publication with me.
29 Cattelan has indicated that Höller collaborated with him in the making of the show for Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, and in the end, the replication of works boosted sales for both artists.
30 “Nancy Spector in Conversation with Maurizio Cattelan,” p. 34.
31 In his interview with the author (2003), Cattelan tells of using falsified documents to install the plaque on the Brera academy. When questioned by school authorities during the process, he claimed that he had been sent by a sign-installation company. See “Nancy Spector in Conversation with Maurizio Cattelan,” pp. 36–37.
32 These biennials are listed in the catalogue cum artist’s book that was published well after the event to commemorate it. See Cattelan, 6th Caribbean Biennial, ed. Bettina Funcke (Dijon, France: Les presses du réel, 2001), Contemporary Art Series, unpaginated.
33 Cattelan garnered in-kind assistance and raised funds for the project from a group of supporters, who are listed in the catalogue: Jumex, Mexico City; Färgfabriken, Stockholm; migros museum für gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Banca Popolare d’Ancona; Marian Goodman, New York; Le consortium, Dijon, France; Janvier, Paris; and the Golden Lemon, Saint Kitts. The last is the hotel at which the artists stayed during the biennial.
34 Though not on the original list of invited artists, Vanessa Beecroft joined the group in Saint Kitts.
35 As Jens Hoffmann observed nearly ten years after the event, “The proposal was based on the idea of a biennial as void, as a vehicle emptied of meaning. Conceptually, all of the trappings of a biennial would be established but at the center would be nothing: no exhibition and no artworks.” Hoffmann, “The 6th Caribbean Biennial: Castaway,” in theanyspacewhatever, p. 201.
36 Many artists have employed the structure of the exhibition as a medium unto itself. One can cite as important precursors to the work of the 1990s artists including Marcel Broodthaers, Yves Klein, Daniel Buren, and Michael Asher. This point is explicated in Spector, “theanyspacewhatever.”
37 See “Interview: ‘Blown Away’—Blown to Pieces,” conversation between Cattelan, Hoffmann, and Massimiliano Gioni, in Cattelan, 6th Caribbean Biennial, unpaginated.
38 For an in-depth analysis of Cattelan’s studied personification of the fool, see Laura Hoptman, “Trickster,” in Maurizio Cattelan, exh. cat. (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 1999), in German and English, unpaginated.
39 This is the argument made by Jean-Yves Jouannais in his illuminating book L’Idiotie: Art, vie, politique-méthode (Paris: Beaux Arts Magazine Livres, 2003). Simon Baker provides a useful summary of the book in “I’m with Stupid,” Oxford Art Journal 30, no. 3 (July 2007), pp. 505–26.
fig. 9 L.O.V.E., 2010
2
political dimensions
The true history of the work is the history of a difficulty repeating itself. I’ve also started to think about the difficulty of being Italian, having a heritage, relationships with other artists, being a member of a community with a history.40
FROM the beginning, Cattelan has refused the mantle of revolutionary provocateur. He claims that his art merely holds up a mirror to society, like Warhol’s bland and at-times glamorizing looking glass, without commentary or judgment. Though it often touches cultural, political, and social nerves with unflinching honesty, the work offers no opinion or call to action. It simply reflects, he asserts, what he witnesses around him. “I actually think that reality is far more provocative than my art. . . . I just take it; I’m always borrowing pieces—crumbs really—of everyday reality. If you think my work is very provocative, it means that reality is extremely provocative, and we just don’t react to it. Maybe we no longer pay attention to the way we live in the world. . . . We are anesthetized.”41 Despite these claims to a certain indifference, however, and his work’s comedic air, Cattelan’s art often offers incisive critiques of specific political events or developments on the world stage. Much of his early work in particular revolved around Italian identity and the tensions of the country’s ever-shifting political landscape, changing populace, and stagnant national economy.
The Italy of his youth was politically turbulent, with the student uprisings of 1968 in Europe and the United States catalyzing unrest from both the Left and the Right in cities throughout the country, including especially Padua, Bologna, and Rome. The 1970s were marked by violent terrorist activities, which led to the era being termed at first the Opposti Estremismi (extreme opposition) and then later the Anni di Piombo (years of lead). Padua, home to the second-largest university in Italy, emerged as a center for the Autonomia Operaia (autonomy movement), which advocated a decentralized form of Marxism. Galvanized by the proliferation of pirate-radio transmissions in Italy (in Padua it was Radio Sherwood) and numerous journals (including Padua’s Autonomia), the movement promoted an everyday, working-class resistance to capitalism, one that took as its guiding principle the Situationist notions of disruption from within and détournement, appropriating and altering elements of the dominant order to use for different, more populist ends. For example, the Autonomists called for absenteeism and deliberate workplace slowdowns instead of mass strikes. While neither Cattelan nor his family were ever directly involved in the political milieu of his hometown, the coincidence of attitudes is striking, and one can argue that both the artist’s own aversion to work and his disdain for direct social activism ultimately had such intellectual roots. In one of his first mature works, Campagna elettorale (Electoral campaign, 1989, cat. no. 5), Cattelan took out an advertisement in the national daily newspaper La Repubblica as well as in papers in Bologna that declared, “Il voto è prezioso/TIENITELO” (Your vote is precious/KEEP IT), signed with an official-looking stamp for the Cooperativa Romagnola Scienziati (Romagna scientists cooperative), a fake workers’ collective he was using at the time as a nom de plume. In his cynical disregard for the potential of political agency, and for the power of labor organizations as a force for change, the artist jokingly encouraged voter apathy—which, in an inverted way, constituted a form of protest.
Cattelan has never shied from representing the social and political scars of his native country. The terrorist activities of the Brigate Rosse, or Red Brigades, a Marxist-Leninist extremist group in operation during the 1970s and ’80s provided very specific subject matter for his art. Their 1978 kidnapping and eventual murder of former Christian Democrat Prime Minister Aldo Moro was a tragedy of great proportions. Punished for his attempts to forge a compromesso storico (historic compromise) for parliamentary representation between two dueling factions of the government, the Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party, Moro came at the time to symbolize the impossibility of measured change, of intelligent negotiating. In 1994, Cattelan appropriated an old front-page article from the newspaper Avvenire showing a photograph of Moro as a beleaguered hostage in front of a Red Brigades banner. He transformed the group’s symbol, a five-pointed star, into
