Maurizio Cattelan: All

All

Maquettes for the model for Maurizio Cattelan: All, 2011

Maurizio Cattelan

All

Nancy Spector

CONTENTS

Prologue

1. The Aesthetics of Failure

2. Political Dimensions

3. Duality and Death

4. From Disrespect to Iconoclasm

5. Spectacle Culture and the Mediated Image

Coda

Selected Bibliography

Selected Exhibition History

Catalogue

Katherine Brinson, Diana Kamin,

William S. Smith, Susan Thompson

MAURIZIO CATTELAN: All

The Leadership Committee for Maurizio Cattelan: All is gratefully acknowledged.

Founding Members

Steven A. and Alexandra M. Cohen Foundation

Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann

Massimo De Carlo

Danielle and David Ganek

Judie and Howard Ganek

Marian Goodman

The Mugrabi Collection

Gael Neeson and Stefan Edlis

Galerie Perrotin

Amy and John Phelan

Samantha and Aby Rosen

Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin

Beth Swofford

Lisa and Steven Tananbaum

David Teiger

And those who wish to remain anonymous

Members

Henry Buhl

Dakis Joannou

Supporters

Attilio Codognato

Honor Fraser and Stavros Merjos

Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte

As of August 3, 2011

Daddy, Daddy, 2008

PREFACE

At once seductive and disturbing, exuberant and sorrowful, Maurizio Cattelan’s multifaceted practice chronicles the follies and paradoxes of contemporary society and the individual’s struggle to find a place within it. Delighting in the subversion of artistic and cultural norms, his works infiltrate the viewer’s consciousness with startling imagery and enigmatic narratives. Despite his trademark persona of the hapless antihero and engagement with the themes of failure and despair, Cattelan has created a body of work over the past twenty-five years that has established him as one of the most eloquent and distinctive voices in contemporary art.

The Guggenheim’s commitment to Cattelan’s work was formalized over a decade ago with the acquisition of La Rivoluzione siamo noi (2000), a diminutive rendering of the artist dangling from a clothes rack, which is featured in this exhibition. Our relationship with the artist was extended in the group show theanyspacewhatever (2008–09), for which Cattelan engaged the unique spatial dynamics of Frank Lloyd Wright’s building by conceiving a work for the fountain on the rotunda floor. Daddy, Daddy (2008), a depiction of the Disney character Pinocchio floating facedown in the pool as if the victim of a tragic tumble from the ramps above, was a memorable exercise in site-specificity. Three years later, the museum’s dramatic potential has again inspired a bold intervention by the artist. In a radical conceptual gesture, Maurizio Cattelan: All takes the form of a riotous cluster of work hanging in the central space of the rotunda, presenting his entire oeuvre in a moment of disorienting suspended animation. Encompassing sculptures, installations, photographs, paintings, and works on paper that date from the late 1980s to the present, the exhibition is the first comprehensive overview of Cattelan’s production. A culmination of his infamous attempts to evade professional obligations and confound public expectations, Cattelan’s installation defies the ordered hierarchies and conventional viewing conditions of the solo retrospective and will, for the duration of the exhibition, constitute an overarching artwork.

Our sincere gratitude is due to a group of patrons, spearheaded by Danielle and David Ganek, who comprise the exhibition’s Leadership Committee. As of this catalogue’s printing, the founding members of the committee include the Steven A. and Alexandra M. Cohen Foundation; Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann; Massimo De Carlo; Judie and Howard Ganek; Marian Goodman; The Mugrabi Collection; Gael Neeson and Stefan Edlis; Galerie Perrotin; Amy and John Phelan; Samantha and Aby Rosen; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Beth Swofford; Lisa and Steven Tananbaum; David Teiger; and those who wish to remain anonymous. The committee has also benefitted from the largesse of other members and supporters, listed before the preface. We could not have realized a project of this scope without their support of the museum as well as their long-standing commitment to the artist’s work. Special thanks are also due to Cattelan’s three primary galleries: Massimo De Carlo, Milan; Galerie Perrotin, Paris; and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, for their generous and essential support.

