In addition to the very famous "sky-high banana" that was auctioned at 850,000 yuan in Basel, Morrigio Cattelan's first exhibition in China is still full of black humor.
Born in 1960 in Padua, Italy, Mauregio Cattelan is one of the most popular and controversial artists on the international contemporary art scene today.
The title of the exhibition, "The Last Judgment," is derived from the famous fresco created by the Italian Renaissance master Michelangelo for the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. A miniature version of the Sistine Chapel and frescoes in the exhibition, wrapped in other exhibited works by Cattelan: The Last Judgment, highlights the dialectical tension between actively choosing to be judged and passively accepting trial.
The tribute is accompanied by banter about pop culture and Italian art history, such as the pigeon specimen with multiple meanings in "The Child" (2011), and "Untitled" (2001), which parodies the scene of director Mario Monicelli's film The Great Man on The Street of Notre Dame (1958).
This exhibition focuses on the thought-provoking, playful, challenging and inspiring representative works created by the artist over the course of more than three decades of his career. The audience is encouraged to delve into the story behind each work, resonate with the artist's practice in the context of the current era, and make a "final judgment" on the artist's creation.
"Moregio Cattelan: The Last Judgment" was exhibited in the 798 UCCA Hall in Beijing from November 20, 2021 to February 20, 2022. Inside the 798 is a publicity poster for the exhibition.
In the open space, 29 representative works covering installations, sculptures and performances are presented, including the artist's earliest important works, The Family Dictionary (1989), the famous works Cattelan (1994), The Twentieth Century (1997) and Comedians (2019), as well as a series of works based on taxidermy. The exhibits are tense and visually impactful, and on the other hand, it has become another popular destination for beijing to take photos in winter.
According to reports, the works in this exhibition are partly based on Cattlan's life and his life experience as an artist, and the self-centered surface personality unexpectedly wraps the multiple faces of the artist's individual identity, triggering the audience to face death and the impermanence of life, especially the artist's own contemplation of death.
No (2021) declares humanity's ignorance of fate with figures kneeling on the ground and wearing paper bags; Untitled (1997) shows moments of death through a rectangular pit and a pile of dirt tailored for Cattelan; and Mother (2021) recreates the artist's performances first exhibited at the 1999 Venice Biennale in the form of wall paintings. For Cattelan, the stuffy and stubborn donkey represents the self who resists the artist's identity, and the elegant and strong horse is the donkey's nemesis, but the horse is swept away in the work "Untitled" (2007), and is embarrassed to be trapped on the wall of the museum as an anti-heroic trophy.
The following is a brief introduction to the main works (the content is derived from the introduction of the exhibits in the exhibition hall):
Love and death are intertwined themes in many of Catteland's works, and his first work related to this was Eternal Love, which was presented at the Münster Sculpture Exhibition in Germany in 1997. The sculpture consists of the skeletons of four animals, with a donkey, a dog, a cat and a rooster standing on the back of the other, as if in a picture. Cattelan draws inspiration from grimm's fairy tale The Musician of Bremen, in which four animals stack up to scare away robbers, and the four skeletons support our life that never dies. Love becomes eternal in the shaping of your and my identity. Cattelan depicts love in his imagination and calls for love in the invisible. Love is always there, because it is never seen, so love never goes away.
"Not Afraid of Love" is a ghost of an elephant, or perhaps an elephant dressed as a ghost on Halloween. In Cattelan's hands, Elephant became a cartoon character in Disney's moving face. A sheet of paper is not well hidden for this elephant. He is a ghost, but he is a very conspicuous ghost. So we laugh in front of him without feeling afraid. Only if we are not afraid can we love - not afraid of love.
Italy is an important element in Cattelan's work. Of course, Cattelan is Italian, but Italy is not only his hometown for him, but also a fantasy world. The horse hanging from the ceiling in Twentieth Century quotes the title of Bernardo Bertolucci's famous film. This masterpiece is a long epic of Italy between the two world wars. And this horse, suspended in mid-air and pulled by gravity, has become a symbol of the turmoil and ups and downs of the homeland. Italy is such a country that is uncertain in the sky and on the ground, always living in the imagination of the whole world, and often entering the quagmire because of its own problems.
It's a normal banana. A banana stuck to the wall. This is obviously a joke. So can jokes go down in art history? Cattelan seemed to think it was okay. As in Marcel in 1917. Duchamp turned an ordinary urinal into the first sculpture of conceptual art; Cattelan glued mundane fruit to the wall, making it a hallmark of contemporary art. Today, this banana is world-famous, people interpret it and laugh at it, but in any case, it has become a recognizable icon in the hearts of people who pay attention to art, especially contemporary art. The name "Comedian" is special. Who are the comedians? The comedian is not an actor, he is between an actor and an ordinary person, and the comedian on the stage is only a line away from the audience. He imitates the audience, imitates the pedestrians on the street, and one step further will fall off the stage. The strong tape that holds the banana in place is an invisible boundary under Cattelan's own face, and crossing the line means the artist's failure; within the boundary, the artist's success is guaranteed. All of Cattelan's artistic language and philosophical ideas are buried in this tension of failure and success.
