believes in its excellence.
Why do you do what you do?
I think that the question implies an idea of art that is as widespread as it is mistaken; an idea that sees art as being the mysterious frontier of man’s expressive capacities, and artists as diamond mines. In my opinion art sadly anticipates the mechanisms of human production, and the rules of the assembly lines of the future. Personally, I reject the sentimentality that survives around the figure of the artist; I want to think of myself as a person who is simply involved in the language of art. Therefore I can answer this question in the same way that anyone else doing any other work would answer it, or how you yourself would answer the same question: with very few interesting personal motivations.
Is your shyness, your modesty, your desire to be seen as just a person involved in the language of art a question of concentration, asceticism or laziness?
Normally I’d say all three, but really it is just a simple consequence of how I think and live.
What do you do exactly?
Within my field I am involved in proposing behavioural and formal models that are different to the usual ones. I don’t want to produce anything new, because the old always manages to survive in the new. I try to realistically understand and predict the mechanisms according to which my work inevitably becomes obsolete. I think it’s the only right thing to do, however confused it may seem. Every generation makes fun of its predecessor and success in a given moment actually corresponds to a historic failure. Also, alongside my artistic work, but separately from it, I try to have a social conscience.
How does your social conscience intersect with your artistic work?
If my work were intersected by my social conscience then it would become demagogic. Their unification occurs within me, not within my work. A work of art is simply a work of art, with all its limitations. In Europe there are more artists than in Africa, where we speak of folkloristic rather than artistic manifestations. This is not because Europeans have a greater intelligence or sensibility; it is merely because they have extremely opulent socio-economic structures. And therefore art is evidently a crude economic consequence. I try not to forget this.
What do you never want to forget?
What I have believed in, so that I can manage, one day, not to believe it any more.
What do you give and what do you take?
I have tried to learn from my mistakes. Often what I do is the result of what I don’t think I should do. However, I think it is presumptuous to talk about what I could give. Altruism is a sophisticated form of egoism and often generosity is just expediency.
Then who do you do it for?
For me a work of art is merely an intermediary level that divides the artist from his public. I can’t see that it contains any particular capacity for communicating, even if we insist of wanting to believe the opposite. My answer can only be consequential and unsatisfactory.
Do you work to please yourself or others?
More simply, I think that I work to understand myself in relation to others.