Every major survey exhibition depends on the generosity of public and private lenders, but in the case of this unconventional installation, we must especially commend the individuals and institutions, listed in the Lenders section of this book, who have lent cherished works from their collections and enthusiastically supported the artist’s wishes for their display.

Equally, this ambitious undertaking could not have occurred without the exceptional leadership of Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, who has worked in close concert with the artist for years to develop the installation concept and oversee its implementation. Every aspect of the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue has been shaped by Nancy’s scholarship and inventive curatorial perspective, and her contribution to this volume constitutes an important new assessment of Cattelan’s oeuvre.

Lastly, our deepest thanks are due to Maurizio Cattelan, who has devoted his time and energy to the project with unstinting generosity. Maurizio Cattelan: All is a remarkable testament to the power and originality of his creative vision and marks a defining moment in the art of our era.

Richard Armstrong

Director

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

While Maurizio Cattelan’s work does not adhere to the model of institutional critique in the classic sense by questioning the reifying capacity of the art museum, it nevertheless challenges the authority of the museum at every turn. Cattelan has dedicated his career to undermining figures and institutions of power, the museum being just one among many targets of ridicule. His goal is not to do away with the museum as a platform for art but rather to harness its energy in order to create the unexpected, to change the terms defining what constitutes an exhibition and an artist’s involvement in its making. In short, to work successfully with Cattelan means to become complicit with his schemes and take institutional and personal risks—whether allowing him to break into galleries, steal the contents of another exhibition, or plan an escape route from the show. A host of curators, museum directors, and gallery owners before me have aligned their vision with the artist’s to achieve remarkable and memorable projects that tested the limits of their respective institutions, and the same is true for the Guggenheim, where Cattelan’s astounding response to our invitation to present a retrospective of his work has required a critical leap of faith from the museum’s administration and all the lenders who have so graciously and bravely shared their works with us. This is not to say that the museum has thrown caution to the wind or short-circuited its fundamental values of scholarship and connoisseurship to realize the artist’s site-specific installation. In accepting his dramatic proposal or, perhaps I should say, his dare, we needed to reconcile our institutional standards and best practices with the outrageousness of his ideas. This exhibition and accompanying catalogue attest to both the power and provocation of Cattelan’s concept and the museum’s ability to remain agile and responsive in the face of the truly experimental.

Maurizio Cattelan: All is a retrospective in the truest sense of the word; it contains key examples of almost everything the artist has produced. As a site-specific installation in the museum’s soaring Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda, its utter cohesion in the space makes it also seem a work of art unto itself. The exhibition comprises a temporary monument to Cattelan’s brilliant artistic career, one that has melded the most traditional of art forms—figurative sculpture—with a comic, Pop sensibility to create indelible imagery infused with both melancholy and searing social critique. In the all-encompassing spirit of the exhibition, this book provides a detailed overview of the artist’s oeuvre, complete with entries on virtually every object he has made and every action performed since the late 1980s. Modeled on an old textbook, with an additional, undeniable stylistic reference to the Bible, the publication also documents what was not possible to capture in the exhibition: Cattelan’s ongoing and highly significant extracurricular activities as a curator, editor, and publisher.

The concept and execution of this exhibition and book represent a true collaboration between artist and institution. Though Cattelan challenged and prodded us throughout the entire process, from inception to realization, he has been a most receptive and engaged partner. Cattelan’s critical approach to his own production and his keen understanding of how the work best functions in the world have been a constant source of inspiration. It has been a true privilege to assist him in realizing his unorthodox vision at the Guggenheim. I am most grateful to him for sharing his thoughts and ever-poignant art with me. This book greatly benefited from his exacting eye and intuitive understanding of print media. I must also acknowledge the essential contribution of Chad Kloepfer, who not only expertly designed the catalogue but contributed in many vital ways to its conceptual development. I would like to recognize Katherine Brinson, Diana Kamin, William S. Smith, and Susan Thompson, who wrote the entries on the works in the exhibition and key performative actions by the artist, which also form the core of an app accompanying the show.

