Maurizio Cattelan: All. Maurizio Cattelan

fore the seemingly inextricable confluence of criminal interests and political power at the heart of Italian rule. Though the public welcomed this trend for ethics in the governmental sphere—even “stoning” Prime Minister Bettino Craxi with coins to protest his culpability in the crisis—the criminal sector reacted with violence. From May to August 1993, five car bombs exploded in Rome, Florence, and Milan, leaving ten people dead and dozens wounded. Orchestrated by the Mafia in retaliation for the crackdown, the bombings targeted churches and art museums, the nerve centers of cultural life in Italy.43 The Palazzo degli Uffizi in Florence was heavily damaged, as was the Padiglione d’arte contemporanea in Milan, near where Cattelan lived at the time. Shocked by the destruction, and, no doubt, by its proximity to his own life, the artist literally incorporated the tragedy into his work, taking rubble from the Milan site for two sculptures, each titled Lullaby (1994). Created for exhibitions at the Laure Genillard Gallery in London (fig. 10) and the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (cat. no. 26)—Cattelan’s first showings outside of Italy—the sculptures functioned for Cattelan like a critical “snapshot” of his country.44 Each comprised a pile of debris wrapped for transport, one in clear plastic, the other in a blue industrial bag, which the artist described as a kind of “laundry grave,” reminding him of “the kinds of bags hospitals have to use to transport contaminated laundry.”45 This was a harsh commentary about corruption in Italy by an artist who was expected to make only humorous, self-effacing work. While unanticipated, this disparaging yet poignant gesture is an apt representation of Cattelan’s ongoing investigation into his Italian identity. Though he never appreciated being categorized by his nationality, ridiculing exhibitions that attempted to reduce his inclusion to such a criterion, he focused a critical eye on the political and financial instability of his country and has continued to do so through the present.

      fig. 11 Cesena 47–A.C. Forniture Sud 12, 1991

For a 1994 exhibition at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin devoted to emerging Italian artists, Cattelan continued his critique of both nationalistic identification and the country’s modes of self-representation. For the occasion, he created a large round carpet bearing the insignia of a popular Italian cheese, Bel Paese—“Beautiful Country” (fig. 12). The image he appropriated includes a map of Italy adorned by a portrait of Abbot Antonio Stoppani, who authored an eponymous book in 1876 extolling the natural beauty of the Italian landscape. Its placement on the floor at the entry to the gallery guaranteed its near destruction by the end of the show, as people trampled over it in all kinds of weather. The role of food as propaganda notwithstanding, Cattelan seemed to be commenting on false nationalistic pride, on the disconnect between the country’s glorified image of itself and its crumbling political infrastructure. This was also the implication of a related work, I Found My Love in Portofino (1994, cat. no. 25), in which the artist set a group of hungry mice free to feast on a circle of actual Bel Paese. He captured its disappearance on video as the mice ravaged both the cheese and its logo. Cattelan’s consciousness of Italy’s tarnished past, with its fascist leanings and xenophobic tendencies, informed a spate of works that mordantly lampooned any contemporary manifestation of these trends. The 1991 founding of the Northern League, a political party that exploited resentment against both Rome’s status as the seat of the Italian government and new waves of illegal immigration, coincided with the creation of his piece A.C. Forniture Sud (Southern Suppliers FC [Football Club], 1991). Tapping Italy’s obsession with soccer, Cattelan formed a team composed entirely of North Africans. He outfitted them with uniforms bearing the word Rauss, which not so subtly recalled the Nazi-inspired phrase Juden raus, or “Jews get out.”46 In addition to actual regional competitions in the province of Emilia-Romagna, Cattelan’s team played a game in an exhibition setting on an elongated foosball table with places for eleven competitors on each side, the North Africans pitted against a team of Italians (fig. 11, cat. no. 12). As “manager” of A.C. Forniture Sud, the artist set up an illegal stand at Bologna Arte Fiera, an art fair, in 1991, intervening into this commercial context in order to peddle Rauss products to raise money for his team. Part performance, part political protest, the A.C. Forniture Sud enterprise perfectly demonstrates how Cattelan can wed the preposterous and the incisive to create a work that reverberates with profound cultural and social implications.

      fig. 12 Il Bel paese, 1994

In subsequent works, Cattelan has continued to invoke and deride instances of fascist thinking, reflecting on a subject that still persists in Italy (and the world at large) with even newer examples of xenophobic activity. For his contribution to the large outdoor exhibition Sonsbeek 93 in the Netherlands, he proposed a citywide poster campaign in Amsterdam advertising a fictional underground meeting of neo-Nazi skinheads. While his goal, he claimed, was to simply create a sense of altered reality—akin to a drug-induced perception of the city he had experienced during a site visit—the curator deemed the project inappropriate, if not incendiary, so it never took place, and he was omitted from the show.47 Years later, in 2007, Cattelan created a truly enigmatic sculpture for an exhibition in Frankfurt comprising three male arms in business-suit sleeves protruding from a gallery wall (fig. 13, cat. no. 99). The disembodied limbs formally resemble Robert Gober’s sculpted body parts, but their specificity and rigidity belies a reading in keeping with that artist’s surreal, psychosexual work; the arms’ precise positions and their repetition unmistakably evoke the intense choreography of the “Heil Hitler” salute. The Nazi salute is commonly believed to have originated in ancient Roman times, but no work of art from the period depicts it, nor does any extant Roman text describe it. The first rendering of the gesture dates to Jacques-Louis David’s 1784 painting Oath of the Horatii, in which three warriors raise their straight arms 45 degrees, palms down and fingers outstretched in a gesture of solidarity and allegiance. From then on called the “Roman salute,” it was adopted by the Italian Fascist party as a symbol for its imperialist aspirations and then, in 1933, by the Nazis as their official salutation. For Cattelan, the conflation of German and Italian iconography is part of the deliberate and complex ambiguity of the sculpture; the three arms are not those of soldiers but rather well-appointed businessmen. The arms thus suggest the supremacy of corporate or financial quarters to brute force and the military, their banal anonymity alluding to the shadowy, multinational conglomerates wielding more and more authority around the world. The title of the piece, Ave Maria—the name of the traditional Catholic prayer, the Hail Mary, rather than the Heil Hitler—further complicates any definitive reading, however. In typical Cattelan fashion, the title and image are in seeming contradiction. Rather than illuminate his works’ apparent content, his titles often suggest unexpected tangents, deferring interpretation by obscuring rather than delineating meaning. This deliberate disjunction between text and image, a hallmark of the artist’s practice, allows for a kind of mental lacuna in which untested ideas and attitudes can emerge. In the case of Ave Maria, the reference to prayer asks that the arms also be seen in a position of benediction from, rather than submission to, a higher power. Or is it, as the prayer suggests—“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death”—an admission of transgression, involving among other possibilities the abuse of power, the adherence to false gods, or the capitulation to greed?

      fig. 13 Ave Maria, 2007

Ave Maria provided a physical prototype for a public sculpture Cattelan unveiled in Milan in 2010, a thirty-six-foot-high white marble hand with an erect middle finger extended toward the sky (fig. 9, cat. no. 108). The other fingers look to have been broken off, as if the whole thing were the ruin of some ancient statue, a victim, perhaps, of iconoclastic frenzy. Ambiguously titled L.O.V.E., the sculpture references Italian cultural heritage,