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fig. 17 Spermini (detail), 1997

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duality and death

I dealt with corpses, real ones, when I worked in a morgue, and they seemed so deaf, distant. Maybe it’s all that job’s fault, but when I think of a sculpture, I always imagine it like that, far away, in some way already dead. It has always surprised me when people laugh at some of my art works: maybe in front of death laughter is a spontaneous reaction.57

FOR an artist who consistently claims to be without ideas, as is the case with Cattelan, self-portraiture is a logical mode: one need not look beyond one’s own face to find material. In Cattelan’s early, escapist antics, his presence was implied but never literally represented. But a subgenre in his oeuvre emerged by the late 1990s: a battery of look-alikes, mini-mes, doubles, and surrogates began to populate the work. Though the artist had been too shy to speak in public, often sending substitutes to pose in his place,58 he has had no qualms about using his distinctive features as fodder for imagery. For an exhibition at the Galleria Massimo Minini in Brescia in 1997, he plastered the walls with five hundred painted latex masks of his face. Amusingly titled Spermini (fig. 17, cat. no. 52), the piece suggests a swarm of genetic carriers, all with the same DNA code. While the features represented in his similar Super Us police-sketch project had all been different, according to the subjective memories of the individuals describing him, here there was nothing but relentless repetition. Presented as if sprayed willy-nilly over the walls, these spermini imply spilt seed. For Cattelan, a former altar boy and lapsed Catholic, this work about wasted expenditure must have had a deeper, more personal resonance than its joking tone might suggest: onanism is considered a sin, after all. The spermini also evoke the spirit of the great, guilty masturbator Alexander Portnoy of Philip Roth’s classic novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), who believed his insatiable sexual appetite would earn him eternal shame.

While the universal emotions of guilt and remorse are intertwined leitmotifs in his work, Cattelan has on more than a few occasions made direct reference to the Church, and by extension its pervasive moral authority. For instance, the artist’s psychoemotional relationship to his religious upbringing finds expression in his 1994 neon piece, Catttelan (fig. 10, cat. no. 24), the three t’s of which mimic the crosses at Calvary. With an art-historical nod to the Post-Minimalist exercises of Bruce Nauman (especially his neon texts and performances taking place in the corners of his studio), Cattelan makes an equation between his own ordeals and the torment embodied by the death of Christ. By transforming his last name into a pictogram of the Crucifixion, he seems to be suggesting a correlation between his persona as suffering fool and that of Christ’s martyrdom. While undeniably blasphemous—who would expect less?—this analogy makes the case for the artist as sacrificial victim. Will Cattelan’s risk of total failure expiate the sins of the world? Does he play the fool so that we don’t have to? While the implication is far-reaching, it offers one way to read Cattelan’s recurrent invocation of the Church and his clear connections, both positive and negative, to the teachings of his faith.

Such an interpretive filter can bring into focus other allusive pieces, including the veiled self-portrait Daddy, Daddy (2008, p. 8, cat. no. 103), a life-size Pinocchio lying facedown in a pool of water. Premiering at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, as Cattelan’s contribution to the exhibition theanyspacewhatever (2008–09), the little cartoon figure floating in the fountain on the rotunda floor appeared to have plunged from above in either a suicidal leap or an accidental fall. As a surrogate for the artist—compare Pinocchio’s protruding nose with Cattelan’s most signature feature, and Pinocchio’s iconic Italianness59—the puppet was, perhaps, pursuing the only way out of a demanding group show. The title, however, suggests a quasi-religious reading. The phrase “Daddy, Daddy,” according to the artist, refers to one of Christ’s last utterances on the cross, as recorded in the gospels of both Matthew and Mark: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The correlation Cattelan draws between the Pinocchio story (in the version told by Disney in its 1940 film) and that of Christ circulates around the idea of a boy given life by his father, a boy who must then sacrifice that fragile life for the father to survive. That Cattelan’s puppet “landed” with his arms outstretched, crucifix-like, only serves to promote this account of the work.