The exhibition has been achieved through the critical and sustained support of many gifted and devoted individuals. Our utmost gratitude is reserved for Lucio Zotti, Zeno Zotti, and Jacopo Zotti, who form the nerve center of the Maurizio Cattelan Archive in Milan. They helped mastermind the unique installation design and also provided invaluable assistance with our inquiries regarding loans and reproductions. Photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari responded to our many requests for images with much-appreciated speed and precision. A special thanks is reserved for the staffs of Cattelan’s galleries, who have been enormously helpful in our research on the current owners of his works all over the world. I would like to mention specifically the following individuals: in Milan, Massimo De Carlo, Oda Albera, Elena Micheluzzi, Anna Maria Soverini, and Stefano Zicchieri of Massimo De Carlo; in Paris, Emmanuel Perrotin, Nathalie Brambilla, Philippe Joppin, and Soizic Oger of Galerie Perrotin; and in New York, Marian Goodman, Rose Lord, Catherine Belloy, Elaine Budin, and Brian Loftus of Marian Goodman Gallery.

I would also like to extend my appreciation to those who provided vital assistance with the research necessary for planning the exhibition and producing this book, as well as the enthusiastic champions of the project since its inception many years ago: Naomi Abe, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Kimberly Aubuchon, Artpace, San Antonio, Texas; Charles Barachon, Technikart, Paris; Christopher Bastock, Tate Library and Archive, London; Chiara Bertola and Valentina Sonzogni, Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin; Jimena Blázquez Abascal and Elisa Pozzi, Fundación Montenmedio arte contemporánea (NMAC), Cádiz, Spain; Francesco Bonami; Cécile Brilloit, Musée de Grenoble, France; Piero Cadoni, GAM Galleria civica d’arte moderna e contemporanea, Turin; Amy Cappellazzo, Christie’s, New York; Emanuela Porta Casucci, Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy; Clarenza Catullo, MART Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy; Germano Celant; Silvia Chiodi, My Private, Milan; Jeanne Lil Chvosta, The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas; Valérie Martine Civita; Francesca Cogoni, Umberta Genta, and Nicola Trezzi, Flash Art, Milan and New York; Meritxell Colina, MACBA Museu d’art contemporani de Barcelona; Valentina Costa, Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia, Italy; Michael Darling and Jennifer Draffen, Museum of ContemporaryArt, Chicago; Jade Dellinger, Artsites, Tampa, Florida; Flavio Del Monte; Lisa Dennison and Jessica Yakubowicz, Sotheby’s, New York; Nell Donkers, de Appel, Amsterdam; Isa Ferri and Valeria Marchi, Fondazione galleria civica, Centro di ricerca sulla contemporaneità di Trento, Italy; Claire FitzGerald, Mamco, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva; Laure Genillard; Gino Gianuizzi, Galleria Neon, Bologna; Massimiliano Gioni; Marven Graf, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany; Stefan Gronert, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Anna-Lena Gugger and Judith Welter, migros museum für gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Sandy Heller, Zuzanna Ciolek, and Chloé Geary, The Heller Group, New York; Carol Huang, Yageo Foundation, Taiwan; Astrid Hulsmann, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands; Madeline Hurst; Esther Jackson, Time Out, London; Brigitte Kappenberg, Münster Marketing, Germany; Meta Kordiš, UGM Umetnostna galerija Maribor, Slovenia; Odile de Labouchere and Isabelle Nahum-Saltiel, Groupe Artémis, Paris; Tabitha Langton-Lockton, Corvi-Mora, London; Seungmin Lee, Kukje Gallery, Seoul; Angela Macelli, Musei civici di Pavia, Italy; Sonia Magri; Tiziana Malaguti; Marylène Malbert and Barbara Polla, Galerie Analix Forever, Geneva; Paola Manfrin; Carla Mantovani, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Charlotte Morris, Ben Brown Fine Arts, London and Hong Kong; Simone Moser, MUMOK Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Esty Neuman; Elisabeth Nowak-Thaller, Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Austria; Bernie O’Brien; Hans Ulrich Obrist; Jeanette Pacher, Wiener Secession, Vienna; Suzanne Pagé; Kay C. Pallister; Béatrice Parent; Giovanni Parenzan; Martine Péan, CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France; Peter Peer, Universalmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria; Daniele Perra, Kult, Milan; Natasha Polymeropoulos and Eugenia Stamatopoulou, The Dakis Joannou Collection Foundation, Athens; Flavia Possenti; Maria Luisa Prete, Inside Art, Rome; Paolo Priolo, Klat, Milan; Umberto Raucci, Giorgio Salzano, and Carlo Santamaria, Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Naples; Debbie Rizzo; Berta de la Rosa, Antonio Colombo arte contemporanea, Milan; Juan Roselione-Valadez, Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Ryan Russo and Sandra Sanches, The Buhl Collection, New York; Allan Schwartzman; Nicola von Senger, Galerie Nicola von Senger, Zurich; Carla Sgaravatti; Mo Shannon; Sarah Stein-Sapir, Phillips de Pury & Company, New York; Andrew Stewart, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Ali Subotnick; Patriciana Tenicela, Inked Magazine, New York; Dirk Teuber, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; Flavio Urrai; Ivan Maria Vele, Boiler Corporation, Milan; Roberto Vidali, Spazio Juliet, Trieste, Italy; Yvonne Force Villareal; Monica Viti, Hager and Partners, Bolzano, Italy; Amy Weinblum; Maria White, Tate Collection, London; and Silvia Zancanella.

