What follows is excerpted from an unauthorized autobiography of Maurizio Cattelan, as told to me over years of assiduous hanging out with the artist in New York and Italy. It’s a tale that will often seem slightly off, since it circles around history, skirting facts but stopping just shy of falsehood. Maurizio Cattelan is our contemporary Pinocchio, which makes me his poor Geppetto, cheerfully imbibing hogwash and half-truths in order to glean a few nuggets of reluctant candor. Here, the artist takes us on a virtual tour of nine seminal works—but first, his impressions of the Guggenheim... Francesco Bonami
The Guggenheim Museum in New York is an upside-down Tower of Babel. The architect didn’t want to reach for the sky; instead, he wanted all artists who enter there to become acquainted with hell. Abandon hope, all ye who come to show your work here. You forget what you were trying to express, you disappear into the vortex, and if, like me, you arrive bereft of ideas, you have no option but to pray.
The curator standing beside me asked what I was planning to do, what I was going to invent for her—the same old story, same old script—but I had nothing left to say, nothing to do, nothing to decide. I hadn’t prayed since I was kicked out of my parish church as a child, but there in the Guggenheim’s rotunda, I started begging forgiveness for all the ideas I had plagiarized, the unfortunates I had ridiculed, the animals I’d stuffed, the money I’d made, the women I’d treated like art objects, and the self I’d failed to take seriously. Suddenly, all my works became a crowd of Virgin Marys visible only to you, my viewer, who have always doubted the existence of Maurizio Cattelan—to you, faithless visitor. All these works appeared in the rotunda, begging you to kneel down and convert to the saving faith of that mysterious religion called Cattelanism, where God is a prankster.
LESSICO FAMILIARE, 1989
My first real artwork was about love, but it also was a way of giving
the finger to love—or at least to that bourgeois concoction of
hypocrisies and brittle rules and gestures, like walking hand in hand as
a signal to the lonely, the unlucky, and the bereaved that “Hey, we’re
together.” I am not made for that kind of love.
So I had a friend take a picture of me nude with my hands formed into a heart shape against my chest. I came across an empty silver picture frame at a friend’s parents’ house, the kind that people receive as wedding gifts. So I stole it, and when I got home, I slipped in the black and white picture of me. There it was, my first artwork—simple, immediate, and banal. It brought together the two halves of my identity: the freewheeling individualist and the artist chained to his ambitions. The frame was the art world, and I had voluntarily imprisoned myself within it. But I have always missed the other Maurizio, who stayed outside the frame—my wiser mini-me, my twin.