Not long before creating Daddy, Daddy, Cattelan produced two enigmatic works that also evoke Christian iconography. Frau C. (2007, cat. no. 100) is a life-size figure of an ordinary woman in a black dress, first seen in the sky above the Portikus museum in Frankfurt, appearing to rise with arms outstretched in benediction. Inexplicably levitating, this anonymous woman presented an image of the Ascension that was steeped in the everyday.60 Cattelan described this mysterious person as either a savior or some sort of counselor: “I don’t know how much Frau C. is trying to save the human race or is trying to make us understand to what extent we are damaged. She seems like a revelation to me, a religious apparition. To tell you the truth, I still haven’t entirely understood if she is rising up to the sky or is slowly descending to the ground as if somebody had knocked her down.”61 Meanwhile, another haunting figure of a woman, Untitled (2007), has its origins in a 1977 self-portrait by Francesca Woodman, who photographed herself in a nightdress hanging from the molding over a doorway, arms extended at an awkward, clearly uncomfortable angle. When installing an unnervingly veristic resin version of this figure at Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, a glimpse of the sculpture in its packing crate led Cattelan to decide to alter the work in future iterations. From then on he has exhibited the woman facedown in the crate with her hands pierced and arms and legs cordoned in place (fig. 18). This is the way it was seen in a small town near Cologne as part of the Kunstprojekt Synagoge Stommeln in 2008, for which the artist installed the crate on the exterior wall of a church (cat. no. 102). Nearby was a memorial to Blessed Christine of Stommeln, a martyred medieval mystic who is venerated for her stigmata and powers to heal. Capitalizing on the layers of religious references at this site, with church, synagogue, and shrine all in proximity, Cattelan opened the work to many interpretive possibilities. Ultimately, what is most memorable about this unfathomable, shackled woman, who evokes a female crucifixion, is her undeniable humanness. She is rendered with an extraordinary degree of realism, her scale that of a real person and her feet noticeably, singularly dirty. If the sculpture were a photograph (as, indeed, its source was), these soiled feet would constitute the Barthesian “punctum” of the picture. They attest that this woman once walked among us, earthbound and all too human.

fig. 18 Untitled (2007) during installation at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, 2008

While the artist’s strict Roman Catholic upbringing plagues him—even his e-mail address includes three t’s in Cattelan—his self-portraits tend to be more whimsical, more attuned to his public persona as an impish troublemaker. In La Rivoluzione siamo noi (We are the revolution, 2000, fig. 19, cat. no. 75), he takes on a different kind of messiah, the German artist Joseph Beuys. Dressed in Beuys’s signature felt suit, a slightly miniaturized Cattelan—one could say a boyish version of the artist—dangles by his collar from a Marcel Breuer–designed coat rack. The look on his face suggests an insincere expression of contrition. While he may have been caught at something and strung up for punishment, he is certainly not sorry. The reference to Beuys complicates the reading, however. Is Cattelan criticizing the German mega-artist’s belief in the utopian potential of art as delusional? Or is he unfavorably comparing his own anxiety-ridden, confessional practice, one defined in part by practical jokes, with the ethical and recuperative tenor of Beuys’s life work? Parts pedagogue, cultural activist, shaman, performance artist, and environmentalist, Beuys claimed that art was a transformational vehicle, a means through which everyone could achieve personal and political reform. In his worldview, every social action, every effort toward the cultural good, could be considered a work of art. In a gesture typical of his self-mythologizing (he too operated behind a carefully composed persona), Beuys signed a 1972 editioned poster of himself striding toward the viewer with the proclamation “La rivoluzione siamo Noi.” With Cattelan’s surrogate dangling like the tragic horse in Novecento, he presents himself as unable to participate, incapable of contributing to the cause, however noble it might be.62

