EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Maurizio Cattelan at the Guggenheim

The Maurizio Cattelan exhibition opening today at the Guggenheim New York (on till Jan 22nd, 2012) is entitled All because it is meant to be a complete retrospective of the Italian artist’s career. In fact, aged 51, he has formally announced that this is also the end of his career and that he has retired from the art world. Cattelan, who moved to New York years ago, has developed a reputation as a prankster, joker and tragic poet who uses signs and realistic reproductions of both humans and animals in strange, slightly comic situations, many involving death. His early works reference Italian happenings like the Red Brigades; the content of his later ones are more American. His best-known work is a life-size mannequin of Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite. Yet while the original was set on a broad expanse of papal red carpet with shattered glass nearby (above right) and really did surprise the spectator, the Guggenheim version is just the Pope and the rock hanging on a palette from the centre of the Guggenheim’s dome. It’s all a little disappointing.  

For the first time, though, in the Guggenheim’s history, nothing is on its walls. The viewer’s attention is turned inwards, away from the walls and towards the open space below the dome. There, suspended from scaffolding covered in realistic pigeons, are samples of all Cattelan’s works. The trick would have worked better if the exhibits were hung closer to the winding walkway where the visitor could get a good look at them and, in a sense, feel them. Instead they are so far away that the works become distant, both physically and psychically.  Some, outside their original context, are difficult to make sense of. The horse with which the artist clearly identified when first shown (above center) was, like the artist, reaching for the stars on the walls of the world's museums. In the Guggenheim the headless horse merely hangs in space with its head attached to what looks like a patch of thick sheetrock. The whole sense that it is a white gallery wall (with a modern gallery's characteristically white floor as well) is missing.

I don’t usually comment on contemporary art because there are too many artists to follow. Nevertheless I am struck by certain common themes. If you go to the Cattelan exhibition, for instance, take note of how many of his works concern crucifixion and how he specifically suggests that anyone can become Christ. Look for the boy sitting with his hands nailed by pencils to his school desk or, with even more punch, the life-size model of a woman crucified inside a museum packing crate as though on her way to an exhibition. Cattelan plays with his face as well, multiple versions all different but all Cattelan. The artist’s self, death and crucifixion on one's way to re-birth, the Christ in each of us, the universal self, variations on the artist’s physiognomy, an identification with both past masters like Picasso and animals, and a fusion of subject matter with the trappings and events of an artist’s practice are all themes and focal points in past art too. That’s why I find the contemporary art that I do see so compelling. They often use the same themes that we show on this site were used by many great masters but which today's art world – beyond the artists themselves, of course - cannot see or cannot acknowledge.