Cattelan problematizes the image of the male artist as virile generator of creative form, joining a long line of twentieth-century forerunners including Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Richard Prince, to cite a few figures who play more than passing roles in the artist’s intellectual development. This art-historical trinity embodies the avant-garde’s (and the neo-avant-garde’s) turn to popular culture as both source and medium in modernism’s ongoing flirtation with the dissolution of difference between art and life. What connects Duchamp’s readymades with Warhol’s soup cans and Prince’s appropriated jokes is a critical, defining shift from production to selection, which indicates a certain devaluation of the artist’s hand. The skillfully crafted object bearing the marks of individual intervention was no longer considered the exclusive manifestation of artistic genius. In fact, the very notion of artistic genius—associated in the early to mid-twentieth century with transcendent aesthetic vision and the expression of inner or otherwise invisible truths—has been under sustained interrogation, with Duchamp’s Dadaesque dismissal of opticality, Warhol’s laconic, mechanical detachment, and Prince’s self-denigrating, appropriated humor. For Cattelan, who has portrayed himself as a chronic underachiever, the antiheroic stance of these artists provided tactical prototypes. In an interview from 1999, already well established in his career, he went so far as to declare, “I am not an artist,” and “I make art, but it’s a job.” He explained, “I fell into this by chance. Someone once told me that it was a very profitable profession, that you could travel a lot and meet a lot of girls. But this is all false; there is no money, no travel, no girls. Only work. I don’t really mind it, however. In fact, I can’t imagine any other option. There is, at least, a certain amount of respect. This is one profession in which I can be a little bit stupid, and people will say, ‘Oh, you are so stupid; thank you, thank you for being so stupid.’”3
NOTES
Unless otherwise noted, unattributed quotations by Maurizio Cattelan are from a series of interviews with the author on July 7 and 9, 2010, and e-mail exchanges in March and April 2011.
1 This book was published as part of Phaidon Press’s highly visible monograph series, which focuses on midcareer contemporary artists. Each book follows a strict format comprising a main essay, an interview with the artist, a brief text focusing on one of his or her works, a selection of the artist’s own writings, and excerpted readings of his or her choice. See Maurizio Cattelan (London: Phaidon Press, 2000; rev. ed. 2003). All citations refer to the 2003 edition.
2 Artist’s Choice, Maurizio Cattelan (2003), pp. 100–109. The original sources are Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1969) and Marc Etkind, . . . Or Not to Be: A Collection of Suicide Notes (New York: Riverhead, 1997).
3 From “Nancy Spector in Conversation with Maurizio Cattelan,” in Maurizio Cattelan (2003), p. 9.
fig. 2 Bidibidobidiboo, 1996
1
the aesthetics of failure
My work can be divided into different categories. One is my early work, which was really about the impossibility of doing something. This is a threat that still gives shape to many of my actions and work. I guess it was really about insecurity, about failure. We can have a chapter here called ‘Failure.’ 4
GROWING up in Padua, Italy, in an uneducated, lower-class family of five during the 1960s and ’70s, Cattelan dreamed of escaping life at little more than a subsistence level. His father was a truck driver and his mother a cleaner. The fact that she suffered from lymphatic cancer through most of his childhood and adolescence only amplified the sense of despair to a traumatizing degree.5 Her religious fervor helped ameliorate the emotional toll of the illness, but Cattelan was required to help raise his two younger sisters, quitting school at age seventeen to contribute to the family income. He took his remaining high-school classes at night. Trained from age twelve in electronics, a practical course for blue-collar families at the time, Cattelan held odd, part-time jobs throughout his youth. He soon came to despise the drudgery of menial labor, planning early on to avoid it all costs. He worked as an apprentice gardener, and, at age thirteen, in a shop at the local parish that sold religious trinkets and statuettes, eventually being fired for drawing moustaches on figurines of Saint Anthony.6 When he left home at eighteen, he found employment at a laundry but was quickly dismissed for washing his own uniform, among other personal effects. The final chapter in his succession of tedious occupations came when he found himself an assistant medical technician, working in a morgue. So depressed by the situation, he engineered a way to receive payment for an extended medical leave: he simply paid a doctor to write perpetual diagnoses to guarantee him paid time off for a period of six months.7
It was during this time that Cattelan began to experiment with a very personal, idiosyncratic form of industrial design, creating one-off, semianthropomorphic objects. A reluctant participant in the overheated world of design in Italy, he nevertheless earned some recognition in it, creating a glass-and-iron table called Cerberino that is still in production today.8 But this was not the path he ultimately imagined for himself; either a design career required too much discipline or he was simply unmotivated to continue producing in this vein. Recognizing early on that most of his objects “couldn’t be commercialized, but they could be sold,” he created a “pitchbook” or catalogue of his production to date, which he sent to hundreds of gallerists and editors of art and design magazines in Europe and America in 1987.9 In an act that reflected his general disregard for authority as well as his economic constraints, Cattelan managed to mail the catalogues for free with purloined postage. But the decision to pursue a full-time career as a visual artist only happened, he claims, after encountering a self-portrait on mirror by Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto in a small gallery in Padua. He was twenty-five years old at the time and refers to this incident as the “epiphany” that changed the course of his life. Having grown up in Italy where art—at least religious art—is ever present, the idea that something in the aesthetic realm could be so startlingly relevant in its direct engagement with the viewer moved him deeply. Detecting his profound curiosity (and clear lack of knowledge), the gallerist lent him books on contemporary art, and thus his informal, self-directed education about art began in earnest.
Cattelan created what is considered to be his first unequivocal work of art in 1989—Lessico familiare (Family syntax, cat. no. 3), a highly stylized photographic self-portrait.10 In this staged black-and-white image, he depicted himself with his hands forming the shape of a heart over his bare chest. Framed in ornate silver, the work was originally exhibited like a traditional marriage portrait on a decorative side table with two candelabra and a small carved bust on an embroidered doily. The entire ensemble, with its altarlike arrangement, bespoke a petit-bourgeois ambience that Cattelan was both emulating and upending, as his gesture of affection in the photograph is simultaneously endearing and pathetic. Despite its allusions to a wedding picture, the image shows the artist all alone, the heart shape decidedly empty.
The reference in the title to a family syntax—a prescribed vocabulary—suggests the artist’s troubled attraction to an ideal that had always eluded him. The use of his own image indicates
