My sincere gratitude is due to the Guggenheim’s talented Publications Department, in particular Elizabeth Levy, Director of Publications and Website, who oversaw the creation of this catalogue with unfailing grace and dedication, adeptly supported by Elizabeth Franzen, Associate Director of Publications, Editorial, and Stephen Hoban, Managing Editor. Melissa Secondino, Associate Director of Publications, Production; Minjee Cho, Associate Production Manager; and Suzana Greene, Production Associate, expertly shepherded the catalogue through the production process. Kamilah Foreman, Associate Editor, and Project Editor for the catalogue, coordinated all aspects of both the English and Italian editions with meticulous attention to detail, while Domenick Ammirati, Senior Editor, ably edited my essay, and Helena Winston, former Associate Editor, carefully and systematically edited the exhibition history and bibliography.
Domenick Ammirati; Kamilah Foreman; Suzana Greene; Laura Kleger, Associate Director, Website; Jennifer Otten, Senior Interactive Designer; and Maria Slusarev, Website Project Manager, supervised by Elizabeth Levy, produced the multimedia app developed for the project with enthusiasm and efficiency. Our warmest thanks are also due to the individuals who contributed richly informative interviews for the app: Vince Aletti, Francesco Bonami, Nicolas Bourriaud, Fabio Cavallucci, Germano Celant, Bice Curiger, Massimo De Carlo, Tom Eccles, David Ganek, Ida Gianelli, Massimiliano Gioni, Marian Goodman, Jens Hoffmann, Carsten Höller, Laura Hoptman, Chrissie Iles, Udo Kittelmann, Andrew Kreps, Paola Manfrin, Emmanuel Perrotin, Anda Rottenberg, Beatrix Ruf, Ali Subotnick, and Rein Wolfs.
Marcia Fardella, Director of Graphic Design and Chief Graphic Designer, carefully created the brochure accompanying the exhibition, with beautiful drawings supplied by Pierpaolo Ferrari. David Heald, Director of Photographic Services and Chief Photographer, assisted by Kristopher McKay, Assistant Photographer and Digital Imaging Specialist, provided images for the catalogue and documentation of the exhibition preparations for the app.
Christina Yang, Associate Director of Education, Public Programs; Rachel Sirota, Manager of Public Programs; and Sharon Vatsky, Associate Director of Education, School and Family Programs, helped create a rich menu of programs to accompany the exhibition. We are grateful to Michael P. Lavin, Theater Director, for ensuring that all public programming would be successfully presented. Helen Warwick, former Executive Director of Individual Development, helped establish this exhibition’s Leadership Committee, which provided essential funding for the project, and thanks are also due to John L. Wielk, Deputy Director, Corporate and Institutional Development; Bronwyn Keenan, Director of Special Events; and their teams. Marianna Horton, Assistant General Counsel, compiled all the contractual agreements pertaining to the exhibition.
In External Affairs, we collaborated closely with Eleanor R. Goldhar, Deputy Director and Chief of Global Communications; Betsy Ennis, Director of Media and Public Relations, and Lauren Van Natten, Senior Publicist; as well as Laura Miller, Director of Marketing, and her staff.
Lastly, and again, I must thank Maurizio Cattelan for his profoundly serious art, which, at first glance, may seem humorous, but in the end, will make you cry. This contradiction is at the heart of his work and thus forms the very core of his Guggenheim presentation, Maurizio Cattelan: All.
Nancy Spector
Deputy Director and Chief Curator
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
fig. 1 Untitled, 2001
prologue
WHAT artists read is often a good indication of what they are thinking, if not their sources of inspiration. A well-stocked bookshelf in the corner of a studio can be as revealing as any explication of a specific work in progress. This rings especially true for Maurizio Cattelan, who rarely divulges his intentions, preferring instead to hide behind a perfectly crafted persona of class clown or inveterate juvenile delinquent. His selections for the Artist’s Choice section of the first comprehensive monograph on his work, published in 2000, are, therefore, especially valuable clues.1 With an exceptionally salacious excerpt from Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth’s brilliant caricature of male Jewish-American angst, followed by extracts from a book of collected suicide notes, Cattelan obliquely conveys the key motivating impulses behind his practice: desperation and guilt.2 After failing, Cattelan claims, at all prior pursuits from the academic to the professional, he approached the art world as a kind of refuge, a place where he could rehearse his anxieties publicly and be rewarded for doing so. Like Alexander Portnoy in Roth’s novel, Cattelan is perpetually searching for an escape from himself, his past, and all rules imposed on him. The long-suffering Portnoy turned to psychoanalysis to overcome the suffocating embrace of his overprotective parents and to understand if not absolve his untoward desires. For Cattelan, the art world is the analyst’s couch. Since the beginnings of his career as an artist during the late 1980s, he has freely enacted his vulnerabilities, giving them physical form and a distinct narrative, one that, in many ways, has come to define his work as a whole.
But this is only one side of the story. Cattelan’s compelling performance of his own psychopathology is less autobiographical in origin than it is a poetic gesture toward universality. By playing the (neurotic) fool, he offers himself up as an Everyman, suggesting that this archetypal figure is ultimately more fragile than appearances may allow. By pursuing his work as a kind of expiation, Cattelan problematizes the image of the male artist as virile generator of creative form, joining a long line of twentieth-century forerunners including Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Richard Prince, to cite a few figures who play more than passing roles in the artist’s intellectual development. This art-historical trinity embodies the avant-garde’s (and the neo-avant-garde’s) turn to popular culture as both source and medium in modernism’s ongoing flirtation with the dissolution of difference between art and life. What connects Duchamp’s readymades with Warhol’s soup cans and Prince’s appropriated jokes is a critical, defining shift from production to selection, which indicates a certain devaluation of the artist’s hand. The skillfully crafted object bearing the marks of individual intervention was no longer considered the exclusive manifestation of artistic genius. In fact, the very notion of artistic genius—associated in the early to mid-twentieth century with transcendent aesthetic vision and the expression of inner or otherwise invisible truths—has been under sustained interrogation, with Duchamp’s Dadaesque dismissal of opticality, Warhol’s laconic, mechanical detachment,