13 Cattelan based this work, he has said, on an incident in which he stabbed another boy with a pen in school. See Bonami, “Static on the Line,” p. 66. In addition to Charlie Don’t Surf, Cattelan produced a single, disembodied hand pierced by a pencil (Untitled, 1997, cat. no. 49), which perhaps more directly recalls this aggressive outburst.
14 Quoted in Bruce Millar, “Top Cat,” Tate Magazine, no. 8 (November–December 2003), p. 42. Ellipses in original.
15 In 2009, the Centre Pompidou in Paris mounted an exhibition devoted to this phenomenon. Comprising twelve nearly empty rooms, each encountered in succession, Vides (Voids) restaged historic examples of entirely vacant installations—spaces left deliberately blank by the featured artists.
16 In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Cattelan stated, “I have been a failure for most of my life. I couldn’t keep a job for more than two months. I couldn’t study: school was a torture. And as long as I had to respect rules, I was a disaster. Initially art was just a way to try a new set of rules. But I was very afraid of failure in art as well.” “Maurizio Cattelan” (2001), in Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews: Volume 1, ed. Thomas Boutoux (Florence: Fondazione Pitti Immagine Discovery; and Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2003), p. 146.
17 That Cattelan received an honorary degree in sociology without ever having attended college only strengthens the carefully choreographed mystique of the inveterate underachiever who somehow succeeds in spite of himself.
18 Cattelan has said that he was interested at the time of this show to force De Carlo to leave the gallery and conduct his business outside its confines. The gesture recalls a 1992 show at 303 Gallery in New York by Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija in which he transferred everything from the gallery’s kitchen, office, and storage room and set it up, for all to see, in the middle of the space. During the exhibition he cooked batches of free curry for visitors. While Cattelan’s gesture was hardly as generous, it demonstrated a shared interest in dissolving distinctions between art and life, which defined much of the work of the 1990s by artists associated with what has become known as “relational aesthetics.” For a study of ten artists associated with this phenomenon, which included Cattelan, see Spector, “theanyspacewhatever: An Exhibition in Ten Parts,” in theanyspacewhatever, exh. cat. (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2008), pp. 13–27.
19 Cattelan found the bear in the window of a pharmacy in New York, where he had re-cently moved.
20 The exhibition, which took place in 1974, was titled I Like America and America Likes Me. Cattelan would continue to channel the spirit of Beuys in his work, which will be discussed later in this essay.
21 Cattelan’s artistic peers, with whom he exhibited in the groundbreaking exhibition Traffic, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud in 1996, were broadly international and, in many cases, living abroad. They included Angela Bulloch, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Tiravanija. See Spector, “theanyspacewhatever,” for a discussion of the nomadic quality of this group.
22 In addition to Cattelan, the exhibition Una domenica a Rivara (A Sunday in Rivara), curated by Gregorio Magnani, included Mario Airò, Stefano Arienti, Umberto Cavenago, Mario Dellavedova, Eva Marisaldi, Marco Mazzucconi, Laura Ruggeri, and Luca Vitone.
23 Bonami makes this point in relation to Cattelan’s Venice Biennale piece in “Static on the Line,” p. 74. It is interesting to note that Cattelan earned money on Working Is a Bad Job twice: when he rented his space and on the subsequent sale of the work to a private collection.
24 See Richard Brilliant, Portraiture, vol. 1, part 2 (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), pp. 171–74, for a discussion of the poster that deciphers Duchamp’s puns, pointing out that in New York street jargon of the era, “welch” refers to failing to meet one’s financial obligations in gambling and that “pickens” refers to the “paltry results of a swindle.”
25 The exhibition, entitled Ottovolante: Per una collezione d’arte contemporanea, was at the Galleria d’arte moderna e contemporanea, Accademia Carrara.
26 “Nancy Spector in Conversation with Maurizio Cattelan,” p. 32.
27 The reference to Sigmund Freud’s concept of the tripartite id/ego/superego configuration of the psyche in correlation with this piece was suggested by Francesco Manacorda in an entry on the work in Manacorda, Maurizio Cattelan (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2006), Supercontemporanea series, ed. Francesco Bonami, p. 27.
28 The curators of the exhibition were Annie Fletcher, Nina Folkersma, Clive Kellner, Kay C. Pallister, and Adam Szymczyk. According to Cattelan, Szymczyk was the only one not to participate in the break-in. Cattelan’s goal in stealing all the work on view and the furnishings of the gallery was to transpose the reality of the gallery space onto the institutional space of de Appel. Afterward, then-director Saskia Bos confronted the artist about his intent: “[Cattelan] spoke about what I would say is appropriation, and the need to make that appropriation in reality, and the need to bring something into another space, from one space to another. I remember asking myself . . . why he had not written a letter to ask if he could bring the show from one place to another, why he didn’t involve them consciously, willingly, knowingly. He said ‘no, because I had to transgress this line. I had to do something without their consent.’ It was the surprise that he was interested in.” See “Saskia Bos: A Chit Chat with Otto Berchem,” The Crap Shooter, 2nd ed. (May 1996), p. 16. I would like to thank Kay Pallister for sharing this publication with me.
29 Cattelan has indicated that Höller collaborated with him in the making of the show for Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, and in the end, the replication of works boosted sales for both artists.
30 “Nancy Spector in Conversation with Maurizio Cattelan,” p. 34.
31 In his interview with the author (2003), Cattelan tells of using falsified documents to install the plaque on the Brera academy. When questioned by school authorities during the process, he claimed that he had been sent by a sign-installation company. See “Nancy Spector in Conversation with Maurizio Cattelan,” pp. 36–37.
32 These biennials are listed in the catalogue cum artist’s book that was published well after the event to commemorate it. See Cattelan, 6th Caribbean Biennial, ed. Bettina Funcke (Dijon, France: Les presses du réel, 2001), Contemporary Art Series, unpaginated.