fig. 3 Charlie Don’t Surf, 1997
The theme of academic repression and the anxieties that accompany it persisted in Cattelan’s output, culminating in the simultaneously poignant and gruesome sculpture Charlie Don’t Surf (1997, fig. 3, cat. no. 48). Rendered in veristic exactitude, “Charlie”—an oft-used name in the artist’s oeuvre—is a little boy in a hooded sweatshirt seated at a school desk. Turned away from the viewer, he appears repentant, as if doing time in the corner after some minor grade-school offense. On closer inspection, however, the punishment reveals itself to be severe: the boy’s hands are pierced—nailed to the desk by two no. 2 lead pencils. With this perverse crucifixion, the piece confronts the debilitating effect that the embarrassment of public discipline can have on a child.13 The disgraced isolation of this little figure recalls German artist Martin Kippenberger’s sculptural self-portrait Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself (1992), a life-size rendering of the artist standing facing a corner with arms folded behind his back in a studied pose of remorse. Deliberately cultivating a “bad-boy” persona as part of his practice, Kippenberger embraced humiliation as a medium in his art. His stand-in’s defiant dejection, like little Charlie’s martyrdom, suggests, if not promotes, the idea of failure as a viable artistic strategy. Motivated in the beginning by an almost paralyzing fear of disgrace, Cattelan created what can be characterized as an aesthetic of failure—a look, a tone, an attitude that serves to manage expectations, to make excuses before the fact. As the artist has explained, “Failure generates a sympathy that more people can recognize. . . . I’ve probably been so obsessed with a permanent fear of running out of gas that failure has become a sort of constant background to my work. The antithesis of failure is failure in advance—you never actually fail.”14
On the occasion of his first solo exhibition, held at Galleria Neon in Bologna in 1989, Cattelan was evidently so disappointed with his production that, in place of all the works he intended to show, he posted on the locked front door of the gallery a simple placard that read Torno subito, or “Be back soon” (cat. no. 6). This everyday shop sign—familiar from countless butchers, bakeries, and the like—reveals the artist’s discomfort with the critical attention and public judgment that his exhibition would garner. The empty gallery has many historical precedents, dating back to Yves Klein’s infamously bare (though highly publicized) exhibition at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris in 1958. Since then artists such as Robert Barry, Stanley Brouwn, Maria Eichhorn, Robert Irwin, and Maria Nordman have all purged their shows of any objects or installation elements, relying instead on the gallery architecture to frame and convey the content of their work, which ranges from pure aesthetic reverie to institutional critique.15 But for Cattelan, the gallery is not a space to mystify or demystify; it is merely a place of employment, which he approaches with the same rebellious attitude he would display toward any job, following or breaking rules depending on the risks he wishes to take.16 In one instance, echoing his paid leave from the morgue, he even obtained a doctor’s certificate indicating he was too sick to realize an artwork he had promised for an exhibition at the Pinacoteca di Ravenna in 1989. Later, in 2004, when awarded an honorary degree in sociology from the Università degli Studi di Trento, he feigned a skiing accident in order to avoid speaking at the reception, showing up with neck brace and an arm cast.17 When offered a solo exhibition at Galleria Massimo De Carlo in Milan in 1993, the artist found yet another strategy of escape. After failing to generate a body of work he considered acceptable (his ideas included, at one point, showing an inventory of every creative idea he had ever had), Cattelan once again closed the gallery, this time actually bricking up the door. The only thing on view, which was visible through the window, was a lone mechanical teddy bear riding a unicycle on a tightrope strung across the otherwise bare space (cat. no. 21).18 As a surrogate for Cattelan, this readymade—the first in a long line of stuffed or taxidermied animals—publicly admitted to the precariousness of the artist’s position.19 While demonstrating his failure to produce the requisite salable object for a gallery show, the untitled work nevertheless announced the kind of risk-taking path that the artist would follow from this point on, balancing, as it were, total irony and a kind of deadpan honesty.
For Cattelan’s debut in New York, where he moved in 1993, he deployed a similar strategy of evasion and denial. Unable, he claimed, to conceive of any good ideas for his solo exhibition at Daniel Newburg Gallery in 1994, he installed an ornate chandelier accompanied by a live donkey, a common symbol for stupidity, to represent his lowly place within the art world. While presented as an off-handed joke, Warning! Enter at your own risk. Do not touch, do not feed, no smoking, no photographs, no dogs, thank you (fig. 4) nevertheless invoked a significant artistic pedigree. It no doubt referenced Joseph Beuys’s first exhibition in New York, in which he lived on site at the René Block Gallery for one week with a live coyote in a shamanistic ritual of coexistence.20 The donkey itself, which would become a favored motif in Cattelan’s work, also recalled Jannis Kounellis’s groundbreaking installation of live horses at Galleria L’Attico in Rome in 1969. Though steeped in self-ridicule, the exhibition at Daniel Newburg, with its allusions to Beuys and Arte Povera, also made clear the artist’s aspirations for a place in contemporary art history and the seriousness of his enterprise, despite all appearances otherwise.
fig. 4 Warning! Enter at your own risk. Do not touch, do not feed, no smoking, no photographs, no dogs, thank you, 1994
The strategy of hiding in plain sight—a manifestation of Cattelan’s love/hate relationship with public exposure—was one that he would return to later in his career. On the occasion of his first solo exhibition at the venerable Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, a milestone in any artist’s professional life, he presented a life-size sculpture of a baby elephant wearing a white sheet with holes for its eyes and trunk. Compelling in its ambiguity, Not Afraid of Love (2000, fig. 5, cat. no. 77) playfully embodies the artist’s relentless performance anxiety, but also, as with all his later work, it operates on additional metaphoric levels. Sheathed in Ku Klux Klan white and with its exposed, dangling trunk patently sexual in appearance, the little elephant, however shy, seems far from innocent. Its very form invokes the proverbial phrase “an elephant in the room,” an obvious but difficult topic that no one is addressing. With this unsettling work, Cattelan not only rehearses his own evasiveness; he seems to ask what awkward things remain unsaid, what subjects are not being broached in the context of his work or in the world at large. In 1997, for the group exhibition Fatto in Italia (Made in Italy) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Cattelan crafted a similar surrogate self-portrait,