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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 how, without being directly autobiographical, Cattelan drew on his own emotional and psychological experiences to inject his art with potential meaning. This is a strategy he would continue to exploit throughout his early work. His goal, however, was not to invoke specific events or individuals but rather to summon up states of mind or emotions that would resonate in the present. While the work is not directly about him, he uses himself as an example, as a character whose foibles and trials invoke an empathetic identification on the part of the viewer. In the cover letter accompanying his 1987 pitchbook, he wrote (in poorly rendered English): “My name is Maurizio Cattelan, from Italy. I am an artist. The issue is showing an image of my work before the 1987. I’ve been using a different kind of technician to express myself. Now, often more, in my work I’m caring about the ironic-disobedient-childish aspects of my personality.”11

Cattelan’s childhood memories provided vivid fodder for his self-proclaimed concentration on bad behavior at this early stage in his career. His fraught relationship to his elementary-school education, an environment of flourishing insecurity, informed a number of works from the early 1990s that emphasized the drudgery of repetition and its punitive applications.12 In Edizioni dell’obbligo (Obligatory editions, 1991, cat. no. 11), the artist gathered workbooks from schoolchildren and published them in softcover versions, showing the innate banality of the lessons taught and the utter innocence of the thoughts expressed. In a subsequent untitled work, from 1991 (cat. no. 10), Cattelan imitated the oft-used school punishment that requires a child to write the same sentence over and over, such as “Cheating is bad,” or “I will not forget my homework.” He had the following statement inscribed repeatedly on twenty-nine sheets of lined paper: “Fare la lotte in classe è pericoloso” (Fighting in class is dangerous). When it was then “corrected” in red ink—changing the “in” to a “di”—the meaning of this declaration shifted dramatically, to “Class struggle is dangerous.” The artist’s playful realignment of the message simultaneously constitutes an ironic response to the very real social upheavals in Italy at the time and intimates a more genuine resistance to the toils of endless, unsatisfying labor.

fig. 3 Charlie Don’t Surf, 1997

The theme of academic repression and the anxieties that accompany it persisted in Cattelan’s output, culminating in the simultaneously poignant and gruesome sculpture Charlie Don’t Surf (1997, fig. 3, cat. no. 48). Rendered in veristic exactitude, “Charlie”—an oft-used name in the artist’s oeuvre—is a little boy in a hooded sweatshirt seated at a school desk. Turned away from the viewer, he appears repentant, as if doing time in the corner after some minor grade-school offense. On closer inspection, however, the punishment reveals itself to be severe: the boy’s hands are pierced—nailed to the desk by two no. 2 lead pencils. With this perverse crucifixion, the piece confronts the debilitating effect that the embarrassment of public discipline can have on a child.13 The disgraced isolation of this little figure recalls German artist Martin Kippenberger’s sculptural self-portrait Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself (1992), a life-size rendering of the artist standing facing a corner with arms folded behind his back in a studied pose of remorse. Deliberately cultivating a “bad-boy” persona as part of his practice, Kippenberger embraced humiliation as a medium in his art. His stand-in’s defiant dejection, like little Charlie’s martyrdom, suggests, if not promotes, the idea of failure as a viable artistic strategy. Motivated in the beginning by an almost paralyzing fear of disgrace, Cattelan created what can be characterized as an aesthetic of failure—a look, a tone, an attitude that serves to manage expectations, to make excuses before the fact. As the artist has explained, “Failure generates a sympathy that more people can recognize. . . . I’ve probably been so obsessed with a permanent fear of running out of gas that failure has become a sort of constant background to my work. The antithesis of failure is failure in advance—you never actually fail.”14

