December 7, 2008 — Patrick Zimmerman

Maurizio Cattelan: The Art of Absurd Contradictions

Maurizio Cattelan is often described as a Shakespearian fool, expressing universal truths about themes such as power, death and authority through what appear to be jokes or stunts: a stuffed squirrel that has shot itself at the kitchen table, Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite, a child like Hitler praying on his knees. His work tries to subvert and challenge contemporary thinking, blurring the distinction between art and reality to provoke reaction. Cattelan likes to describe himself as an idiot. He refuses to take a stance, and claims that he doesn’t even know what his work means.

As a consolation for the bleakness of a professionalized social life, Cattelan offers up his own example. He has said of his work as an artist, “this is the one profession where I can be a little bit stupid and people will say, ‘Thank you, thank you for being so stupid!‘” This statement updates the now familiar nineteenth-century concept of the aesthetic field as the opposite of the ruthlessness of the market. Art, in this understanding, is not a utopian alternative. It is an adjacent, but equally competitive, field to the professions, but one which values rather than represses reflections on the nature of “the game.”

In keeping with this paradox, Cattelan is the ultimate professional unprofessional: he is unconcerned about demonstrating a mastery of his craft, except for the twin crafts of directing fabricators to realize his ideas and eliciting support from curators and collaborators. His work, a series of sculptural vignettes or gestures, expresses not a poetics of mastery, but a comedy of failure. If laughter can be said to express the whole of wisdom, Cattelan’s body of artistic work tends to confirm this.

Maurizio Cattelan: The Art of Absurd Contradictions

Maurizio Cattelan: The Art of Absurd Contradictions

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