The Guggenheim Museum has a long history of giving form to the most radical of artistic visions, often achieving what one thought to be impossible. Maurizio Cattelan: All required an entire team of inspired coworkers who believed in the artist’s original concept and dedicated their time and expertise to realize it so successfully in our space. I am especially indebted to Katherine Brinson, Assistant Curator, who managed all aspects of this exhibition and publication. Her devotion to the project, natural curatorial instincts, and utmost professionalism were essential to the success of this undertaking. She was ably assisted by Susan Thompson, Curatorial Assistant, who provided essential support. Curatorial interns Eric Booker, Chloe Capewell, Emily Carr, Adam Hines-Green, Jaime Schwartz, and Alison Wender conducted much of the research for the catalogue’s back matter, and for this I am most grateful.

An exhibition of this scale and complexity could not have happened without the sustained support of Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, who has been a constant source of encouragement. Initial discussions about the exhibition were held during Lisa Dennison’s tenure as Director of the Guggenheim Museum, and I thank her for her early faith in this project. Jessica Ludwig, Managing Director of Exhibition Management, skillfully and gracefully supervised the logistical details, from the budget to the coordination of all departments involved in the installation, aided by the expertise of Jason Phoel, Financial Analyst. Maria Paula Armelin, Associate Registrar for Exhibitions, ably coordinated the intricate details of transporting the works in the exhibition. Eliza Stoner, Assistant Registrar for Collections and Exhibitions, provided essential support in this area. Jaime Roark, Senior Exhibition Designer, offered inestimable technical and aesthetic expertise on how best to achieve the artist’s concept. The unparalleled installation team, comprising David Bufano, Director of Art Services and Preparation; Derek Deluco, Exhibition Technician; Christopher George, Chief Fabricator; Richard Avery, Technical and Production Specialist, Fabrications; Doug Hollingsworth, Chief Cabinetmaker; Barry Hylton, Senior Manager, Exhibition Installations; and Peter Read, Director of Fabrication, worked diligently to create this engineering feat of an installation. I am continually inspired by their amazing skills and their dedication to the museum. Nathan Otterson, Conservator, Objects, provided important oversight throughout the installation process to ensure the long-term safety of the works on view, aided by the valuable contributions of Julie Barten, Senior Conservator of Collections and Exhibitions; Jeffrey Warda, Associate Conservator, Paper; and Esther Chao, Assistant Conservator, Objects, under the guidance of Carol Stringari, Deputy Director and Chief Conservator. Mary Ann Hoag, Chief of Lighting Design, worked adeptly with the artist to properly illuminate his site-specific installation. Maria Celi, Managing Director of Visitor Services and Retail Operations, embraced this unusual project with characteristic zeal.