On the occasion of his first solo exhibition, held at Galleria Neon in Bologna in 1989, Cattelan was evidently so disappointed with his production that, in place of all the works he intended to show, he posted on the locked front door of the gallery a simple placard that read Torno subito, or “Be back soon” (cat. no. 6). This everyday shop sign—familiar from countless butchers, bakeries, and the like—reveals the artist’s discomfort with the critical attention and public judgment that his exhibition would garner. The empty gallery has many historical precedents, dating back to Yves Klein’s infamously bare (though highly publicized) exhibition at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris in 1958. Since then artists such as Robert Barry, Stanley Brouwn, Maria Eichhorn, Robert Irwin, and Maria Nordman have all purged their shows of any objects or installation elements, relying instead on the gallery architecture to frame and convey the content of their work, which ranges from pure aesthetic reverie to institutional critique.15 But for Cattelan, the gallery is not a space to mystify or demystify; it is merely a place of employment, which he approaches with the same rebellious attitude he would display toward any job, following or breaking rules depending on the risks he wishes to take.16 In one instance, echoing his paid leave from the morgue, he even obtained a doctor’s certificate indicating he was too sick to realize an artwork he had promised for an exhibition at the Pinacoteca di Ravenna in 1989. Later, in 2004, when awarded an honorary degree in sociology from the Università degli Studi di Trento, he feigned a skiing accident in order to avoid speaking at the reception, showing up with neck brace and an arm cast.17 When offered a solo exhibition at Galleria Massimo De Carlo in Milan in 1993, the artist found yet another strategy of escape. After failing to generate a body of work he considered acceptable (his ideas included, at one point, showing an inventory of every creative idea he had ever had), Cattelan once again closed the gallery, this time actually bricking up the door. The only thing on view, which was visible through the window, was a lone mechanical teddy bear riding a unicycle on a tightrope strung across the otherwise bare space (cat. no. 21).18 As a surrogate for Cattelan, this readymade—the first in a long line of stuffed or taxidermied animals—publicly admitted to the precariousness of the artist’s position.19 While demonstrating his failure to produce the requisite salable object for a gallery show, the untitled work nevertheless announced the kind of risk-taking path that the artist would follow from this point on, balancing, as it were, total irony and a kind of deadpan honesty.

For Cattelan’s debut in New York, where he moved in 1993, he deployed a similar strategy of evasion and denial. Unable, he claimed, to conceive of any good ideas for his solo exhibition at Daniel Newburg Gallery in 1994, he installed an ornate chandelier accompanied by a live donkey, a common symbol for stupidity, to represent his lowly place within the art world. While presented as an off-handed joke, Warning! Enter at your own risk. Do not touch, do not feed, no smoking, no photographs, no dogs, thank you (fig. 4) nevertheless invoked a significant artistic pedigree. It no doubt referenced Joseph Beuys’s first exhibition in New York, in which he lived on site at the René Block Gallery for one week with a live coyote in a shamanistic ritual of coexistence.20 The donkey itself, which would become a favored motif in Cattelan’s work, also recalled Jannis Kounellis’s groundbreaking installation of live horses at Galleria L’Attico in Rome in 1969. Though steeped in self-ridicule, the exhibition at Daniel Newburg, with its allusions to Beuys and Arte Povera, also made clear the artist’s aspirations for a place in contemporary art history and the seriousness of his enterprise, despite all appearances otherwise.

fig. 4 Warning! Enter at your own risk. Do not touch, do not feed, no smoking, no photographs, no dogs, thank 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 casually described his process as finding “the path of least resistance . . . the quickest and easiest thing to do.”30 In his professed quest for a labor-free but lucrative career, Cattelan has frequently extended his projects to include other artists, weaving their engagement into the conceptual framework of his practice. The ambiguous relationship between art and effort was the subject of Oblomov Foundation (1992, fig. 8, cat. no. 15), a fictional not-for-profit established by Cattelan to award an artist a $10,000 grant for not exhibiting his or her work for an entire year. Named after the 1859 novel by Ivan Goncharov, whose eponymous main character has come to symbolize total inertia and indecision, Oblomov sought to disrupt the market-driven cycles of creativity in the art world, in which artists are expected to produce product for a seemingly unending chain of fairs, gallery shows, and museum presentations. Cattelan raised the funds to support purposeful inactivity from a circle of donors, whose names he inscribed on a commemorative glass plaque that he installed illegally on the facade of the Accademia di belle arti di Brera in Milan, where it remained undetected for a year.31 The donors nominated deserving artists—Cattelan claims there was even a short list of potential winners—but no one would accept the grant. In the end, he awarded it to himself and used the money to move to New York.

