Coda
MAURIZIO Cattelan’s career resists summation by any traditional exhibition format. Many of his early, action-based meditations on or rehearsals for failure would be impossible to reconstruct. His collaborative editorial and curatorial endeavors have been largely ephemeral. And his singular, iconic objects function best in isolation. Sculptures like Novecento, La Nona Ora, Him, and Now are so powerful individually that, when brought together in one space, they might operate like magnets in close proximity and repel one another on a tide of negative energy. The exhibition that this book accompanies, Maurizio Cattelan: All, is thus a full-scale admission of the inadvisability of viewing his work within the context of a conventional retrospective, which would typically provide a chronological overview, select career highlights, and, by its very nature, create a hierarchy within an oeuvre. In typical Cattelan style, the artist has resisted this model at all costs, creating instead a site-specific installation that cunningly celebrates its futility.
Maurizio Cattelan: All brings together virtually everything the artist has produced since 1989, borrowed from collectors and museums around the world, and presents the works en masse, strung haphazardly from the oculus of the Guggenheim’s rotunda. Perversely encapsulating Cattelan’s career to date in an overly literal, three-dimensional catalogue raisonné, the installation lampoons the idea of comprehensiveness. All is an exercise in disrespect: the artist has hung up his work like laundry to dry (fig. 43). Another analogy, one cited by Cattelan, is the juvenile propensity for stringing up the family cat, an inherently cruel and decidedly naughty act. Like all of his individual objects, the new installation resonates with multiple interpretive valences. Cattelan has certainly used the motif of suspension before, most notably in the poetically elongated Novecento and the little boys hanging from a tree in Milan, but here it takes on epic proportions. Hoisted by rope as if on a gallows, the objects explicitly reveal the undertone of death that pervades the artist’s work. In total, the installation looks like a mass execution. More than just a witty culmination of a career, the exhibition signifies its end. And this is exactly what Cattelan wishes to convey.
