Maurizio Cattelan: All. Maurizio Cattelan

      fig. 8 Oblomov Foundation, 1992 (detail)

Seven years later, Cattelan orchestrated another high-profile paid vacation for artists, this time in the guise of the 6th Caribbean Biennial (cat. no. 67), at once a party and a parody of the ever-proliferating international biennial circuit, on which the same group of artists, the “usual suspects,” seemed to be included in every show. At the time of the project, Cattelan counted seventy-two biennials in existence around the world, the continuing propagation of which provided cover for this performative riff on an exhibition.32 It was cast as just another invitational, held in some far-flung destination with the potential for tourism; this time it was the island of Saint Kitts in the British West Indies. Organized in collaboration with curator Jens Hoffmann, the 6th Caribbean Biennial had all the trappings of a typical exhibition: curators, official sponsors,33 a press release, a press office, advertisements in top art magazines (fig. 34), invitation letters, and a list of notable participating international artists whose names would have had great currency, given how frequently their work was being featured in biennials around the globe: Olafur Eliasson, Douglas Gordon, Mariko Mori, Chris Ofili, Gabriel Orozco, Elizabeth Peyton, Tobias Rehberger, Pipilotti Rist, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.34 The only thing missing was the “art,” as nothing was put on display. The artists simply swam, partied, rested, and conversed for eight days, as if on vacation.35 While easily dismissible as ironic navel gazing or a diluted form of institutional critique, the piece was emblematic of a practice that emerged during the 1990s in which artists embraced the exhibition format itself as a medium, expanding its parameters in time and space as a means to engage their audiences in ways that subverted the normal expectations of an art-viewing experience.36 Most presentations of visual art are conceived as an endpoint, a culminating view of all the effort expended prior to the opening (hence the prevalence of terms like “retrospective,” “survey,” and “overview” in exhibition-related parlance). By resisting and remolding the exhibition context, Cattelan incorporated its structural elements into his work, presenting alternative conditions for the viewing experience. The 6th Caribbean Biennial, in his mind, deliberately confused roles in a reflection of the convoluted nature of everyday life. In an interview with Massimiliano Gioni and Hoffmann during the planning process, Cattelan claimed:

      What I’m really interested in is the notion of complexity, the idea that there are no fixed roles and definitions. Everyone is forced to change roles every single moment of his life. . . . No one should be able to tell if it’s an artwork or a critical and curatorial statement. No one should be able to figure out where the artworks are, if there are any, or what the artists are doing there. . . .

What I’m trying to say is that art is a collision of different systems and levels of reality. And I wish our biennial could reflect all this. On the other hand, complexity is hard to grasp, so our project might turn out as a total flop. Which is okay, because failure is closer to reality than art itself.37

Cattelan’s profound engagement with and courtship of failure, as a strategy and a theme, links him historically to an antiheroic impulse with roots in Dada and Duchamp as well as to more contemporary correlates like Richard Prince and Mike Kelley, who cultivate self-derision as an art form. While he has been described (and dismissed) repeatedly as a trickster, clown, or court jester who is most often the brunt of his own sad jokes, Cattelan merits a more nuanced consideration.38 While his performative escapades—from perverse school assignments to narrow escapes and brushes with the law to fake exhibitions—may stem from a personal sense of dejection and anxiety (tinged with adolescent humor), they serve to disrupt the art-historical status quo in provocative and meaningful ways. Cattelan’s persona, a highly developed version of the archetypal fool, allows him to circumvent two opposing poles of critical thought that define the way much twentieth-century art has been articulated and understood. The idea of willful idiocy is in direct contrast to the much-venerated notion of the artist-genius, whose aesthetic vision is a portent of progress and originality, the hallmarks of modernist principles.39 At the same time, however, the figure of the fool, given its penchant for buffoonery and chaos, cannot adhere to the postmodernist ideal of the author’s elegant disappearance into the work. Caught in a dialectical netherland between opposing yet intertwined perspectives, Cattelan’s practice offers a third way, a path between the utopian goals and high ideals of modernism and the self-reflexive, deconstructive tendencies of postmodernism. His work amalgamates the defining factors of both without being beholden to any one intellectual paradigm. It is aspirational yet ironic; comical yet critical; and elusive yet instantly accessible, given its pop sensibility. Like a seasoned outlaw, Cattelan navigates a fine line between what is socially and culturally acceptable and what is not.

      NOTES

4 Ibid., p. 26.

5 Cattelan’s mother died when he was twenty-two years old.

6 Cattelan shared this story in his 2003 interview with the author; see “Nancy Spector in Conversation with Maurizio Cattelan,” p. 31. He used this example to demonstrate his inability to fit in as a child and his propensity for getting in trouble: “I had drawn moustaches on the little statues. And when the priests found them, they came straight to me, they didn’t even ask the other twenty kids who were working with me. Basically they knew it had to be Maurizio’s fault. So they came up to me and said ‘Maurizio. Why!?’”

7 “Nancy Spector in Conversation with Maurizio Cattelan,” pp. 31–32.

8 Francesco Bonami points out that in Italian the name of the table means “little watchdog” and refers to Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the gates of Hades in Greek mythology. See “Static on the Line: The Impossible Work of Maurizio Cattelan,” in Maurizio Cattelan (2003), p. 45. Manufactured by Dilmos Milano, the round glass table has a figurative iron base in the form of a three-armed, three-legged man.

9 A copy of this brochure resides in the Franklin Furnace Archives, now housed in the library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It contains a piece of writing presumably by the artist that reads as a surreal stream of consciousness as well as drawings and photographs of mostly nonexistent sculptures that hover between domestic objects and art.

10 See Bonami, “Static on the Line,” pp. 45–46, on the chronology of Cattelan’s early work.

11 It would have been difficult to predict how Cattelan’s aesthetic would develop from this catalogue. The cover letter, dated June 5, 1987, provides a first glimpse into the conceptual path he would subsequently take.

12 A pendant to Lessico familiare entitled Grammatica quotidiana (Daily grammar, 1989, cat. no. 4) brilliantly captures the monotony so associated with unvaried, uninspiring work, the fear of which haunted the young artist. The piece takes the form of a prosaic daily calendar that advertises a “modern bakery”