33 Artists in 3 Acts (24 page)
Maurizio Cattelan
L.O.V.E.
2010
“I
n the Italian provinces, ‘artist’ is a synonym for dunce,” says Francesco Bonami in his “unauthorized autobiography” of Maurizio Cattelan. The first curator to include Cattelan in the Venice Biennale, Bonami has since exhibited the artist’s work seven times, acted as a regular sounding board for his ideas, and titled some of his most important works. The curator has even acted as a ventriloquist for the artist in a faux autobiography that is “full of mistakes that turn out, by chance, to be exactly right.”
Bonami and I are looking at a public monument recently erected in the middle of Milan’s Piazza Affari or “Business Square.” Carved out of gray-white Carrara marble, Cattelan’s giant hand has all its fingers cut off except the middle one, the one that has the authority to gesture rudely. The hand, which I heard the artist discussing on the phone when I visited his Chelsea apartment, calls to mind late Roman sculptures such as the Colossus of Constantine. It sits on a high plinth made out of a creamier-colored travertine, the same stone as the Milan stock exchange that looms behind it. The plinth is already covered with graffiti—smiley faces, names with dates, messages to God such as “Ciao Dio!” and a few “Merda” comments that seem to be passing judgment on the work.
In order to obtain a view of the piece, we weave our way through the
Fiats and Clios that are parked around the phallic finger to the edge of the piazza. Rain sprinkles have turned into a steady drizzle, so we take cover under the eaves of one of the many banks that line the square. “Some people think he is giving the finger to the stock exchange. I think the stock exchange is giving the finger to the people,” says Bonami with typical jocularity. Bonami has pale blue-green eyes, short-cropped hair, and long gray stubble. He comes across as a mauled teddy bear—one who comes to life and wreaks havoc among the other toys when his owner sleeps.
The sculpture is titled
L.O.V.E.
(2010). It was unveiled in September 2010 to coincide with the opening of a Cattelan show curated by Bonami at the Palazzo Reale. The “retrospective” included only three works: a grand patriarchal Pope (1999), a crucified woman in a crate (2007), and an animatronic figure of a boy with a toy drum (2003). Cattelan saw the selection of hyperreal sculptures as “a family.”
While I try to remember what the acronym
L.O.V.E.
stands for, Bonami tells me that it depends on the language and that even though he was “involved in the conversation about the title,” he is not sure. “Lies, Liberty, Oligarchs, Violence, Vendettas, Emptiness, Envy?” he surmises. “Elsewhere it might be a stupid piece, but here it works very well.”
L.O.V.E.
is the only new public sculpture to grace the streets of Milan for some time. During a dark moment in Italy’s rolling economic crisis, Cattelan chose the location, then had friends pull strings to obtain government permission to erect the sculpture there. Initially, it was to be here for only a few weeks, but now, thanks to the mayor’s intervention, it will stay for three decades. Most of Cattelan’s sculptures are made in editions of three. “I think this one is unique,” says Bonami, “but there is always a possibility to do more if someone is asking.”
Bonami met Cattelan when he was figuring out which artists to put in his section of the 1993 Venice Biennale. The curator included a few “hot” artists who have since disappeared and many unknown ones, such as Cattelan, Gabriel Orozco, Charles Ray, and Paul McCarthy, who have gone on to achieve high levels of recognition. In 1996, 1997, and 1998, the curator showed Cattelan in group exhibitions in Torino, Santa Fe, and Paris. Then, in 2001, Bonami commissioned a sculpture for the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Cattelan delivered
Felix
, a giant cat skeleton. “A terrible work,” says Bonami, “the fifth bad work he gave me.” In 2003, when Bonami was director of the entire Venice Biennale, he again invited Cattelan to participate. “He sent
Charlie
, a stupid self-portrait on a tricycle,” says Bonami. “The only great work Maurizio has made for a show of mine is
All
, which I put in the atrium at Palazzo Grassi as part of my show of Italian art since the sixties.” One of the many Cattelan pieces upon which Bonami has bestowed a title,
All
(2007) consists of nine marble sculptures of corpses draped in fabric. Exquisitely carved by masters in a workshop in Carrara (a two-hour drive from here), the restrained sculpture confronts the viewer with the anonymity and odd beauty of death.
Bonami wrote an introduction to his mock Cattelan autobiography in his own voice. “Cattelan is a contemporary Pinocchio,” he says, “and I’m like some poor Geppetto forced to listen to endless tall tales and half-truths.” Certainly, Cattelan has a reputation for being coy with the truth and often poses for photos in a way that accentuates the unbelievable size of his nose, but the statement also suggests that Bonami created Cattelan. The rain subsides and we perambulate the outer edge of the piazza, moving counterclockwise around the finger. I remind the curator of his analogy, suggesting that Geppetto is the artist and Pinocchio is his masterwork. “Maurizio was already in the piece of wood. I didn’t make him but I finished off his legs and got him to walk,” says Bonami. “But then I was punished. He kicked me hard in the shins!”
Bonami puffs out his cheeks so he looks like a chipmunk, lets out the air slowly, and then looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “What can I say?” he says. “Maurizio is a very good friend but every time I describe him I come out with something negative.”
It sounds like siblings, I remark. You love them but you complain about them.
“Love is a very particular thing,” says Bonami. “I wouldn’t say I love him and I don’t think he loves me. But, yeah, you could say we are like brothers. He has screwed me a few times. It is his way. He can be very annoying. He’s always up to something but you don’t necessarily know what it is.” Bonami’s whole face puckers in an emphatic expression of
agony. “Artists are not kind people. They do what they do. That’s why they are artists.”
