"Thieving, lazy jokester calls himself an artist?"




By Tracy-Lee Nicol

An up-and-coming artist is hard at work until the small hours of the morning setting up his latest exhibition due to open the following evening. He’s satisfied and calls it a night. Next evening the artistic elite, press, critics and collectors gather anticipating a great show. The curtains are thrown back. The audience gasps then falls silent. Someone attempts an awkward clap and mumbles, “is he for real?” The gallery is stark empty save for a bit of lint in the corners. The only clue that something has gone awry is the artist running off in tears.

Down the road, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan is opening an exhibition too. The artistic elite, press, critics and collectors gather anticipating a great show. The curtains are thrown back, the audience gasps…except this time they are greeted by a gallery full of boxes containing art that mysteriously disappeared from the other artist’s gallery the night before. The reaction is mixed.

The teary artist bays for Cattelan’s arrest. At the police station he describes Cattelan and the officer pulls out a file as thick as a phone directory with hundreds of pencil drawn profiles of the man himself. “He left these here after one of his exhibitions where he told friends and family to draw what they thought he looked like” says the officer. Some time goes by. The artist hears Cattelan is opening another exhibition and decides to go over and have a word. Upon arrival the gallery is dark and locked up, no one’s around, and stuck in the window is a handwritten note saying “sorry”, a police report and a case number for a “stolen exhibition”. Some people wish the title “artist” could be removed much like a head from a pair of shoulders.


While some fail to see the humour of his work, — one of his best-known sculptures La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour) (1999), an effigy of Pope John Paul II in full ceremonial dress crushed under a meteor, caused a right commotion — Cattelan’s satirical and controversial approach to art makes him postmodernism’s poster-boy. Showing a metaphorical finger to the artistic elite, Cattelan: did not attend art school, commissions others to make his work, hires stand-ins armed with evasive or nonsensical answers for media interviews, has sold his exhibition space at one of Europe’s prestigious biennales to the highest bidding cosmetics advertiser, holds empty exhibitions with only a sick note from the doctor stuck to the door as explanation, and creates miniature wax caricatures of himself should anyone want to know what he looks like.

In spite of his regular satirical pokes at the art world, Cattelan has made quite a career from this machine he critiques, that same body of ruffled feathers that bestows upon him the title of “artist”. He has exhibited in illustrious international galleries. In addition to exhibition credentials that would bring a tear to any striving artist’s eye, Cattelan’s pieces fetch handsome sums at auction. La Nora Ora (The Ninth Hour) (1999) hauled in $3 million at a Christie’s auction, while Par Peur de l’Amour (2000), a sculpture of an elephant dressed in a Ku Klux Klan uniform, sold at Christie’s in 2004 for $2.7 million.

Some may say that the death of modernism was the death of art, and who’s to say they are wrong? Gone was the artist as god, great author, speaker and knower of unfathomable truth, gone was a world structured by polarised opposites of mind/matter, higher/lower, greater/lesser, subject/object, civilised/uncivilised.
Postmodernity is a reflection of unresolved paradoxes of modernism; a movement wholly parasitic, whose scope of deconstruction rattles between established binaries.


So while today anyone has the ability to call themselves an artist, a bag of rubbish on the roadside or a shop window display can be called art, where art is as commodified and consumable as a Mac and cheese to go, and where authorship lies cold and stiff, this does not spell the death of art. You can be certain that the goal posts have moved, perhaps are missing entirely, and Cattelan has run off with the ball. And it’s a good thing too, because only once everything has been said will art truly die. But hey, if you refuse to see the art in Cattelan convincing his gallery manager to dress as a giant pink phallus for an entire month, the joke’s on you.






P.S. While facts in this piece hold more or less true, some have been bent and stretched for effect (the price tags not being one). If you have any queries, though, I’m sure Cattelan would be happy to dodge them too. See more at (http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/cattelan.html).

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