fig. 8 Oblomov Foundation, 1992 (detail)

Seven years later, Cattelan orchestrated another high-profile paid vacation for artists, this time in the guise of the 6th Caribbean Biennial (cat. no. 67), at once a party and a parody of the ever-proliferating international biennial circuit, on which the same group of artists, the “usual suspects,” seemed to be included in every show. At the time of the project, Cattelan counted seventy-two biennials in existence around the world, the continuing propagation of which provided cover for this performative riff on an exhibition.32 It was cast as just another invitational, held in some far-flung destination with the potential for tourism; this time it was the island of Saint Kitts in the British West Indies. Organized in collaboration with curator Jens Hoffmann, the 6th Caribbean Biennial had all the trappings of a typical exhibition: curators, official sponsors,33 a press release, a press office, advertisements in top art magazines (fig. 34), invitation letters, and a list of notable participating international artists whose names would have had great currency, given how frequently their work was being featured in biennials around the globe: Olafur Eliasson, Douglas Gordon, Mariko Mori, Chris Ofili, Gabriel Orozco, Elizabeth Peyton, Tobias Rehberger, Pipilotti Rist, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.34 The only thing missing was the “art,” as nothing was put on display. The artists simply swam, partied, rested, and conversed for eight days, as if on vacation.35 While easily dismissible as ironic navel gazing or a diluted form of institutional critique, the piece was emblematic of a practice that emerged during the 1990s in which artists embraced the exhibition format itself as a medium, expanding its parameters in time and space as a means to engage their audiences in ways that subverted the normal expectations of an art-viewing experience.36 Most presentations of visual art are conceived as an endpoint, a culminating view of all the effort expended prior to the opening (hence the prevalence of terms like “retrospective,” “survey,” and “overview” in exhibition-related parlance). By resisting and remolding the exhibition context, Cattelan incorporated its structural elements into his work, presenting alternative conditions for the viewing experience. The 6th Caribbean Biennial, in his mind, deliberately confused roles in a reflection of the convoluted nature of everyday life. In an interview with Massimiliano Gioni and Hoffmann during the planning process, Cattelan claimed:

What I’m really interested in is the notion of complexity, the idea that there are no fixed roles and definitions. Everyone is forced to change roles every single moment of his life. . . . No one should be able to tell if it’s an artwork or a critical and curatorial statement. No one should be able to figure out where the artworks are, if there are any, or what the artists are doing there. . . .

What I’m trying to say is that art is a collision of different systems and levels of reality. And I wish our biennial could reflect all this. On the other hand, complexity is hard to grasp, so our project might turn out as a total flop. Which is okay, because failure is closer to reality than art itself.37

Cattelan’s profound engagement with and courtship of failure, as a strategy and a theme, links him historically to an antiheroic impulse with roots in Dada and Duchamp as well as to more contemporary correlates like Richard Prince and Mike Kelley, who cultivate self-derision as an art form. While he has been described (and dismissed) repeatedly as a trickster, clown, or court jester who is most often the brunt of his own sad jokes, Cattelan merits a more nuanced consideration.38 While his performative escapades—from perverse school assignments to narrow escapes and brushes with the law to fake exhibitions—may stem from a personal sense of dejection and anxiety (tinged with adolescent humor), they serve to disrupt the art-historical status quo in provocative and meaningful ways. Cattelan’s persona, a highly developed version of the archetypal fool, allows him to circumvent two opposing poles of critical thought that define the way much twentieth-century art has been articulated and understood. The idea of willful idiocy is in direct contrast to the much-venerated notion of the artist-genius, whose aesthetic vision is a portent of progress and originality, the hallmarks of modernist principles.39 At the same time, however, the figure of the fool, given its penchant for buffoonery and chaos, cannot adhere to the postmodernist ideal of the author’s elegant disappearance into the work. Caught in a dialectical netherland between opposing yet intertwined perspectives, Cattelan’s practice offers a third way, a path between the utopian goals and high ideals of modernism and the self-reflexive, deconstructive tendencies of postmodernism. His work amalgamates the defining factors of both without being beholden to any one intellectual paradigm. It is aspirational yet ironic; comical yet critical; and elusive yet instantly accessible, given its pop sensibility. Like a seasoned outlaw, Cattelan navigates a fine line between what is socially and culturally acceptable and what is not.

