you, 1994
The strategy of hiding in plain sight—a manifestation of Cattelan’s love/hate relationship with public exposure—was one that he would return to later in his career. On the occasion of his first solo exhibition at the venerable Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, a milestone in any artist’s professional life, he presented a life-size sculpture of a baby elephant wearing a white sheet with holes for its eyes and trunk. Compelling in its ambiguity, Not Afraid of Love (2000, fig. 5, cat. no. 77) playfully embodies the artist’s relentless performance anxiety, but also, as with all his later work, it operates on additional metaphoric levels. Sheathed in Ku Klux Klan white and with its exposed, dangling trunk patently sexual in appearance, the little elephant, however shy, seems far from innocent. Its very form invokes the proverbial phrase “an elephant in the room,” an obvious but difficult topic that no one is addressing. With this unsettling work, Cattelan not only rehearses his own evasiveness; he seems to ask what awkward things remain unsaid, what subjects are not being broached in the context of his work or in the world at large. In 1997, for the group exhibition Fatto in Italia (Made in Italy) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Cattelan crafted a similar surrogate self-portrait, a taxidermied ostrich with its head buried in the floor (cat. no. 58). The act of hiding was again multivalent, but it unquestionably expressed his unease about participating in a show that categorized him first and foremost as an Italian artist when his sights were by this time set internationally.21 Though his native country figures profoundly in the thematic concerns of his early work, Cattelan avoided this (and any other) type of pigeonholing. As early as 1992, with an emphasis on flight at once comical and feeble, he had responded to an invitation to participate in a group show of young Italian artists at the Castello di Rivara by simply hanging a cord of knotted bedsheets from the window in a mock gesture of escape (fig. 6, cat. no. 16).22 This performative action represented a calculated refusal to exhibit within such a defining nationalistic context while also signaling his purported inability to produce. Cattelan admitted failure before the fact and so protected himself against inevitable and always unpredictable criticism. His staging of avoidance was also clearly a ploy, a way to make art out of insecurity with a healthy dose of humor.
Cattelan’s aesthetics of failure involves both the semblance of escape and the act of hiding; it also entails a recurrent shirking of professional responsibilities. When invited to participate in an exhibition in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale in 1993, Cattelan avoided the pressures of this high-profile situation by leasing his allotted space to an advertising agency, which used the occasion to test the packaging design for a new perfume on a large billboard in the Arsenale. Titled Working Is a Bad Job (cat. no. 22), the piece allowed him to earn money while relinquishing any responsibility for actually creating and delivering the art. The obvious correlation between art and capital in this piece was less about making a commentary on commerce than it was about making a living; the motivation was personal, stemming from the artist’s dread of returning to the economic deprivation of his childhood. This fear haunted much of the work he produced between 1990 and 1994.23
fig. 5 Not Afraid of Love, 2000
fig. 6 Una Domenica a Rivara, 1992
A combination of need, desperation, and low self-esteem contributed to the development of Cattelan’s rebellious mentality. Not only would he slack off at every opportunity, he would actively break the art world’s rules, even if it meant engaging in criminal activity. As theft and escape go hand-in-hand, the two became the performative pillars of his early practice. At first, he merely declared himself the victim of a crime rather than its perpetrator. When unable to create a work (or so he claimed) for an exhibition in 1991, he managed to convince the local police that his “invisible” sculpture had been stolen, and they produced an official document asserting as much (cat. no. 13). In a gesture recalling the way Conceptualist and Post-Minimalist artists documented their refabricatable works with instructional certificates, Cattelan exhibited the police report recording his sculpture’s alleged abduction. In so doing, he falsely established its prior existence. This certificate, complete with the obligatory stamp of the Commune di Forlì, also links the artist’s project to Marcel Duchamp’s Dadaesque pranks involving legalistic and financial exchange. In particular, it recalls his 1923 self-portrait in the guise of a Wanted poster, in which he implicates himself under a list of aliases (including “George W. Welch,” “Bull,” “Pickens,” and his female alter-ego “Rrose Sélavy”) for general graft and fraud.24 Cattelan’s identification with the petty criminal was further manifest when he presented two bank safes that had been broken into as part of an exhibition in Bergamo in 1992.25 Labeled with the amount of lire stolen during each robbery (-76.000.000 and -157.000.000; see cat. no. 14), the safes were shown emptied and bearing the scars of the crimes that defaced them. The artist explained that the two works were, in his mind, essentially romantic, deriving from his “love for certain cops and robbers movies,” and his belief in the fact that “inside of everyone there is a little thief” who dreams of getting away with the goods.26 The safes stand, therefore, as battered monuments to a fantasy that crime pays. As imagined in Cattelan’s lawless universe, the stolen money is now presumably in the hands of some very cunning and lucky crook. In the same year, he projected his own image as that of a criminal suspect in Super Us (1992, see cat. no. 17), for which he asked a police-sketch artist to create composite portraits of him based on descriptions by friends and relatives. With the title playing on the Freudian concept of the superego—the moralizing component of the individual psyche—this work comprises fifty different views of the artist, presenting a multiple and fractured self in the place of a unified subject.27
fig. 7 Another Fucking Readymade, 1996
At this time, Cattelan was clearly cultivating his elusive persona, flirting with a kind of outlaw status in the art world and beyond. His attraction to the illegal took on greater proportions when he actually stole the contents of another artist’s exhibition and attempted to exhibit them as his own under the title Another Fucking Readymade (1996, fig. 7), with its less-than-subtle reference to Duchamp. Invited to participate in the improvisatory group exhibition Crap Shoot at the de Appel arts center in Amsterdam, he and members of the curatorial training program who were organizing the show broke into a local gallery and pilfered the works by Dutch artist Paul de Reus on view there, along with the entire contents of the office, wrapping everything in plastic and duct tape.28 The loot never made it to the exhibition, however, as Cattelan was questioned by the police and required to return every object, narrowly missing arrest. Taking the act of appropriation, long an established artistic strategy, to new extremes, the artist pulled another such stunt one year later in Paris when he copied in every detail Carsten Höller’s exhibition at Air de Paris for his concurrent show at the neighboring Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin. The replicas, which bear the same titles as Höller’s originals, including Moi-même-soi-même (Myself, oneself, 1997), have since entered Cattelan’s oeuvre as individual works with no indication of their source.29
Rooted in a perpetual rehearsal of failure, Cattelan’s early work exists in the interstice between object and action. Whatever the finished product—be it a certificate, sign, or performative remnant—the artist has