My sincere gratitude is due to the Guggenheim’s talented Publications Department, in particular Elizabeth Levy, Director of Publications and Website, who oversaw the creation of this catalogue with unfailing grace and dedication, adeptly supported by Elizabeth Franzen, Associate Director of Publications, Editorial, and Stephen Hoban, Managing Editor. Melissa Secondino, Associate Director of Publications, Production; Minjee Cho, Associate Production Manager; and Suzana Greene, Production Associate, expertly shepherded the catalogue through the production process. Kamilah Foreman, Associate Editor, and Project Editor for the catalogue, coordinated all aspects of both the English and Italian editions with meticulous attention to detail, while Domenick Ammirati, Senior Editor, ably edited my essay, and Helena Winston, former Associate Editor, carefully and systematically edited the exhibition history and bibliography.

Domenick Ammirati; Kamilah Foreman; Suzana Greene; Laura Kleger, Associate Director, Website; Jennifer Otten, Senior Interactive Designer; and Maria Slusarev, Website Project Manager, supervised by Elizabeth Levy, produced the multimedia app developed for the project with enthusiasm and efficiency. Our warmest thanks are also due to the individuals who contributed richly informative interviews for the app: Vince Aletti, Francesco Bonami, Nicolas Bourriaud, Fabio Cavallucci, Germano Celant, Bice Curiger, Massimo De Carlo, Tom Eccles, David Ganek, Ida Gianelli, Massimiliano Gioni, Marian Goodman, Jens Hoffmann, Carsten Höller, Laura Hoptman, Chrissie Iles, Udo Kittelmann, Andrew Kreps, Paola Manfrin, Emmanuel Perrotin, Anda Rottenberg, Beatrix Ruf, Ali Subotnick, and Rein Wolfs.

Marcia Fardella, Director of Graphic Design and Chief Graphic Designer, carefully created the brochure accompanying the exhibition, with beautiful drawings supplied by Pierpaolo Ferrari. David Heald, Director of Photographic Services and Chief Photographer, assisted by Kristopher McKay, Assistant Photographer and Digital Imaging Specialist, provided images for the catalogue and documentation of the exhibition preparations for the app.

Christina Yang, Associate Director of Education, Public Programs; Rachel Sirota, Manager of Public Programs; and Sharon Vatsky, Associate Director of Education, School and Family Programs, helped create a rich menu of programs to accompany the exhibition. We are grateful to Michael P. Lavin, Theater Director, for ensuring that all public programming would be successfully presented. Helen Warwick, former Executive Director of Individual Development, helped establish this exhibition’s Leadership Committee, which provided essential funding for the project, and thanks are also due to John L. Wielk, Deputy Director, Corporate and Institutional Development; Bronwyn Keenan, Director of Special Events; and their teams. Marianna Horton, Assistant General Counsel, compiled all the contractual agreements pertaining to the exhibition.

In External Affairs, we collaborated closely with Eleanor R. Goldhar, Deputy Director and Chief of Global Communications; Betsy Ennis, Director of Media and Public Relations, and Lauren Van Natten, Senior Publicist; as well as Laura Miller, Director of Marketing, and her staff.

Lastly, and again, I must thank Maurizio Cattelan for his profoundly serious art, which, at first glance, may seem humorous, but in the end, will make you cry. This contradiction is at the heart of his work and thus forms the very core of his Guggenheim presentation, Maurizio Cattelan: All.