NOTES

4 Ibid., p. 26.

5 Cattelan’s mother died when he was twenty-two years old.

6 Cattelan shared this story in his 2003 interview with the author; see “Nancy Spector in Conversation with Maurizio Cattelan,” p. 31. He used this example to demonstrate his inability to fit in as a child and his propensity for getting in trouble: “I had drawn moustaches on the little statues. And when the priests found them, they came straight to me, they didn’t even ask the other twenty kids who were working with me. Basically they knew it had to be Maurizio’s fault. So they came up to me and said ‘Maurizio. Why!?’”

7 “Nancy Spector in Conversation with Maurizio Cattelan,” pp. 31–32.

8 Francesco Bonami points out that in Italian the name of the table means “little watchdog” and refers to Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the gates of Hades in Greek mythology. See “Static on the Line: The Impossible Work of Maurizio Cattelan,” in Maurizio Cattelan (2003), p. 45. Manufactured by Dilmos Milano, the round glass table has a figurative iron base in the form of a three-armed, three-legged man.

9 A copy of this brochure resides in the Franklin Furnace Archives, now housed in the library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It contains a piece of writing presumably by the artist that reads as a surreal stream of consciousness as well as drawings and photographs of mostly nonexistent sculptures that hover between domestic objects and art.

10 See Bonami, “Static on the Line,” pp. 45–46, on the chronology of Cattelan’s early work.

11 It would have been difficult to predict how Cattelan’s aesthetic would develop from this catalogue. The cover letter, dated June 5, 1987, provides a first glimpse into the conceptual path he would subsequently take.

12 A pendant to Lessico familiare entitled Grammatica quotidiana (Daily grammar, 1989, cat. no. 4) brilliantly captures the monotony so associated with unvaried, uninspiring work, the fear of which haunted the young artist. The piece takes the form of a prosaic daily calendar that advertises a “modern bakery” in Forlì, a city not far from Padua where Cattelan had settled in 1985. Each tear-off sheet bears not the day of the week but the word oggi, suggesting an endless stream of todays with no hope for progress, change, or escape.

13 Cattelan based this work, he has said, on an incident in which he stabbed another boy with a pen in school. See Bonami, “Static on the Line,” p. 66. In addition to Charlie Don’t Surf, Cattelan produced a single, disembodied hand pierced by a pencil (Untitled, 1997, cat. no. 49), which perhaps more directly recalls this aggressive outburst.

14 Quoted in Bruce Millar, “Top Cat,” Tate Magazine, no. 8 (November–December 2003), p. 42. Ellipses in original.

15 In 2009, the Centre Pompidou in Paris mounted an exhibition devoted to this phenomenon. Comprising twelve nearly empty rooms, each encountered in succession, Vides (Voids) restaged historic examples of entirely vacant installations—spaces left deliberately blank by the featured artists.

16 In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Cattelan stated, “I have been a failure for most of my life. I couldn’t keep a job for more than two months. I couldn’t study: school was a torture. And as long as I had to respect rules, I was a disaster. Initially art was just a way to try a new set of rules. But I was very afraid of failure in art as well.” “Maurizio Cattelan” (2001), in Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews: Volume 1, ed. Thomas Boutoux (Florence: Fondazione Pitti Immagine Discovery; and Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2003), p. 146.

