UNTITLED, 1999
When I got back to Milan, I recounted the soccer experience to my
friend, also a gallerist, who remarked that if I had pulled such a stunt
with his precious Milan team, he would have nailed me to the wall. I
told him that was an intriguing idea, and for our next show I stuck him
to the wall of the gallery with industrial-strength duct tape. It was a
real crucifixion, and after a few hours the poor man, deathly pale,
rolled his eyes to the ceiling and said, “Maurizio, Maurizio, why have
you forsaken me?” They had to take him to the hospital in an ambulance,
which some people thought was part of the artwork, but it wasn’t.
LA NONA ORA, 1999
I had immense respect for Pope John Paul II. Even old and tired,
afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, he still kept doggedly touring the
world. I wondered how he did it. For an exhibit at a small museum in
Basel run by a Polish director, I made a statue of the Pope holding his
staff with the crucifix on top, and together with my Milanese gallerist
friend, I propped him up in a room carpeted in red. The result was
appalling. The show was supposed to open the following day, and I didn’t
know what to do. We spent the night in the museum trying to think up an
alternative.
I fell asleep for a few minutes and then jumped up, woke my companion, and said, “We have to break his legs.” My friend thought I was nuts—was I referring to the curator? “We have to break the pope’s legs!” I repeated. We sawed the legs off at the knee and then hurried over to a quarry and ordered a massive boulder. A few hours before the opening, the museum director took one look at the mangled pontiff and went totally white. When the truck delivered the boulder, the poor man tried halfheartedly to prevent us from rolling it onto His Holiness, but it was too late. We even broke the skylight to make it seem as though the rock were a meteorite sent by God to stop his overzealous servant from accepting any burden. There were some who believed that the work was a provocation and a sign of contempt, but they were way off base: It was actually an act of mercy.
HOLLYWOOD, 2001
I was on vacation in Sicily, mulling over my contribution to the Venice
Biennale, when I was struck by the similarity between the hills outside
Palermo and their counterparts in Hollywood. I hiked to the peak of a
mountain of garbage that was managed by the Mafia and wondered if
changing the imaginative associations of a place could alter its
reality, too. Los Angeles, after all, is plagued by brutal murders, race
riots, and earthquakes, but the Hollywood sign overshadows all that.
Lies wither, but dreams fly.
