Today is the last day of Giuseppe Penone’s seminal show at Versailles. Conceptual fine arts dialogues with the master (not talking about Arte Povera)

 

Conceptuafinearts: Could you tell us something about the working method that produced the works exhibited in the Palace of Versailles? Specifically, what is the relationship between the artist and the material?

 

Giuseppe Penone: I’ve always been working on the matter. I start from the idea that the material itself can reveal its forms, or better, that it can suggest some forms. That means, from my side, to ascribe the material a value that is put in relations with whom works on it, that is to say the artist. The result is an idea of equality between the material and the artist, and ultimately, between the man and the nature. In my work, thus, there never is this environmentalist rhetoric, nowadays so popular, of man dominating nature and destroying it. It goes without saying that if man and nature are on the same level, if they are the same thing, then if man destroys nature, he also destroys himself.

 

Cfa: Gmo, cloning, aren’t these man’s interventions in nature?

 

GP: No, they aren’t. If man is nature, then any of his product, any of his action is natural. It is just a new and extremely sophisticated means through which nature is transforming. I’m not giving any value judgment, I am just noticing that there isn’t a conflict, but simply a mutation going on.

 

Cfa: Were your works for the Palace of Versailles site-specific art?

 

GP: No. I don’t think that creating artworks specifically for the place they are intended for is a good enough reason to make art. This attitude is certainly more related to the interests of the museums rather than to the interest of the art itself. Since the end of the 1980s, in order to attract more people, museums have started also to produce art (it wasn’t like that before), that is to say they allot part of their budget to the commission and the realization of artworks.

 

Cfa: Don’t you think is a good choice?

 

GP: During the 1980s it could have been a motivated choice, there were many attempts undergoing to change the system. However, I believe that nowadays the problem regarding museums’ management is getting irrelevant to the problem of art.

 

Cfa: What is, in your art, the relations between the existing material and the creation of forms?

 

GP: It’s the matter in practice that hints at its actual shape, I believe this to be one of the basis of sculpture, but not only of sculpture. Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, used to say that one of his teachings was that of painting starting from the imagination on a damp stain. This idea opposes to another concept of the artist’s work that is of creator of forms, which stem only from his thoughts. By following the material, or better the natural aspect of the material, new reflections are conceived, thus new forms, which result from the material, without however distorting it, and are as much satisfactory, for whoever creates them, as inventing forms from scratch.

 

Cfa: You mentioned Leonardo. According to you, are there other similarities between such method and the ancient art?

 

GP: Similarities have often been made with Michelangelo, the sculpture that is done by removing. I would say that this process of creation can be pinpointed back to the beginning of the history of image’s creation. I’ve been lucky enough to visit a cave in the Ardeche, called Grot Chauvet. It was discovered during the mid 1990s. It is closed to the public and contains cave paintings that trace back to 30 thousand years ago. They are marvelous, perfectly preserved thanks to a landslide which had closed the entrance of the cave. Well, by closely looking at them, you can realize that the paintings are in fact suggested by the actual shape of the rock: the painter grasped, in the outline of the rock face, the shape of an animal which was later going to depict, bringing it to light. I am going to say something now which art historians would probably consider a nonsense. However, I think that Duchamp, with his ready made, hasn’t actually created a work to conceptualize the displacement, but to indicate, thanks to this shift, a shape that is intrinsic in the object. If that urinal hadn’t have such a strong intrinsic shape, then it would have not been so shocking in the history of art.

 

Cfa: Are there other analogies between your work and Duchamp’s one?

 

GP: Well, it is evident that. in Duchamp’s, the industrial production, that is done by men, becomes matter, as the matter of nature.

 

Cfa: What does it mean, for an artist, to meet with a global public?

 

GP: To artists of my generation, globalization is nothing new. I think that globalization has entered the art world well before than the economy and the finance. To grasp this phenomenon, it is enough to think about the simplification of the matter that has characterized most of the works since the end of 1960s. This process of simplification, from my point of view, wasn’t separated from the idea that art had to overcome national borders and communicate with other cultures. Many pieces from the 1970s could be understood in Italy as well as in South America, or in the East for that matter. The language employed very simple forms, such as the spiral or the circle, figures that belonged to the cultures of various countries. The language was starting to include the matter, too. In other words, it was the end of an epoch in which a certain kind of art, produced by a certain society, imposed itself upon other cultures in order to colonies them. On the contrary, in art, amongst the artists, there already was the idea of a global village.

 

Cfa: Yet in artistic literature, also from the second half of the 1900, the bond between artists and nationality seem to be very strong indeed.

 

GP: However, in most cases, there wasn’t a real intention of the artists to assert their relationship with their country of origin. We wouldn’t say “I am an Italian artist”, the Germans wouldn’t say “I am a German artist”… This local point of view was introduced by critics and, above all, by museums, which had to defend their own cultural products, thus recreating the concept of national identity that nevertheless, was quite poor at that time. The only exception was France, whose idea of national identity was very strong, also in art, possibly thanks to De Gaulle’s politics. Generally however, nationalism was regarded as a danger, because the memories of the II World War were still extremely vivid.

 

Cfa: Are there many deceitful artists?

 

GP: Someone can make a work of art, having only the best intentions, still it can end up in a bad piece. However, it could also happen that an artist is guided by wrong purposes, which however may conceive a good work. As you can see, deceit is not always a limit.

July 15, 2015