17 That Cattelan received an honorary degree in sociology without ever having attended college only strengthens the carefully choreographed mystique of the inveterate underachiever who somehow succeeds in spite of himself.

18 Cattelan has said that he was interested at the time of this show to force De Carlo to leave the gallery and conduct his business outside its confines. The gesture recalls a 1992 show at 303 Gallery in New York by Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija in which he transferred everything from the gallery’s kitchen, office, and storage room and set it up, for all to see, in the middle of the space. During the exhibition he cooked batches of free curry for visitors. While Cattelan’s gesture was hardly as generous, it demonstrated a shared interest in dissolving distinctions between art and life, which defined much of the work of the 1990s by artists associated with what has become known as “relational aesthetics.” For a study of ten artists associated with this phenomenon, which included Cattelan, see Spector, “theanyspacewhatever: An Exhibition in Ten Parts,” in theanyspacewhatever, exh. cat. (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2008), pp. 13–27.

19 Cattelan found the bear in the window of a pharmacy in New York, where he had re-cently moved.

20 The exhibition, which took place in 1974, was titled I Like America and America Likes Me. Cattelan would continue to channel the spirit of Beuys in his work, which will be discussed later in this essay.

21 Cattelan’s artistic peers, with whom he exhibited in the groundbreaking exhibition Traffic, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud in 1996, were broadly international and, in many cases, living abroad. They included Angela Bulloch, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Tiravanija. See Spector, “theanyspacewhatever,” for a discussion of the nomadic quality of this group.

22 In addition to Cattelan, the exhibition Una domenica a Rivara (A Sunday in Rivara), curated by Gregorio Magnani, included Mario Airò, Stefano Arienti, Umberto Cavenago, Mario Dellavedova, Eva Marisaldi, Marco Mazzucconi, Laura Ruggeri, and Luca Vitone.

23 Bonami makes this point in relation to Cattelan’s Venice Biennale piece in “Static on the Line,” p. 74. It is interesting to note that Cattelan earned money on Working Is a Bad Job twice: when he rented his space and on the subsequent sale of the work to a private collection.

24 See Richard Brilliant, Portraiture, vol. 1, part 2 (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), pp. 171–74, for a discussion of the poster that deciphers Duchamp’s puns, pointing out that in New York street jargon of the era, “welch” refers to failing to meet one’s financial obligations in gambling and that “pickens” refers to the “paltry results of a swindle.”

25 The exhibition, entitled Ottovolante: Per una collezione d’arte contemporanea, was at the Galleria d’arte moderna e contemporanea, Accademia Carrara.

26 “Nancy Spector in Conversation with Maurizio Cattelan,” p. 32.

27 The reference to Sigmund Freud’s concept of the tripartite id/ego/superego configuration of the psyche in correlation with this piece was suggested by Francesco Manacorda in an entry on the work in Manacorda, Maurizio Cattelan (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2006), Supercontemporanea series, ed. Francesco Bonami, p. 27.

28 The curators of the exhibition were Annie Fletcher, Nina Folkersma, Clive Kellner, Kay C. Pallister, and Adam Szymczyk. According to Cattelan, Szymczyk was the only one not to participate in the break-in. Cattelan’s goal in stealing all the work on view and the furnishings of the gallery was to transpose the reality of the gallery space onto the institutional space of de Appel. Afterward, then-director Saskia Bos confronted the artist about his intent: “[Cattelan] spoke about what I would say is appropriation, and the need to make that appropriation in reality, and the need to bring something into another space, from one space to another. I remember asking myself . . . why he had not written a letter to ask if he could bring the show from one place to another, why he didn’t involve them consciously, willingly, knowingly. He said ‘no, because I had to transgress this line. I had to do something without their consent.’ It was the surprise that he was interested in.” See “Saskia Bos: A Chit Chat with Otto Berchem,” The Crap Shooter, 2nd ed. (May 1996), p. 16. I would like to thank Kay Pallister for sharing this 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.