fig. 14 Untitled, 2004
In the case of the reception for L.O.V.E., however, Cattelan clearly hit a nerve in a way that was, for the most part, publicly acceptable. The work’s placement outside Milan’s stock exchange immediately anchored its meaning to issues of the economy, which in Italy at the time was near crisis.53 As Cattelan has observed in reference to the work, “Our trust in the social system has been broken. Have you ever doubted that a bank could falter? Have you ever doubted the financial system as a whole? Sure, there were earlier crises like the dot-com fiasco, but this is systemic. The whole system seems in need of deconstruction and reconstruction.” Italy’s economy shrank 5.1 percent in 2009, its worst year in at least three decades, and between 2008 and 2010 the country’s gross domestic product lost a total of 6.5 percentage points as a result of the recession triggered by the global financial crisis.54 An article published in late 2010 in The Telegraph of London, titled “Italy’s debt costs approach red zone,” sums up the country’s grim situation: “growth has been glacial for a decade, productivity has fallen since 1995, and global export share is in steep decline.”55 Cattelan’s intervention in the public square near the Borsa Italiana and in the Italian imagination couldn’t have been better timed. For many disaffected citizens, L.O.V.E. became a symbol of their anger and frustration.
Cattelan has examined the effects of economic deprivation before. His sculptures of “homeless” figures huddled against walls, rendered simply from stuffed clothes and blankets, are temporary outdoor installations that tend to unnerve the public for their casual verisimilitude and the interventionist nature of their placement (fig. 15). Andreas e Mattia (Andreas and Mattia, 1996), a slumped hooded figure, was created for an exhibition at the Galleria civica d’arte moderna e contemporanea in Turin and originally shown outside, where people mistook the figure to be a vagrant, ignoring him as they are wont to do when confronted with the hopelessly needy. (It took more than a few days for someone to call the Italian equivalent of 911 to report a homeless person who had not moved for an alarmingly long period of time.) Cattelan produced a similar intervention when invited to create an exhibition at the Institute of Visual Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, in 1998. Kenneth (cat. no. 45), another disheveled drifter, occupied a space in the city as a monument to failure but also to freedom. As suggested by his aversion to work and his frequently staged flights from responsibility, Cattelan identifies with the trope of the vagabond. Reminiscing about Padua, he recalled numerous homeless characters who became staples of the city, “celebrities of the streets” who, in some cases, had become itinerant as an act of protest (against taxes, the responsibilities of ownership, and so on). Regardless of a certain admiration and curiosity, however, Cattelan does not glorify these figures. Instead, they represent a pervasive breakdown of the system, a reminder that the social contract has many devastating loopholes. Given his childhood deprivation, such investigations presumably have a personal resonance.
fig. 15
Gérard, 1999
The concept of a civic monument that refuses to commemorate or coalesce around culturally sanctioned ideologies has an important place in Cattelan’s oeuvre. If L.O.V.E. can be considered a culminating work in this vein, then the sculpture Novecento (Twentieth century, 1997, fig. 16) represents a critical beginning. It is a taxidermied horse suspended from the ceiling by a belted harness, the kind used for lifting heavy cargo onto and off ships. Cattelan had seen a photograph of a horse being hoisted in such a fashion on an album cover in a window on St. Mark’s Place in New York, and it continued to resonate in his mind until he found the proper sculptural form. Originally manifested in an untitled version (formerly The Ballad of Trotsky) for an exhibition at the Galleria Massimo De Carlo in 1996 (cat. no. 44), the horse figure evolved formally into Novecento, which includes exaggeratedly long legs. Now the suspended quarter horse seems to be stretched toward the ground, gravity forcing its body into a graceful and mournful arch, as if the weight of modern history is bending it ever downward. The title’s reference to the twentieth century is, in typical Cattelan fashion, multivalent. In addition to invoking a century of modernist experiment, technological advancement, and untold violence, it alludes also to the 1976 film of that name by Bernardo Bertolucci, which examines class struggle and the rise of Fascism in Italy.56 It could also refer to the proto-Fascist art movement Novecento Italiano, which emerged in 1922 in response to a postwar, pan-European “call to order” that rejected the formal and intellectual inventions of the artistic avant-garde. A monument to entropy, the destructive power of irresistible forces, Novecento is considered by Cattelan to be his first true sculpture in the “classic sense”: “It was the first work,” he has explained, “to measure itself against the classics.” Its physical form embodies the ancient tradition of equestrian sculpture, which depicts horses in commemorative tableaux. Cattelan cites as forerunner Donatello’s magnificent 1453 statue of the Venetian general Gattamelata (Erasmo da Narni) on horseback, which stands in Padua on the piazza in front of the Basilica di Sant’Antonio—the very church where he lost a job after drawing moustaches on the little souvenir Saint Anthonys. The Gattamelata was the first life-size equestrian bronze cast since antiquity, inspired by the sculpture of Marcus Aurelius at the Capitoline Hill in Rome. For Cattelan, Novecento marked an important turning point in his art. As a self-contained, highly resonant object that vibrates optically like any arresting