subject: Maurizio Cattelan The Redemption By Jerry Saltz [print this page] I had imagined that Maurizio Cattelans All -- a retrospective that consists of nearly every work hes ever made, suspended via cables and a truss from the Guggenheims ceiling -- would look like a total clusterfuck, a supernova sparked when Madame Tussauds crashed into a Calder factory and exploded. In fact, when I first saw these 128 sculptures, framed photos, paintings, stuffed horses, sleeping dogs, a sitting cow, a dead squirrel, mannequins, numerous self-portraits and assorted gewgaws, all floating in the atrium, my fan heart sank. It seemed sedate, sparse and anticlimactic, less clusterfuck and more inchoate limbo.
Although the 51-year-old, Italian-born art star is much loved by curators and collectors, and his work sells for millions, critics havent been kind to Cattelan. His work is often dismissed as a bunch of sight gags, one-liners and kitsch. Hes considered an entertainer more than an artist, a poseur joker who mocks the system that makes him able to be a millionaire poseur joker. Its true that his work can be wildly uneven, but Ive had faith in him ever since I saw it for the first time, in 1994: The installation was a live donkey in a Greene Street gallery. (The neighbors howled, and the show lasted one day.) Since then, Cattelan has, often enough, done what an artist ought to: open the floor beneath my feet and take me places I didnt know were there.
Standing at the bottom of the atrium, staring up at it all in the minutes after I arrived, I thought, My God, this guys gonna get blistered. (He did: Artnet Magazineran a negative review of this show before it opened.) Hes been way too cute promoting the show, too, doing things like carrying a tombstone reading THE END, telling the press that after this show hell retire from being an artist. The clownishness makes it that much easier to write off Cattelan as a man addicted to using museums as material, one whos been tripped up by his own ideology.
This tripping isnt altogether his doing. Since 1959, the glorious Guggenheim has laid a trap for artists, and many have fallen into it. Save for Tino Sehgals 2010 visitor-activated museum installation and Matthew Barneys transformation of the building into a Vaseline-filled body that he moved through like some mad narrative organism, almost all surveys here are forced into a format of one-piece-per-architectural-bay, commanding viewers to keep a moderate distance, pause, move on and repeat, all the way to the top of the ramp.
It shouldnt be surprising that Cattelan would desperately search for a way around this format, trying to deny the kind of totalizing summation that often makes artists view retrospectives as being entombed alive. All is Cattelan internally fissuring, convulsing into a spectacular grand seizure. Its full disclosure, nondisclosure, self-martyrdom, panic attack and jumping-the-shark rolled into one -- and its also some kind of masterpiece.
As I made my way up the ramp, my initial letdown turned into pathos-filled wonderment, intrigue, evolving awe. Far from being a one-shot chaotic burst, the installation becomes, for viewers, a slow burn. New objects come into view; you see work from below, then circle around and see it straight on, then from above. This multiplication forms optical echoes, patterns of thought, altering ideas about what youve experienced. The mess becomes a mesh. Things cohere, then break apart. In spite of the onslaught of visual material, objects somehow come into view one at a time. Yet all the while youre unconsciously seeing everything at once, fitting it all together in changing configurations and categories.