Are curators kind? I ask. A
curatore
is a “carer” by definition, yes?
“Curating can be about taking care of the artist. When you do a solo show, you are basically a butler. The artist chooses everything.” Bonami has curated retrospectives of Jeff Koons and Rudolf Stingel but, no matter how much he likes the artist, he prefers to work on group shows, which allow him more creative control. “Curator is not even a job,” he continues. “It’s just something between an artist, a writer, and a butler. We are frustrated people.”
Two blondes with complicated handbags and beige Uggs interrupt us, requesting that we take their picture in front of Cattelan’s finger. I oblige. Despite the weather, we’ve seen a steady stream of young people making pilgrimages to the already notorious sculpture.
As we resume our stroll around the finger, Bonami admits that it can be hard to distinguish between “long-lasting artists” and “artists that just have a moment, who are very important but then disappear.” However, in a book published in Italian titled
He Thinks He’s Picasso
, Bonami puts artists into four hard-and-fast categories according to whether they are real or fake, good or bad. “Bruce Nauman has an urgency to make art. He is very consistent within his rules. He is a good real artist,” explains Bonami. “Jasper Johns is a real artist but his work is shit. He is a bad real artist.” We pause at the Quentin Tarantinoesque sight of five businessmen in long dark coats striding briskly through the square. “Francis Alÿs is a good fake artist,” continues Bonami. “Alÿs has a romantic idea of an artist and he plays it very well. He
walks
it well and he has created some great work.” Bonami sees Ai Weiwei as the epitome of a bad fake artist. “I would put him back in jail for his art,” says the curator cheerfully.
Knowing that Bonami has worked with Orozco, I inquire about him. “Orozco? My old friend,” says Bonami, followed by a long pause. “I called him the Michael Corleone of Mexico. We don’t talk anymore.” Bonami sees Orozco as the kind of skillful political animal who becomes the don of a crime syndicate, just as Al Pacino’s character did in
The Godfather
. Orozco is the leader of a group of Mexican artists who used to meet every Friday at his home to discuss their work and are now
represented by kurimanzutto, a gallery he helped found in Mexico City. Bonami extended the analogy in an article in
Tate Etc
, suggesting that Orozco’s stalwart supporter, Benjamin Buchloh, a Marxist art historian who teaches at Harvard, was “the Don Vito Corleone of institutional critique.” When Bonami curated the Venice Biennale in 2003, he asked Orozco to curate a room in the Arsenale. It turned out to be one of the most praised parts of the show. “Orozco is a very good real artist but he is a fake revolutionary,” declares Bonami. “He is a fake revolutionary but a real dictator. But who cares? Art is about aesthetics.”
And Cattelan? I ask. “He’s a good fake. Sometimes you are such a good fake artist that you redefine the real. Roman sculpture was copied from the Greek but then it became the real thing,” says Bonami. Ideas about originality have shifted. “Did the second painter to do a Crucifixion steal the idea from the first one? Until Duchamp, artists were not obsessed with ideas. It was about who could do the best version.” Bonami contemplates his watch, which looks like a fancy Jaeger–LeCoultre timepiece to me though he insists, unconvincingly, that it’s a cheap, gold-plated knockoff. “Maurizio may be the Duchamp of his time, but he is also the victim of that. His obsession with creating news all around the world has become a problem.”
We leave the piazza and talk as we walk to one of Bonami’s favorite lunch spots. I was surprised to see Bonami use the word “dunce” in print, even in jest. Art educators will sometimes talk about the high rates of dyslexia, dyscalculia, and attention deficit disorder amongst their artist-students, but it doesn’t mean they are not bright. “Most artists are like donkeys. They bray. They make a suffering, complaining sound,” explains Bonami sardonically. “Great artists are like horses. A neigh is more heroic. Maurizio kills horses because it is the dream of all donkeys.” Cattelan has made several works that allude to struggles for artistic empowerment, featuring these animals. In general, the artist’s donkeys (a.k.a. asses) fare better than the noble racehorses, which find themselves stuffed and suspended from the ceiling in harnesses or mounted head first in the wall. As we enter the restaurant, Bonami concludes, “If Maurizio could put a purebred artist on the wall, he would.”
Laurie Simmons
Love Doll: Day 27/Day 1 (New in Box)
2010
O
ver the years, Grace Dunham has attended forty or fifty of her parents’ exhibition openings. Many of the adults she encountered as a child were artists. They dominated her parents’ social circles and even those of her friends’ parents because she attended Saint Ann’s, a private school in Brooklyn Heights to which so many artists sent their kids that the remedial math class was called “Math for Artists.”
Grace has new glasses since she appeared in her sister’s film
Tiny Furniture
. This evening at Laurie Simmons’s opening in the East End of London, she wears thick round Sol Moscot specs in a style favored by Andy Warhol. Wilkinson Gallery has put on an exhibition of Simmons’s earliest and most recent bodies of work. This airy ground-floor room hosts twenty-eight images from her “Early Black and White Interiors” (1976–78), while an even grander room on the floor above displays six large-scale color photos from her “Love Doll” series (2009–11).
“When I was young, these images scared me,” says Grace as we inch our way clockwise around the perimeter of the ground-floor space, looking at 8 × 10-inch photographs of doll’s house interiors that were made before she was born. We pause in front of a silver gelatin print titled
Woman Lying on Floor (Aerial View)
(1976), in which a plastic housewife doll lies diagonally against a grid of tiles on a kitchen floor. “I used to relate to my mother’s series as if they were children’s books
like
Magic School Bus
,” she explains. “Each series was a different picture book that I could memorize. Nowadays, I think about them in terms of what my mother was going through at the time.”