Nancy Spector

Deputy Director and Chief Curator

Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

fig. 1

Untitled, 2001

prologue

WHAT artists read is often a good indication of what they are thinking, if not their sources of inspiration. A well-stocked bookshelf in the corner of a studio can be as revealing as any explication of a specific work in progress. This rings especially true for Maurizio Cattelan, who rarely divulges his intentions, preferring instead to hide behind a perfectly crafted persona of class clown or inveterate juvenile delinquent. His selections for the Artist’s Choice section of the first comprehensive monograph on his work, published in 2000, are, therefore, especially valuable clues.¹ With an exceptionally salacious excerpt from Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth’s brilliant caricature of male Jewish-American angst, followed by extracts from a book of collected suicide notes, Cattelan obliquely conveys the key motivating impulses behind his practice: desperation and guilt.² After failing, Cattelan claims, at all prior pursuits from the academic to the professional, he approached the art world as a kind of refuge, a place where he could rehearse his anxieties publicly and be rewarded for doing so. Like Alexander Portnoy in Roth’s novel, Cattelan is perpetually searching for an escape from himself, his past, and all rules imposed on him. The long-suffering Portnoy turned to psychoanalysis to overcome the suffocating embrace of his overprotective parents and to understand if not absolve his untoward desires. For Cattelan, the art world is the analyst’s couch. Since the beginnings of his career as an artist during the late 1980s, he has freely enacted his vulnerabilities, giving them physical form and a distinct narrative, one that, in many ways, has come to define his work as a whole.

But this is only one side of the story. Cattelan’s compelling performance of his own psychopathology is less autobiographical in origin than it is a poetic gesture toward universality. By playing the (neurotic) fool, he offers himself up as an Everyman, suggesting that this archetypal figure is ultimately more fragile than appearances may allow. By pursuing his work as a kind of expiation, Cattelan problematizes the image of the male artist as virile generator of creative form, joining a long line of twentieth-century forerunners including Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Richard Prince, to cite a few figures who play more than passing roles in the artist’s intellectual development. This art-historical trinity embodies the avant-garde’s (and the neo-avant-garde’s) turn to popular culture as both source and medium in modernism’s ongoing flirtation with the dissolution of difference between art and life. What connects Duchamp’s readymades with Warhol’s soup cans and Prince’s appropriated jokes is a critical, defining shift from production to selection, which indicates a certain devaluation of the artist’s hand. The skillfully crafted object bearing the marks of individual intervention was no longer considered the exclusive manifestation of artistic genius. In fact, the very notion of artistic genius—associated in the early to mid-twentieth century with transcendent aesthetic vision and the expression of inner or otherwise invisible truths—has been under sustained interrogation, with Duchamp’s Dadaesque dismissal of opticality, Warhol’s laconic, mechanical detachment, and Prince’s self-denigrating, appropriated humor. For Cattelan, who has portrayed himself as a chronic underachiever, the antiheroic stance of these artists provided tactical prototypes. In an interview from 1999, already well established in his career, he went so far as to declare, I am not an artist, and I make art, but it’s a job. He explained, I fell into this by chance. Someone once told me that it was a very profitable profession, that you could travel a lot and meet a lot of girls. But this is all false; there is no money, no travel, no girls. Only work. I don’t really mind it, however. In fact, I can’t imagine any other option. There is, at least, a certain amount of respect. This is one profession in which I can be a little bit stupid, and people will say, ‘Oh, you are so stupid; thank you, thank you for being so stupid.’³

NOTES

Unless otherwise noted, unattributed quotations by Maurizio Cattelan are from a series of interviews with the author on July 7 and 9, 2010, and e-mail exchanges in March and April 2011.

1 This book was published as part of Phaidon Press’s highly visible monograph series, which focuses on midcareer contemporary artists. Each book follows a strict format comprising a main essay, an interview