fig. 19 La Rivoluzione siamo noi, 2000

In another, yet markedly different, strike against the art-historical canon, Cattelan depicted himself breaking into the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (fig. 1, cat. no. 86) as part of an exhibition in 2002. His now-permanent intervention involved tearing open a hole in the floor of one of the esteemed Old Master galleries through which his wax double peers with wonderment, envy, or greed (typically, the artist would give nothing away about any specific emotion he might have wished to convey). The trope of the disruptive, antibourgeois artist à la Martin Kippenberger or Paul McCarthy is given a new twist by Cattelan, who revived it here with a sense of mock innocence.63 Two years later, the artist let loose a boyhood version of himself on a radio-operated, motorized blue tricycle at the three-day vernissage of the Venice Biennale. Commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where the work was later shown, Charlie (2003, cat. no. 89) sped around the grounds of the Giardini, narrowly missing visitors, pavilions, and artworks. Unlike the poor, persecuted child of Charlie Don’t Surf, this juvenile iteration of the artist’s subconscious was having the time of his life, alternately annoying and entertaining visitors to the exhibition.

Cattelan’s use of an errant twin, a ne’er-do-well lookalike, often rings with an epic existential angst, which, according to some thinkers, dates to the very origins of life. In his cultural history of twins and doubles, The Culture of the Copy, Hillel Schwartz cites a theory that posits that most pregnancies begin as dual, with two fetuses sharing the womb.64 The growth of a human is itself based on cellular duplication—cells splitting into duplicate, autonomous units that in time form a body. When those units continue to develop into separate individuals, identical twins are the result. As the hypothesis goes, in most cases only the stronger fetus survives, eventually ingesting the weaker twin’s chromosomal matter into its very being. Schwartz combines sources in ancient philosophy, such as Plato’s story in the Symposium about humans being originally in a binary state until split by Zeus and forced to search thereafter for their other half, with modern medical evidence and draws a psychological conclusion: “The emergent legend of the vanishing twin makes of our selves our own kin. . . . In one body, at one and the same time, we may carry and confute our own nearest sister, closest brother. While vanished twinship assures us of a sempiternal human link, it affords us also the pathos of inexpressible loss.”65 It is, perhaps, this sense of loss, this indescribable lack at the core of his work, that forms the subtext of Cattelan’s otherwise playful use of look-alikes and body doubles.

Of course, doubles have long been theorized for their psychological import, most famously by Sigmund Freud. He experienced the uncanny—that pervasive feeling of dread intrinsic to the Gothic novel—when he encountered his own reflection in a mirror while traveling on an overnight train. Not recognizing his image, he wondered who the old gentleman might be. He described the phenomenon as belonging to the “class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”66 In his view, the double is a figment of the subconscious that guards against primordial fears of estrangement. Repressed, it eventually returns as a portent, a chilling sign that death is lurking. The artist’s mannequins, no matter what trouble they may be stirring up, have a certain vacancy, a soulless quality that is disconcerting and ultimately disrupts their humor.67 They look just like Cattelan but are clearly and utterly inert. It is from such slippages between perceived opposites—self and lost other, the dead and the undead—that a sense of the uncanny emerges. His wax or resin figures invoke a parallel world of doppelgängers that haunt the wax museum and its history of making palpable the uncanny and its link to death. Take the Musée Grévin in Paris, established in 1882, with its array of historical personages in embalmed states of verisimilitude, so often in death-laden situations: Napoleon pauses in his tent during the withdrawal from Moscow; Marie Antoinette beholds a crucifix while awaiting the guillotine; Marat yields to death in his bathtub. Contemporary additions include Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe, two celebrities who succumbed to early, tragic demises. The museum’s “mortuary chill” is further intensified in a special underground section devoted to executions, which displays the events leading from violent crime to capital punishment.68

