MILAN — “You should never ask an artist about his art,” Maurizio Cattelan said after arriving by bicycle at a Milan park. “The best art raises a lot of questions,” he added. “No answers.”
Cattelan, 63, one of today’s most prominent artists with a reputation that reaches far beyond the art world, has a new exhibition riddled in New York that is sure to raise even more questions — and some doubts.
He spoke enthusiastically in Italian about his first major New York exhibition since his landmark retrospective, “Everything,” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2011, in which almost all of his work was suspended like a mobile.
“I hate when they call me a joker,” he declared. The artist, who created an effigy of a Pope struck down by a meteorite, made a real, working toilet out of solid gold he called “America” and stunned the world when he taped a banana to the wall and sold it as art , has continually received variations of the joker nickname—jester, trickster, sly—but his is the cosmic joke, the joke of the Stoic philosophers: death and our illusions of personal importance before oblivion arrives for us and for him. .
If Cattelan’s work is not a laughing matter, it is undeniably thought-provoking, and for his exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in NY, which runs until June 15, he turns his sardonic gaze to the disturbing topic of gun violence. His new works are riddled with bullets—24-karat gold-plated steel panels that create a mirror-like reflection, with their ammunition wounds deforming the metal surfaces.
The riddled panels, 64 in total and titled “Sunday,” weigh about 35 kilos each and measure about 1.40 meters high. Cattelan compared the assembly, mounted on a single wall, to the execution wall of a firing squad.
“When I read the front page of the newspapers, all they talk about is violence“, said. “I am completely immersed in violence.”
With the “Sunday” panels, the public participates in the aftermath of a shooting, seeing their own reflections riddled with bullet holes, with the seductive beauty of the shine of gold—and with the contrasting implications of a denunciation and a glorification of violence.
“Gold and guns are the American dream,” he said. The message: violencenot the violence of fictional movies, but the all-too-real barbarism of mass shootings, murders, and wars—is now part of pop culture.
Cattelan hired shooters at a New York City shooting range to shoot at the panels with weapons that were easily and legally obtained thanks to lax gun restrictions in the US. “Where else in the world could you do that?” he asked.
Cattelan’s work reached its highest auction price in May 2016, when “He”, A wax and resin sculpture of Hitler on his knees, sold at Sotheby’s for $17.2 million, or about $22 million in today’s money.d.
“My primary audience is not the art world,” he continued. “These are people who may not be educated in what art is supposed to be, but they identify with the work.”
Roberta Tenconi, curator of his 2021-22 exhibition at Hangar Bicocca, in Milan, with Vicente Todolí, said that “the power of Maurizio’s work is in layering familiar images to create something that resonates in many ways.
“Nothing is ever singular or simple. And Maurizio loves to make people uncomfortable,” she added.
“The more you can synthesize contrasting elements and eliminate any embellishments, the closer you will get to something that functions as a symbol.” —to create indelible images that offer infinite interpretations, Cattelan said.
Namely: the banana, titled “Comedian,” from 2019. The banana sparked fascination and outrage and an art-world-gone-mad-type furor, as well as a dizzying cycle of memes. At the time, Cattelan told me: “Try to think of Napoleon without his horse—it’s impossible! Now try to think of pop culture without the banana”—the banana of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, the banana peel of slapstick, the proverbial banana in your pocket, as he put it.
But today he dismisses the fad as “just a viral moment.”
“Even if people know banana, no one knows who I am as an artist“, said.
And then he took off on his bike, leaving me with many more questions.
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