name of the traditional Catholic prayer, the Hail Mary, rather than the Heil Hitler—further complicates any definitive reading, however. In typical Cattelan fashion, the title and image are in seeming contradiction. Rather than illuminate his works’ apparent content, his titles often suggest unexpected tangents, deferring interpretation by obscuring rather than delineating meaning. This deliberate disjunction between text and image, a hallmark of the artist’s practice, allows for a kind of mental lacuna in which untested ideas and attitudes can emerge. In the case of Ave Maria, the reference to prayer asks that the arms also be seen in a position of benediction from, rather than submission to, a higher power. Or is it, as the prayer suggests—“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death”—an admission of transgression, involving among other possibilities the abuse of power, the adherence to false gods, or the capitulation to greed?
fig. 13 Ave Maria, 2007
Ave Maria provided a physical prototype for a public sculpture Cattelan unveiled in Milan in 2010, a thirty-six-foot-high white marble hand with an erect middle finger extended toward the sky (fig. 9, cat. no. 108). The other fingers look to have been broken off, as if the whole thing were the ruin of some ancient statue, a victim, perhaps, of iconoclastic frenzy. Ambiguously titled L.O.V.E., the sculpture references Italian cultural heritage, given its placement and proportions, even if its meaning remains decidedly unclear.48 Carved with the exacting detail of Michelangelo’s David (1501–04), of stone hewn from the same Italian quarry some five hundred years later, the piece invokes the legacy of the Renaissance. At the same time, however, it offers a most vulgar gesture, perhaps the most universal sign of derision.49 But the work’s origin in violence—imagine a hand held taut in a Fascist salute with all of its fingers, save for the middle digit, chopped off—disallows a purely amused response. This antimonument defies all the traditional functions of commemorative public art. Instead of commanding respect for some accepted ideology or focusing collective memory, it is both humorous in its irreverence and horrific in its brutality. Cattelan had rehearsed such contradictory impulses in an earlier “monument” he created in 1999 for an exhibition at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London. With a sardonic swipe at British pride, he presented an oversized granite plaque—with clear references to Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.—that listed all the defeats of England’s national soccer team (cat. no. 72). By treading on “sacred” territory, Cattelan acknowledged at the time that he was making a shocking gesture but not, he blithely claimed, one so out of the ordinary: “It’s like pointing a gun at an ambulance or insulting your own mother. It’s considered outrageous, but it seems like everyone does such things once in a while.”50 The piece in London was, of course, cloistered within the rarefied atmosphere of an art gallery and thus relatively protected. But the Milan sculpture occupied a public square for months, courting controversy and winning many converts.51 This acceptance eluded a previous, untitled outdoor sculpture in Milan commissioned by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi for the city’s Piazza XXIV Maggio. This 2004 work (fig. 14), comprising three life-size effigies of charmingly innocent, barefoot boys hanging from nooses in an oak tree, was attacked by an outraged viewer who managed to injure himself while cutting them down from their makeshift gallows.52 There are, it seems, some subjects still considered taboo today, one of them being children suffering. But Cattelan reveals the paradox in such overly moralizing thought: such anguish is all too real around the world, and everywhere one looks—newspapers, magazines, the Internet—one is confronted by news of childhood starvation, displacement, and exploitation.
fig. 14 Untitled, 2004
In the case of the reception for L.O.V.E., however, Cattelan clearly hit a nerve in a way that was, for the most part, publicly acceptable. The work’s placement outside Milan’s stock exchange immediately anchored its meaning to issues of the economy, which in Italy at the time was near crisis.53 As Cattelan has observed in reference to the work, “Our trust in the social system has been broken. Have you ever doubted that a bank could falter? Have you ever doubted the financial system as a whole? Sure, there were earlier crises like the dot-com fiasco, but this is systemic. The whole system seems in need of deconstruction and reconstruction.” Italy’s economy shrank 5.1 percent in 2009, its worst year in at least three decades, and between 2008 and 2010 the country’s gross domestic product lost a total of 6.5 percentage points as a result of the recession triggered by the global financial crisis.54 An article published in late 2010 in The Telegraph of London, titled “Italy’s debt costs approach red zone,” sums up the country’s grim situation: “growth has been glacial for a decade, productivity has fallen since 1995, and global export share is in steep decline.”55 Cattelan’s intervention in the public square near the Borsa Italiana and in the Italian imagination couldn’t have been better timed. For many disaffected citizens, L.O.V.E. became a symbol of their anger and frustration.
Cattelan has examined the effects of economic deprivation before. His sculptures of “homeless” figures huddled against walls, rendered simply from stuffed clothes and blankets, are temporary outdoor installations that tend to unnerve the public for their casual verisimilitude and the interventionist nature of their placement (fig. 15). Andreas e Mattia (Andreas and Mattia, 1996), a slumped hooded figure, was created for an exhibition at the Galleria civica d’arte moderna e contemporanea in Turin and originally shown outside, where people mistook the figure to be a vagrant, ignoring him as they are wont to do when confronted with the hopelessly needy. (It took more than a few days for someone to call the Italian equivalent of 911 to report a homeless person who had not moved for an alarmingly long period of time.) Cattelan produced a similar intervention when invited to create an exhibition at the Institute of Visual Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, in 1998. Kenneth (cat. no. 45), another disheveled drifter, occupied a space in the city as a monument to failure but also to freedom. As suggested by his aversion to work and his frequently staged flights from responsibility, Cattelan identifies with the trope of the vagabond. Reminiscing about Padua, he recalled numerous homeless characters who became staples of the city, “celebrities of the streets” who, in some cases, had become itinerant as an act of protest (against taxes, the responsibilities of ownership, and so on). Regardless of a certain admiration and curiosity, however, Cattelan does not glorify these figures. Instead, they represent a pervasive breakdown of the system, a reminder that the social contract has many devastating loopholes. Given his childhood deprivation, such investigations presumably have a personal resonance.
fig. 15
Gérard, 1999
The concept of a civic monument that refuses to commemorate or coalesce around culturally sanctioned ideologies has an important place in Cattelan’s oeuvre. If L.O.V.E. can be considered a culminating work in this vein, then the sculpture Novecento (Twentieth century, 1997, fig. 16) represents a critical beginning. It is a taxidermied horse suspended from the ceiling by a belted harness, the kind used for lifting heavy cargo onto and off ships. Cattelan had seen a photograph of a horse being hoisted in such a fashion on an album cover in a window on St. Mark’s Place in New York, and it continued to resonate in his mind until he found the proper sculptural form. Originally manifested in an untitled version (formerly The Ballad of Trotsky) for an exhibition at the Galleria Massimo De Carlo in 1996 (cat. no. 44), the horse figure