The origins of the waxwork lie in the death mask, and Marie Tussaud, the founder of the famous wax museum that bears her name, honed her skills during the French Revolution by making masks of the decapitated heads of the executed.69 As a cast of its subject’s own bodily presence at one specific moment in time, the wax figure records for posterity an image of what once had been but no longer is; like a photograph, it is indexical. When a cast is made on a living person, it will forever embody the anterior future, when, someday, the subject will no longer exist.70 This reality is manifested in the fragile nature of wax itself, even when the material is pressed into the service of commemorative portraiture. And herein lies its essential cruelty. Wax is far more delicate than human skin; when cast, it can easily break apart or collapse, and it melts completely when exposed to heat. Though it can eerily resemble the translucency of living flesh, a waxwork is actually far closer to the body as decaying—as corpse—as is eerily evident in Cattelan’s self-portraits, such as La Rivoluzione siamo noi and Charlie, and his other, more mystical figures like Frau C. and the woman in the crate.71

The taxidermied animals that recur in Cattelan’s work further embody this pervasive undercurrent of death, since by their nature they signify the dead even while simulating the living. This is particularly the case with the artist’s dog sculptures—Labradors, German shepherds, and Jack Russell terriers, among others—which are curled up on the floor or on the seats of chairs seemingly asleep, but which are in fact, as one title makes clear, Stone dead (1997, cat. no. 55). The dogs are practical jokes, perceptual tricks with ghastly implications. What looks to be charming and approachable, a dog to pet or cuddle, is really a well-preserved cadaver. Though not exactly surrogates in the spirit of the artist’s puckish clones, Cattelan’s animals function, in many cases, as symbols for a certain state of mind, for an emotion in search of physical expression. The live donkey in Cattelan’s short-lived exhibition at Daniel Newburg Gallery, for instance, signified his feelings of embarrassment—“like an ass”—for not having a better idea for the show.72 Since then, donkeys have reappeared in the artist’s oeuvre, often representing feelings of futility and helplessness. There is the taxidermied donkey pulling a wagon so laden with parcels that it rises upward, the cart serving as a counterweight to the unnaturally airborne animal (Untitled, 2002, cat. no. 27). Another sits on his haunches, in a most human pose, doing absolutely nothing, fulfilling the stereotype of a “lazy ass” (Untitled, 2004, cat. no. 28).

Cattelan’s affinity for animals flows right out of Aesop’s Fables and so embraces not only those tales’ anthropomorphic projections of human traits but also their moral inflection. The two golden Labradors apparently guarding a baby chick in Untitled (2007), which premiered in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, could be an essay about trust and maternal instincts. Or, on the other hand, it could illustrate a moment of predation. As a tableau in the haunting exhibition that included the nameless “crucified” woman, its meaning remains ambiguous. Cattelan has also found inspiration in the folktales of the Brothers Grimm, particularly “The Musicians of Bremen,” a story of outcast, retired work animals that by bonding together escape their sure deaths and find a peaceful life together. His sculpture of stacked taxidermied animals—rooster on cat on dog on donkey—called Love Saves Life (1995, fig. 20, cat. no. 35) playfully appropriates the composition of a bronze statue by Gerhard Marcks erected in Bremen in 1953 to commemorate the story. Cattelan revisited the motif two years later in Love Lasts Forever (1997, fig. 21, cat. no. 36), this time imagining a morbid outcome to this tale of fidelity by depicting the stacked animals as skeletons, still faithful but long dead.

