(2007)"/>
fig. 18 Untitled (2007) during installation at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, 2008
While the artist’s strict Roman Catholic upbringing plagues him—even his e-mail address includes three t’s in Cattelan—his self-portraits tend to be more whimsical, more attuned to his public persona as an impish troublemaker. In La Rivoluzione siamo noi (We are the revolution, 2000, fig. 19, cat. no. 75), he takes on a different kind of messiah, the German artist Joseph Beuys. Dressed in Beuys’s signature felt suit, a slightly miniaturized Cattelan—one could say a boyish version of the artist—dangles by his collar from a Marcel Breuer–designed coat rack. The look on his face suggests an insincere expression of contrition. While he may have been caught at something and strung up for punishment, he is certainly not sorry. The reference to Beuys complicates the reading, however. Is Cattelan criticizing the German mega-artist’s belief in the utopian potential of art as delusional? Or is he unfavorably comparing his own anxiety-ridden, confessional practice, one defined in part by practical jokes, with the ethical and recuperative tenor of Beuys’s life work? Parts pedagogue, cultural activist, shaman, performance artist, and environmentalist, Beuys claimed that art was a transformational vehicle, a means through which everyone could achieve personal and political reform. In his worldview, every social action, every effort toward the cultural good, could be considered a work of art. In a gesture typical of his self-mythologizing (he too operated behind a carefully composed persona), Beuys signed a 1972 editioned poster of himself striding toward the viewer with the proclamation “La rivoluzione siamo Noi.” With Cattelan’s surrogate dangling like the tragic horse in Novecento, he presents himself as unable to participate, incapable of contributing to the cause, however noble it might be.62
fig. 19 La Rivoluzione siamo noi, 2000
In another, yet markedly different, strike against the art-historical canon, Cattelan depicted himself breaking into the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (fig. 1, cat. no. 86) as part of an exhibition in 2002. His now-permanent intervention involved tearing open a hole in the floor of one of the esteemed Old Master galleries through which his wax double peers with wonderment, envy, or greed (typically, the artist would give nothing away about any specific emotion he might have wished to convey). The trope of the disruptive, antibourgeois artist à la Martin Kippenberger or Paul McCarthy is given a new twist by Cattelan, who revived it here with a sense of mock innocence.63 Two years later, the artist let loose a boyhood version of himself on a radio-operated, motorized blue tricycle at the three-day vernissage of the Venice Biennale. Commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where the work was later shown, Charlie (2003, cat. no. 89) sped around the grounds of the Giardini, narrowly missing visitors, pavilions, and artworks. Unlike the poor, persecuted child of Charlie Don’t Surf, this juvenile iteration of the artist’s subconscious was having the time of his life, alternately annoying and entertaining visitors to the exhibition.
Cattelan’s use of an errant twin, a ne’er-do-well lookalike, often rings with an epic existential angst, which, according to some thinkers, dates to the very origins of life. In his cultural history of twins and doubles, The Culture of the Copy, Hillel Schwartz cites a theory that posits that most pregnancies begin as dual, with two fetuses sharing the womb.64 The growth of a human is itself based on cellular duplication—cells splitting into duplicate, autonomous units that in time form a body. When those units continue to develop into separate individuals, identical twins are the result. As the hypothesis goes, in most cases only the stronger fetus survives, eventually ingesting the weaker twin’s chromosomal matter into its very being. Schwartz combines sources in ancient philosophy, such as Plato’s story in the Symposium about humans being originally in a binary state until split by Zeus and forced to search thereafter for their other half, with modern medical evidence and draws a psychological conclusion: “The emergent legend of the vanishing twin makes of our selves our own kin. . . . In one body, at one and the same time, we may carry and confute our own nearest sister, closest brother. While vanished twinship assures us of a sempiternal human link, it affords us also the pathos of inexpressible loss.”65 It is, perhaps, this sense of loss, this indescribable lack at the core of his work, that forms the subtext of Cattelan’s otherwise playful use of look-alikes and body doubles.
Of course, doubles have long been theorized for their psychological import, most famously by Sigmund Freud. He experienced the uncanny—that pervasive feeling of dread intrinsic to the Gothic novel—when he encountered his own reflection in a mirror while traveling on an overnight train. Not recognizing his image, he wondered who the old gentleman might be. He described the phenomenon as belonging to the “class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”66 In his view, the double is a figment of the subconscious that guards against primordial fears of estrangement. Repressed, it eventually returns as a portent, a chilling sign that death is lurking. The artist’s mannequins, no matter what trouble they may be stirring up, have a certain vacancy, a soulless quality that is disconcerting and ultimately disrupts their humor.67 They look just like Cattelan but are clearly and utterly inert. It is from such slippages between perceived opposites—self and lost other, the dead and the undead—that a sense of the uncanny emerges. His wax or resin figures invoke a parallel world of doppelgängers that haunt the wax museum and its history of making palpable the uncanny and its link to death. Take the Musée Grévin in Paris, established in 1882, with its array of historical personages in embalmed states of verisimilitude, so often in death-laden situations: Napoleon pauses in his tent during the withdrawal from Moscow; Marie Antoinette beholds a crucifix while awaiting the guillotine; Marat yields to death in his bathtub. Contemporary additions include Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe, two celebrities who succumbed to early, tragic demises. The museum’s “mortuary chill” is further intensified in a special underground section devoted to executions, which displays the events leading from violent crime to capital punishment.68
The origins of the waxwork lie in the death mask, and Marie Tussaud, the founder of the famous wax museum that bears her name, honed her skills during the French Revolution by making masks of the decapitated heads of the executed.69 As a cast of its subject’s own bodily presence at one specific moment in time, the wax figure records for posterity an image of what once had been but no longer is; like a photograph, it is indexical. When a cast is made on a living person, it will forever embody the anterior future, when, someday, the subject will no longer exist.70 This reality is manifested in the fragile nature of wax itself, even when the material is pressed into the service of commemorative portraiture. And herein lies its essential cruelty. Wax is far more delicate than human skin; when cast, it can easily break apart or collapse, and it melts completely when exposed to heat. Though it can eerily resemble the translucency of living flesh, a waxwork is actually far closer to the body as decaying—as corpse—as is eerily evident in Cattelan’s self-portraits, such as La Rivoluzione siamo noi and Charlie, and his other, more mystical figures like Frau C. and the woman in the crate.71
The taxidermied animals that recur in Cattelan’s work further embody this pervasive undercurrent of death, since by their nature they signify the dead even while simulating the living. This is particularly the case with the artist’s dog sculptures—Labradors, German shepherds, and Jack Russell terriers, among others—which are curled up on the floor or on the seats of chairs seemingly asleep, but which are in fact, as one title makes clear, Stone dead (1997, cat. no. 55). The dogs are practical jokes, perceptual tricks with ghastly implications. What looks to be charming and approachable, a dog to pet or cuddle, is really a well-preserved cadaver. Though not exactly surrogates in the spirit of the artist’s puckish clones, Cattelan’s animals function, in many cases, as symbols for a certain state of mind, for an emotion in search of physical expression. The live donkey in Cattelan’s short-lived exhibition at Daniel Newburg Gallery, for instance, signified his feelings of embarrassment—“like an ass”—for not having a better idea for the show.72 Since then, donkeys have reappeared in the artist’s oeuvre, often representing feelings of futility and helplessness. There is the taxidermied donkey pulling a wagon so laden with
