Marinetti Lives

Photo by Pierpaolo Ferrari

Maurizio Cattelan, 2008

Pablo Picasso Georgia O'Keeffe Maurizio Cattelan Balla Umberto Boccioni Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Luigi Russolo Shaq's Big Debut

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When he was 13, Maurizio Cattelan worked in the gift shop of the Church of St. Anthony in Padua. Finding that someone had drawn mustaches on the figurines of the holy, the priests did not bother questioning the other boys. "Maurizio, why?" they asked. This has been a recurrent question in Cattelan’s life and art. His first solo show, in Bologna, featured a locked gallery with a note on the door: "Torno subito" ("I’ll be right back"). (He wouldn’t be.) A few years later, he persuaded the Parisian art dealer Emmanuel Perrotin, a notorious philanderer, to dress up in a giant pink bunny costume — one that looked a lot like a giant pink phallus — and to hop gamely about his gallery. Taking to the idea of putting dealers in difficult positions, Cattelan duct-taped Massimo de Carlo — owner of a Milan gallery and not a small man — to the wall. A Perfect Day (1999), as the work was called, came to an end when de Carlo was rushed to the hospital.

Cattelan has not confined himself to his own galleries for such new expressions. Many contemporary artists have been fascinated by ideas of symbolic theft. Cattelan went a step beyond "appropriation art" to actual larceny. In 1996, he broke into the Galerie Bloom in Amsterdam, stole its entire contents, and put them up the next day in a nearby Amsterdam gallery with the title Another Fucking Ready-made. The police soon arrived.

In his playful pursuit of new forms of provocation, Cattelan has often turned to iconic places and names. For La Nona ora (The Ninth Hour; 1999), he felled a life-size doll of Pope John Paul II — in full papal splendor, wearing a golden robe and carrying a silver scepter — with a meteorite. In Him (2001), Hitler kneels in what looks like earnest prayer. For an opening in 1997, held a few blocks away from the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe, Cattelan donned a dress and a giant carnival-size papier-mâché mask of O’Keeffe. He then made the rounds, cigar in hand, chatting. This proved a warm-up for a visit to MoMA the following year. Cattelan put on an equally monumental papier-mâché Picasso head and signature striped shirt. He shook hands with those waiting in line (to see not only the Picasso show but also Cattelan’s own work inside), played with children, and posed for photos. Just as A Perfect Day came to an end with the paramedics arriving and Another Fucking Ready-made with the knock on the door from the police, the Picasso playdate was interrupted by MoMA security. In every case, the question was the same as when Cattelan was 13 and working in the Church of St. Anthony: "Maurizio, why?"

On occasion, Cattelan has offered answers to this question. "I’m not trying to be against institutions or museums," he has said. "Maybe I’m just saying that we are all corrupted in a way; life itself is corrupted, and that’s the way we like it." Were Cattelan looking to discuss questions of corruption with someone who was against institutions and museums, he could not have found a better interlocutor than his countryman Marinetti, who condemned museums as "cemeteries" and advocated burning and flooding Italy’s great ones. ("Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! ...Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums!") Never one to shy away from a challenge, Cattelan has found a way around Marinetti’s death in 1944 to do just this. (The strange fruit of this impossible conversation begins on the following page.) In the meantime, a few final words on Cattelan’s calling are perhaps in order. In recent years he has extended his activities, coediting the magazine Charley (described by its editors as "partial, unstable, and untrustworthy"), cofounding the Wrong Gallery in New York (sign on door: Fuck Off We’re Closed), cocurating the Fourth Berlin Biennial, as well as returning to object making (his sculpture is on view in the "Italics" show currently up in Venice, reviewed in this issue). Cattelan’s incendiary mixture of the wry and the goofy has remained constant through these varied activities. On another occasion, he gave a more thorough response to those seeking to understand what he is doing and why: "The problem with that question is that I am not an artist. I really don’t consider myself an artist. I make art, but it’s a job. I fell into this by chance. Someone once told me that it was a very profitable profession, that you could travel a lot and meet a lot of girls. But this is all false; there is no money, no travel, no girls. Only work. I don’t really mind it, however. This is one profession in which I can be a little bit stupid, and people will say, ‘Oh, you are so stupid; thank you, thank you for being so stupid." — Leland de la Durantaye