Maurizio Cattelan: All. Maurizio Cattelan

      fig. 2 Bidibidobidiboo, 1996

      1

      the aesthetics of failure

My work can be divided into different categories. One is my early work, which was really about the impossibility of doing something. This is a threat that still gives shape to many of my actions and work. I guess it was really about insecurity, about failure. We can have a chapter here called ‘Failure.’ 4

GROWING up in Padua, Italy, in an uneducated, lower-class family of five during the 1960s and ’70s, Cattelan dreamed of escaping life at little more than a subsistence level. His father was a truck driver and his mother a cleaner. The fact that she suffered from lymphatic cancer through most of his childhood and adolescence only amplified the sense of despair to a traumatizing degree.5 Her religious fervor helped ameliorate the emotional toll of the illness, but Cattelan was required to help raise his two younger sisters, quitting school at age seventeen to contribute to the family income. He took his remaining high-school classes at night. Trained from age twelve in electronics, a practical course for blue-collar families at the time, Cattelan held odd, part-time jobs throughout his youth. He soon came to despise the drudgery of menial labor, planning early on to avoid it all costs. He worked as an apprentice gardener, and, at age thirteen, in a shop at the local parish that sold religious trinkets and statuettes, eventually being fired for drawing moustaches on figurines of Saint Anthony.6 When he left home at eighteen, he found employment at a laundry but was quickly dismissed for washing his own uniform, among other personal effects. The final chapter in his succession of tedious occupations came when he found himself an assistant medical technician, working in a morgue. So depressed by the situation, he engineered a way to receive payment for an extended medical leave: he simply paid a doctor to write perpetual diagnoses to guarantee him paid time off for a period of six months.7

It was during this time that Cattelan began to experiment with a very personal, idiosyncratic form of industrial design, creating one-off, semianthropomorphic objects. A reluctant participant in the overheated world of design in Italy, he nevertheless earned some recognition in it, creating a glass-and-iron table called Cerberino that is still in production today.8 But this was not the path he ultimately imagined for himself; either a design career required too much discipline or he was simply unmotivated to continue producing in this vein. Recognizing early on that most of his objects “couldn’t be commercialized, but they could be sold,” he created a “pitchbook” or catalogue of his production to date, which he sent to hundreds of gallerists and editors of art and design magazines in Europe and America in 1987.9 In an act that reflected his general disregard for authority as well as his economic constraints, Cattelan managed to mail the catalogues for free with purloined postage. But the decision to pursue a full-time career as a visual artist only happened, he claims, after encountering a self-portrait on mirror by Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto in a small gallery in Padua. He was twenty-five years old at the time and refers to this incident as the “epiphany” that changed the course of his life. Having grown up in Italy where art—at least religious art—is ever present, the idea that something in the aesthetic realm could be so startlingly relevant in its direct engagement with the viewer moved him deeply. Detecting his profound curiosity (and clear lack of knowledge), the gallerist lent him books on contemporary art, and thus his informal, self-directed education about art began in earnest.

Cattelan created what is considered to be his first unequivocal work of art in 1989—Lessico familiare (Family syntax, cat. no. 3), a highly stylized photographic self-portrait.10 In this staged black-and-white image, he depicted himself with his hands forming the shape of a heart over his bare chest. Framed in ornate silver, the work was originally exhibited like a traditional marriage portrait on a decorative side table with two candelabra and a small carved bust on an embroidered doily. The entire ensemble, with its altarlike arrangement, bespoke a petit-bourgeois ambience that Cattelan was both emulating and upending, as his gesture of affection in the photograph is simultaneously endearing and pathetic. Despite its allusions to a wedding picture, the image shows the artist all alone, the heart shape decidedly empty.

The reference in the title to a family syntax—a prescribed vocabulary—suggests the artist’s troubled attraction to an ideal that had always eluded him. The use of his own image indicates how, without being directly autobiographical, Cattelan drew on his own emotional and psychological experiences to inject his art with potential meaning. This is a strategy he would continue to exploit throughout his early work. His goal, however, was not to invoke specific events or individuals but rather to summon up states of mind or emotions that would resonate in the present. While the work is not directly about him, he uses himself as an example, as a character whose foibles and trials invoke an empathetic identification on the part of the viewer. In the cover letter accompanying his 1987 pitchbook, he wrote (in poorly rendered English): “My name is Maurizio Cattelan, from Italy. I am an artist. The issue is showing an image of my work before the 1987. I’ve been using a different kind of technician to express myself. Now, often more, in my work I’m caring about the ironic-disobedient-childish aspects of my personality.”11

Cattelan’s childhood memories provided vivid fodder for his self-proclaimed concentration on bad behavior at this early stage in his career. His fraught relationship to his elementary-school education, an environment of flourishing insecurity, informed a number of works from the early 1990s that emphasized the drudgery of repetition