affinity for animals flows right out of Aesop’s Fables and so embraces not only those tales’ anthropomorphic projections of human traits but also their moral inflection. The two golden Labradors apparently guarding a baby chick in Untitled (2007), which premiered in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, could be an essay about trust and maternal instincts. Or, on the other hand, it could illustrate a moment of predation. As a tableau in the haunting exhibition that included the nameless “crucified” woman, its meaning remains ambiguous. Cattelan has also found inspiration in the folktales of the Brothers Grimm, particularly “The Musicians of Bremen,” a story of outcast, retired work animals that by bonding together escape their sure deaths and find a peaceful life together. His sculpture of stacked taxidermied animals—rooster on cat on dog on donkey—called Love Saves Life (1995, fig. 20, cat. no. 35) playfully appropriates the composition of a bronze statue by Gerhard Marcks erected in Bremen in 1953 to commemorate the story. Cattelan revisited the motif two years later in Love Lasts Forever (1997, fig. 21, cat. no. 36), this time imagining a morbid outcome to this tale of fidelity by depicting the stacked animals as skeletons, still faithful but long dead.
fig. 20 Love Saves Life, 1995
fig. 21 Love Lasts Forever, 1997
The taxidermied animal that best personifies the feelings of despair endemic to the work overall is the little squirrel that died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Bidibidobidiboo (1996, fig. 2, cat. no. 40). Set in a miniature kitchen reminiscent of the artist’s family home, with a cheap water heater and sink with dirty dishes, the squirrel expired with his head on a yellow Formica-topped table, a pistol at his feet. The title of the work is a variation on the magical incantation recited by Cinderella’s fairy godmother in the famous 1950 Disney animated film when she transforms the scullery maid into an elegant princess. In its contrast to the desperate scene at hand, the title, according to Cattelan, belies the promise of progress and redemption sold to us by the media and the Church. The hopelessness of suicide (and its attendant passive-aggressiveness) returns as a theme throughout the artist’s work. Cattelan’s choice of Marc Etkind’s . . . Or Not to Be: A Collection of Suicide Notes (1997) as one of the selected readings for his Phaidon monograph underscores his melancholic identification with the topic. While Daddy, Daddy can be read either as the result of a suicidal leap or an act of homicide, the grave he dug for himself through the floor at Le consortium in Dijon, France, in 1997 (cat. no. 63) seems clearly to suggest that ending one’s life is a viable option. Yet within the context of Cattelan’s oeuvre, with its dark and biting humor, suicide functions more as a metaphor for escape, for dropping out or going rogue.
fig. 22 Mini-me, 1999
fig. 23 All (2007) during fabrication, Carrara, Italy, 2007
Death stalks the artist’s psyche and creeps into all manifestations of his production, well beyond the doubles and surrogates. Sometimes the subject is presented with amusing guile, as was the case with the “drowned” woman presented on the occasion of the 1997 edition of Skulptur: Projekte in Münster, an outdoor exhibition devoted to public sculpture (fig. 24, cat. no. 59). Using the city’s central lake as his platform, Cattelan deposited a life-size dummy of a woman in the water. She was meant to be visible just below the surface, like in the scene of a crime, but the figure sank out of view, leaving only rumor and innuendo to stand in for the object. Visitors who encountered only a label with the work’s original title, Out of the Blue, and an unobstructed view of the lake wondered if the piece ever existed other than as a concept, an obvious possibility given the artist’s history of invisible artworks, empty galleries, and other disappearances.73 Other shadowy works seem more menacing, like a sign installed on the side of a Spanish road announcing that fourteen people had died and two had been injured in a total of eighty-one accidents at that specific curve in the road (Untitled, 2001, cat. no. 84).
fig. 24 Untitled, 1997
With All (2007, fig. 23, cat. no. 98), Cattelan created what he described as a “monument to death,” a sculpture that would commemorate its grim and unrelenting presence. Searching for a universal symbol of mortality in magazines, newspapers, and online, he repeatedly found depictions of the shrouded body. It is an image, he said, “that we encounter every day” as natural and technological disasters intensify around the world, news of which now travels instantaneously through the mass media. The decision to use marble came later and was grounded in the “gravity of the subject.” Marble is, of course, the language of the monument in Western culture, and it has a personal resonance for Cattelan as an artist who grew up in Italy in the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. He has mentioned specifically in connection with All his memory of a 1753 statue depicting a veiled Christ by Giuseppe Sanmartino in the Cappella Sansevero de’ Sangri in Naples.74 Intensely baroque, the carved marble emulates the look of a translucent shroud over the highly articulated physique of the dead Christ. In All, Cattelan has eschewed the fetishization of the individual body for the haunting poetry of anonymity. Nine unidentified bodies covered with sheets lie on the floor in a straight line. Undoubtedly corpses, they are the fallen victims of some unnamed trauma. Harking back, perhaps, to the artist’s days working in the morgue, they silently address the unconscionable realities of our present-day world, which is rife with acts of terrorism, human-rights abuses, ethnic cleansing, and climate-induced natural catastrophes. All is a shrine to profound loss; the unknown figures memorialized in white Carrara marble are contemporary martyrs, secular saints whose demise bears no meaning other than to make visible the inevitable, to give form to our collective fear of the profane passage of life into death.
NOTES
57 “Killing Me Softly: A Conversation with Maurizio Cattelan,” interview with Giancarlo Politi et al., Flash Art (International edition) 37, no. 237 (July–September 2004), p. 92.
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