fig. 20 Love Saves Life, 1995

fig. 21 Love Lasts Forever, 1997

The taxidermied animal that best personifies the feelings of despair endemic to the work overall is the little squirrel that died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Bidibidobidiboo (1996, fig. 2, cat. no. 40). Set in a miniature kitchen reminiscent of the artist’s family home, with a cheap water heater and sink with dirty dishes, the squirrel expired with his head on a yellow Formica-topped table, a pistol at his feet. The title of the work is a variation on the magical incantation recited by Cinderella’s fairy godmother in the famous 1950 Disney animated film when she transforms the scullery maid into an elegant princess. In its contrast to the desperate scene at hand, the title, according to Cattelan, belies the promise of progress and redemption sold to us by the media and the Church. The hopelessness of suicide (and its attendant passive-aggressiveness) returns as a theme throughout the artist’s work. Cattelan’s choice of Marc Etkind’s . . . Or Not to Be: A Collection of Suicide Notes (1997) as one of the selected readings for his Phaidon monograph underscores his melancholic identification with the topic. While Daddy, Daddy can be read either as the result of a suicidal leap or an act of homicide, the grave he dug for himself through the floor at Le consortium in Dijon, France, in 1997 (cat. no. 63) seems clearly to suggest that ending one’s life is a viable option. Yet within the context of Cattelan’s oeuvre, with its dark and biting humor, suicide functions more as a metaphor for escape, for dropping out or going rogue.

fig. 22 Mini-me, 1999

fig. 23 All (2007) during fabrication, Carrara, Italy, 2007

Death stalks the artist’s psyche and creeps into all manifestations of his production, well beyond the doubles and surrogates. Sometimes the subject is presented with amusing guile, as was the case with the “drowned” woman presented on the occasion of the 1997 edition of Skulptur: Projekte in Münster, an outdoor exhibition devoted to public sculpture (fig. 24, cat. no. 59). Using the city’s central lake as his platform, Cattelan deposited a life-size dummy of a woman in the water. She was meant to be visible just below the surface, like in the scene of a crime, but the figure sank out of view, leaving only rumor and innuendo to stand in for the object. Visitors who encountered only a label with the work’s original title, Out of the Blue, and an unobstructed view of the lake wondered if the piece ever existed other than as a concept, an obvious possibility given the artist’s history of invisible artworks, empty galleries, and other disappearances.73 Other shadowy works seem more menacing, like a sign installed on the side of a Spanish road announcing that fourteen people had died and two had been injured in a total of eighty-one accidents at that specific curve in the road (Untitled, 2001, cat. no. 84).

fig. 24 Untitled, 1997

With All (2007, fig. 23, cat. no. 98), Cattelan created what he described as a “monument to death,” a sculpture that would commemorate its grim and unrelenting presence. Searching for a universal symbol of mortality in magazines, newspapers, and online, he repeatedly found depictions of the shrouded body. It is an image, he said, “that we encounter every day” as natural and technological disasters intensify around the world, news of which now travels instantaneously through the mass media. The decision to use marble came later and was grounded in the “gravity of the subject.” Marble is, of course, the language of the monument in Western culture, and it has a personal resonance for Cattelan as an artist who grew up in Italy in the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. He has mentioned specifically in connection with All his memory of a 1753 statue depicting a veiled Christ by Giuseppe Sanmartino in the Cappella Sansevero de’ Sangri in Naples.74 Intensely baroque, the carved marble emulates the look of a translucent shroud over the highly articulated physique of the dead Christ. In All, Cattelan has eschewed the fetishization of the individual body for the haunting poetry of anonymity. Nine unidentified bodies covered with sheets lie on the floor in a straight line. Undoubtedly corpses, they are the fallen victims of some unnamed trauma. Harking back, perhaps, to the artist’s days working in the morgue, they silently address the unconscionable realities of our present-day world, which is rife with acts of terrorism, human-rights abuses, ethnic cleansing, and climate-induced natural catastrophes. All is a shrine to profound loss; the unknown figures memorialized in white Carrara marble are contemporary martyrs, secular saints whose demise bears no meaning other than to make visible the inevitable, to give form to our collective fear of the profane passage of life into death.

NOTES

57 “Killing Me Softly: A Conversation with Maurizio Cattelan,” interview with Giancarlo Politi et al., Flash Art (International edition) 37, no. 237 (July–September 2004), p. 92.