Hanged and Buried for Reasonable Doubt

 

”The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends and the other begins?” (Edgar Allen Poe, Premature Burial, 1844 )

Maurizio Cattelan, W Magazine, Linda Evangelista

”In Agape Agape, William Gaddis final novel of despair, a dying narrator expounds, before his imminent demise, a litany of cultures self-infatuating abuses. These abuses, channeled through a Prednisone-laced invective, led to the systemic destruction of the arts in the modern age: mass production, media-driven awards for corporate awards sake (the Pulitzer, the Nobel) and last, but certainly not least, the idolatry of creative facility for pure entertainment, which sterilizes the human spirit from the fundamental capacity to err, turning us into player pianos.” ( James Bae )

Shocking and disturbing.A skillful entrapment of wayward paranoid spirits and  corralling of roundup ready archetypes of fear, in a museum of the absurd. An artist who is a showcase  for themes of   death and violence in supra-reality; a clinical, surgical precision showing a subversive vision of society.  The depiction of such ethernal themes is a commentary that informs about the times we live in. Narratives involving death and violence are particularly rich and powerful if not subject to casual treatment which is the general rule in contemporary story lines.

Maurizio Cattelan

 

 

Artists like Maurizio Cattelan probe the tragic and morbid  in a deep,  insightful  and sometimes disturbing manner through his artistic narrative. The mechanics of confrontation, inverted images of power and innocence and the seduction of authority are part of  Cattelan’s commentary on the paradoxes of transgression, and its undefined limits, in an interplay between simultaneously existing differing truths and  unpredictable conclusions, all in a flight from the mundane. He  carries his pictorial statements to extremes so that the realistic depiction of well-practiced social and art world conventions  spill over into the absurd and ridiculous. Rather theatrical and ephemeral in his actions, objects, and installations, but deploying ironic sophistication and playful jabs that delve into a collective imagination and common attraction to spectacle; the logos of which are uniquely mined, refined and elaborated on from the riches of popular culture.

Cattelan  spares no taboo in unmasking deceitfulness and suffering the public as fool.” Yet, he wants his work to be located somewhere between “softness and perversity,” he says: “It should be tender, comforting and seductive and yet corrupted, twisted and consumed.’ ”

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Cattelan, We Are the Revolution, 2000

This artwork does possess  and is stalked relentlessly in kind, by this pervasive morbid streak. An Italian attitude to life swinging from banality to extreme devoutness and holy veneration? A mesmerized and allegorical journey through  a central Catholic narrative of martyrdom and sacrifice, and understanding of the way, in general that essentially all religious cultures are founded and perpetuated ;  informed upon by the aestheticizing of death and disfigurement. The art, to some extent, a tracing back   to iconic  transcendent figures; a holy trinity of death, sex and religious ritual and the concommittant  passive aggressive relationship with the fears and anxieties it could arouse. As Poe said, ” insanity with long intervals of horrible sanity”.

The rhetorical and allegorical functions of those religious narratives are markedly evident in Cattelan’s work. It is this tragic but comical keynote that evokes strong, but sometimes also oppressive emotions , especially when Cattelan, in all his diversity, repeatedly falls back on  death as a guarantee on our corporeal meanderings. Like Poe, there is a damnation and attraction to death through an exploration of different realities. Like Poe, Cattelan also creates an anti-utopian world, substituting pure realism for the pure poetry of Poe. The idea of a split self, seeking to reintegrate and unify and a belief in an otherworld of repeated dyings and rebirth, or to paraphrase Poe, all that we see or seem, being but a dream within a dream. A hyper-realism that is unreal since the cult of death, per se, is more an abstract fixation.

Maurizio Cattelan, Bidibidobidiboo, 1996

”No artist seems more readily aware of the historical punctuality between indebted failure and artistic promise than Maurizio Cattelan. The all-or-nothing nature of his pieces appears topically, at times, to be a roundabout game of doubting the practice of art as personally enriching. In other instances, his artistic output figuratively cloaks individuality in the guise of the abject. Though humorous, Cattelans works provoke laughter only in a Schopenhauer light in whichwhats funny generally stems from witnessing the effect of beautiful shadows cast by ugly things.”( James Bae )The idea of ”ready made art,” metaphor for a certain bankruptcy of ideas dealing with the burden of arts rich history before him and the treading on graves both fresh and worn by time and usage.

Marcel Duchamp removed a urinal’s intended utility and gave it a new purpose as a referent or sign.  Had that urinal survived, it would be worth millions today, not as a working device, but as a fetishized sign.  We can’t see the piece today because it was discarded by Duchamp as if it were no longer art.  However, museums have remade it in several replicas, as if a replica can stand in for the art.”In contrast to Duchamp, however,Cattelan  does not relate the idea of the readymade to the selecting of found objects which are then declared as artworks, but views experienced reality in its irreconcilable, often absurd contradictions as a large readymade which he quarries for ideas.”(Bice Curiger )

Cattelan, La Nona Ora

Cattelans own experimenting within the context of Joseph Beuys iconographic grey felt suit, La Rivoluzione siamo noi leaves bare the utterance of what exactly is the purpose of creating art at all. Is the destiny to walk through the treads of another only because they are born before you, or are you a mute player with your ever-diminishing hour on the stage, signifying contempt and frustration at the meagre leftovers.  Undoubtedly, theres an uneasy indebtedness thats genuine, a playing of the cards dealt, a wearing of the emperors new clothes, but perhaps a preference to be an ungrateful and unthankful emperor wearing no clothes.

” Aesthetics have never been about value theory but of the theory of value. Without failure, improvisation is removed from any happening. Cattelan challenges the limits of contemporary value systems.” Another Fucking Readymade is the quintessential case in point of appropriation, tribute and symbolic theft:

Maurizio Cattelan

” De Appel insisted that ( De Appel, Amsterdam Gallery ) Cattelan complete an art installation in one week and he did not like to work that fast. He explained that he hated to work when he was a young man and believed labor robbed us of our precious time. Too often, art work becomes laborious, so he made a crime into an artwork. The night prior to the Crap Shoot opening, Maurizio broke into the nearby Galerie Bloom, which did not have an alarm system, and stole all of the gallery’s contents- the artworks, fax machines, filing cabinets-everything. He packed up the gallery’s property in boxes and transported them to de Appel where he exhibited them the next day under the title Another Fucking Readymade. This “theft” was a statement about displacement; one gallery was transported completely to another. This has been described as a form of cultural policing that allowed the curators of de Appel to reframe a real theft as an act of appropriation. The police were soon summoned and there were problems on the horizon…”