Maurizio Cattelan - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris

  • Catalogue Essay

    “In Eugene Ionesco's well-known play, Rhinoceros (1960), the inhabitants of a small village in the French countryside watch dumbfounded and anxiously as the ungulate mammal announced by the title repeatedly rushes by on the sidewalk, passing so quickly that the characters are not so much surprised by the animal's presence than concerned to know whether it is one-horned or two-horned. The dilemma is of course of some considerable importance: in the former case, the animal would come from Asia, and in the latter case, from Africa. Initially impossible, the pachyderm's abrupt appearance in the French countryside becomes, in the course of the dialogue, successively incongruous, likely, and then subject to conjecture (did it escape from a zoo? from a circus?) and ultimately to the same sort of discussions as any other subject. Discussing the absurd renders the notion increasingly familiar, even perfectly innocuous. And therein lies the essence of the absurd: it ends up becoming unnoticeable. In Maurizio Cattelan's work, stuffed animals are often placed in situations such that viewers are not really surprised--or at least not immediately. Pigeons inside the Italian pavilion at the 47th Venice Biennale are seen standing on the works of Ettore Spaletti or on the metal ceiling structures (Tourists, 1997); dogs are seen lying beside a fireplace (Good Boy, 1998) or apparently sleeping in a chair, whereas they have "dropped dead," as suggested by the title of the latter work: Morto stecchito (1997). Other stuffed animals are presented in unlikely though not utterly impossible contexts, such as the horse hanging by the stomach in The Ballad of Trotsky (1996), or If a Tree Falls in the Forest and There Is No One Around It, Does It Make a Sound? (1998), featuring a donkey with a television set on its back. In other cases, though, there can be little doubt: no one has ever seen an ostrich dig a hole in a gallery to bury its head (Untitled, 1997), or a squirrel commit suicide with a revolver (Bidibidobidiboo, 1996), except--in the latter case--in Tex Avery's Screwball Squirrel cartoons, where the squirrel does occasionally pull the trigger. Previously, Cattelan had actually brought a live donkey into a gallery in Warning! Enter at Your Own Risk... (1994), a stunt no less extravagant than an animal suicide, except that it was entirely real. Cattelan's gradual upping the ante by going from the acknowledged fact to the merely probable and ending up with the impossible, is linked to the absurd in the sense Ionesco assigns the term in his plays: a situation of undecidability between the normal and the imaginary, between real existence and what can simply never occur. Yet, just as in Cattelan's work, what was never supposed to be is a normal occurrence and the everyday takes on nightmarish proportions. In this respect--and to carry the comparison a step further--Cattelan's works could also be subtitled with such generic names as "comic drama," "tragic farce," or "pseudo-drama." Does the world make us laugh because it is absurd, or is it absurd because it makes us laugh? Does the world make us cry because it is absurd, or is it absurd because it makes us cry? These two positions, which legend respectively attributes to Democritus and Heraclitus, still seem to govern how contemporary reality is apprehended in different societies. But these attitudes have become in turn so banal that they end up by literally depersonalizing the very instances and subjects to which they were suppose to correspond. … These works, like others in the same spirit, might suggest that Cattelan is just engaging in provocative mockery, but what is surprising is that it is not so much the reality to which he refers which incites our reaction as the artist's own stagings: “I'm not really sure satire is the key to my work. Comedians manipulate and make fun of reality, whereas I actually think that reality is actually far more provocative than my art... If you think my work is very provocative, it means that reality is extremely provocative, and we just don't react to it. Maybe we no longer pay attention to the way we live in the world, ” (J. Lageira, Absurdity for All, Belonging to Nobody: Maurizio Cattelan. Parachute, Montreal, 2003, pp 11-25).

14

Untitled, Preparatory Study

1999
Taxidermied baby male ostrich.
7 x 5 x 6 1/2 in. (17.8 x 12.7 x 16.5 cm).
This work is unique.

Estimate
$120,000 - 180,000 

Sold for $229,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York