53 The work was not, however, conceived as site specific. Its current location was only one of several offered by the city for consideration. But the confluence of site and sculpture in the case of L.O.V.E. has proven most productive for a context-specific reading that might have been different elsewhere.
54 See Jeffrey Donovan, “Italian GDP Shrank by 6.5% Because of Financial Crisis, Central Bank Says,” Bloomberg.com, April 12, 2010, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-04-12/italian-gdp-shrank-by-6-5-because-of-financial-crisis-central-bank-says.html.
55 See Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “Italy’s debt costs approach red zone,” The Telegraph (London), December 29, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/8230413/Italys-debt-costs-approach-red-zone.html.
56 This point is made by Bonami in “A Short History of Meaninglessness,” in Maurizio Cattelan (Paris: Three Star Books, 2010), p. 21.
fig. 17 Spermini (detail), 1997
3
duality and death
I dealt with corpses, real ones, when I worked in a morgue, and they seemed so deaf, distant. Maybe it’s all that job’s fault, but when I think of a sculpture, I always imagine it like that, far away, in some way already dead. It has always surprised me when people laugh at some of my art works: maybe in front of death laughter is a spontaneous reaction.57
FOR an artist who consistently claims to be without ideas, as is the case with Cattelan, self-portraiture is a logical mode: one need not look beyond one’s own face to find material. In Cattelan’s early, escapist antics, his presence was implied but never literally represented. But a subgenre in his oeuvre emerged by the late 1990s: a battery of look-alikes, mini-mes, doubles, and surrogates began to populate the work. Though the artist had been too shy to speak in public, often sending substitutes to pose in his place,58 he has had no qualms about using his distinctive features as fodder for imagery. For an exhibition at the Galleria Massimo Minini in Brescia in 1997, he plastered the walls with five hundred painted latex masks of his face. Amusingly titled Spermini (fig. 17, cat. no. 52), the piece suggests a swarm of genetic carriers, all with the same DNA code. While the features represented in his similar Super Us police-sketch project had all been different, according to the subjective memories of the individuals describing him, here there was nothing but relentless repetition. Presented as if sprayed willy-nilly over the walls, these spermini imply spilt seed. For Cattelan, a former altar boy and lapsed Catholic, this work about wasted expenditure must have had a deeper, more personal resonance than its joking tone might suggest: onanism is considered a sin, after all. The spermini also evoke the spirit of the great, guilty masturbator Alexander Portnoy of Philip Roth’s classic novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), who believed his insatiable sexual appetite would earn him eternal shame.
While the universal emotions of guilt and remorse are intertwined leitmotifs in his work, Cattelan has on more than a few occasions made direct reference to the Church, and by extension its pervasive moral authority. For instance, the artist’s psychoemotional relationship to his religious upbringing finds expression in his 1994 neon piece, Catttelan (fig. 10, cat. no. 24), the three t’s of which mimic the crosses at Calvary. With an art-historical nod to the Post-Minimalist exercises of Bruce Nauman (especially his neon texts and performances taking place in the corners of his studio), Cattelan makes an equation between his own ordeals and the torment embodied by the death of Christ. By transforming his last name into a pictogram of the Crucifixion, he seems to be suggesting a correlation between his persona as suffering fool and that of Christ’s martyrdom. While undeniably blasphemous—who would expect less?—this analogy makes the case for the artist as sacrificial victim. Will Cattelan’s risk of total failure expiate the sins of the world? Does he play the fool so that we don’t have to? While the implication is far-reaching, it offers one way to read Cattelan’s recurrent invocation of the Church and his clear connections, both positive and negative, to the teachings of his faith.
Such an interpretive filter can bring into focus other allusive pieces, including the veiled self-portrait Daddy, Daddy (2008, p. 8, cat. no. 103), a life-size Pinocchio lying facedown in a pool of water. Premiering at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, as Cattelan’s contribution to the exhibition theanyspacewhatever (2008–09), the little cartoon figure floating in the fountain on the rotunda floor appeared to have plunged from above in either a suicidal leap or an accidental fall. As a surrogate for the artist—compare Pinocchio’s protruding nose with Cattelan’s most signature feature, and Pinocchio’s iconic Italianness59—the puppet was, perhaps, pursuing the only way out of a demanding group show. The title, however, suggests a quasi-religious reading. The phrase “Daddy, Daddy,” according to the artist, refers to one of Christ’s last utterances on the cross, as recorded in the gospels of both Matthew and Mark: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The correlation Cattelan draws between the Pinocchio story (in the version told by Disney in its 1940 film) and that of Christ circulates around the idea of a boy given life by his father, a boy who must then sacrifice that fragile life for the father to survive. That Cattelan’s puppet “landed” with his arms outstretched, crucifix-like, only serves to promote this account of the work.
Not long before creating Daddy, Daddy, Cattelan produced two enigmatic works that also evoke Christian iconography. Frau C. (2007, cat. no. 100) is a life-size figure of an ordinary woman in a black dress, first seen in the sky above the Portikus museum in Frankfurt, appearing to rise with arms outstretched in benediction. Inexplicably levitating, this anonymous woman presented an image of the Ascension that was steeped in the everyday.60 Cattelan described this mysterious person as either a savior or some sort of counselor: “I don’t know how much Frau C. is trying to save the human race or is trying to make us understand to what extent we are damaged. She seems like a revelation to me, a religious apparition. To tell you the truth, I still haven’t entirely understood if she is rising up to the sky or is slowly descending to the ground as if somebody had knocked her down.”61 Meanwhile, another haunting figure of a woman, Untitled (2007), has its origins in a 1977 self-portrait by Francesca Woodman, who photographed herself in a nightdress hanging from the molding over a doorway, arms extended at an awkward, clearly uncomfortable angle. When installing an unnervingly veristic resin version of this figure at Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, a glimpse of the sculpture in its packing crate led Cattelan to decide to alter the work in future iterations. From then on he has exhibited the woman facedown in the crate with her hands pierced and arms and legs cordoned in place (fig. 18). This is the way it was seen in a small town near Cologne as part of the Kunstprojekt Synagoge Stommeln in 2008, for which the artist installed the crate on the exterior wall of a church (cat. no. 102). Nearby was a memorial to Blessed Christine of Stommeln, a martyred medieval mystic who is venerated for her stigmata and powers to heal. Capitalizing on the layers of religious references at this site, with church, synagogue, and shrine all in proximity, Cattelan opened the work to many interpretive possibilities. Ultimately, what is most memorable about this unfathomable, shackled woman, who evokes a female crucifixion, is her undeniable humanness. She is rendered with an extraordinary degree of realism, her scale that of a real person and her feet noticeably, singularly dirty. If the sculpture were a photograph (as, indeed, its source was), these soiled feet would constitute the Barthesian “punctum” of the picture. They attest that this woman once walked among us, earthbound and all too human.