In front of the huge wall painting stood the doll-like Picasso. Cattelan arranged such a performance in front of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which houses a large collection of Picasso's works. Picasso visited the United States from the end, but became a mythical figure in people's hearts. Cattelan continues to dig into people's imaginations, allowing Picasso to transform into cartoon characters and greet the audience like Mickey Mouse, Pluto, and Goofy in Disneyland. Picasso became an actor. Cattelan thus turned a big artist into a street performer, a clown who laughed at everyone.
Standing at the entrance to the exhibition and looking around the exhibition hall, you will see a lot of crows, a lot of pigeons, as if it were a scene from the British director Alfred Hitchcock's famous work "The Flock of Birds". In the film, the gentle and harmless bird gradually becomes frightening; just as the pigeons in the exhibition give people a sense of oppression Cattelan gives his pigeons different names, sometimes called "Tourist", sometimes called "Ghost", this time the title is "Child". Tourists, ghosts, children are hard-to-define beings, they are crowded together, sometimes noisy, sometimes quiet, and in a sense, they always feel threatened. We in the exhibition hall are also shrouded in a terrible threat, the threat of a flock of birds.
Felix is the skeleton of a giant cat that borrows the name of the classic cartoon character "Felice". At the invitation of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Cattelan strolled around the city and also visited the Museum of Natural History, where he encountered the huge dinosaur fossil "Sue", thus creating "Felix" to compete with "Sue". Here, it's not so much that the cat becomes a behemoth, but rather that the audience is shrunk into a small rat, trembling in front of Felix. Cattelan wanted us to be intimidated by the guys we usually felt cute in our arms.
The horse was punctured in the belly by a stick and fell to the ground. The wooden sign with the stick in it reads "NRI". The scene stems from a photograph Cattelan saw in a British tabloid showing animal rights defenders piercing dead horses with sticks in protest of scientific experiments on living animals. Cattelan escalated this protest while rebelling against his Catholic upbringing.
There was a hole in the ground. A man, a catland-like man, came out of the ground. The work was first exhibited at the Boimans Van Berningen Art Gallery in the Netherlands, and it looks like Cattelan dug a tunnel in the gallery as if to sneak into the hall and steal the paintings on the walls. Inspired by Italian director Mario Monicelli's classic The Big Man on The Street of Notre Dame, a group of stupid thieves who try to steal the safe but chisel the wall of the kitchen next to the apartment. Cattelan, who had poked his head out of the ground, seemed to be shocked by what he saw, and his eyes widened in surprise.
Many of Cattelan's works speak of one subject, one and only one, and that is himself. Cattelan explores himself in one self-portrait after another, in order to tap into the self of each of us. "Fine Mini" is one of the first works to appear in the image of Cattelan. The title refers to semen, these liquids that give birth to life. Cattelan paints his face on each drop of liquid, gluing these small masks to the wall, densely piecing together a cloud of life with infinite possibilities.
Cattelan often reduces or enlarges the objects of his creations in his works, which is not about size, but emphasizes perception. He narrows down on feelings, emotions, fears, and pleasures. In Mini Me, Cattelan turns himself into a doll-sized, sitting on a shelf, looking down, weary and desperate as he looks at the audience walking by at his feet, he's not asking for help, he's given up calling for help.
The huge soles of the feet in the wall painting "Father" seem to have become stone statues on Easter Island. It was cattelan's own paw. Named after "Father", the work reveals the artist's complex relationship with his own father, for Which, even if his father is alive, he disappears into his own life as if he were dead. When you see "Father," another picture comes to mind: a picture of Che Guevara's body. The guerrilla leader was killed in the Bolivian jungles and his body was subsequently shown to the media. The bare soles of his feet are the most conspicuous of the photographs of Che Guevara's body, as depicted in Cattelan's work.
In addition, the specific site works exhibited in the exhibition, according to different venues to construct the possible life scenes of homeless people, such as "Zhang San" (2021) in this exhibition, and the performance works inspired by Picasso's image and echoing the 2019 UCCA exhibition "Picasso – The Birth of a Genius", inspire the audience to participate in interaction and carry out artistic exploration with Cattelan.
Cattelan's view of art is rooted in contemporary social contradictions, not only questioning the cultural traditions and social stereotypes of his hometown, but also examining the moral concepts of today's globalized society and the context in which related views arise. Personally, I think that the greatest charm of art lies in the fact that everyone can combine their own circumstances to perceive, creating a sense of magic and pluralism of perceptions of art, which is also the meaning of "a thousand people have a thousand Hamlets".
After the end of the exhibition, there are some derivative goods about this exhibition at the exit, it can be said that the curators are very good at playing, but also understand the careful thinking of the exhibition people, just the "sky-high banana" derivatives can find several kinds, different sizes of decompression banana toys, auxiliary gray tape, you can take this artwork home DIY.
Other derivatives such as calendars, bags, bags, etc., also have a lot of interesting points to see.
On the Occasion of the National Public Sacrifice, we also use this article to re-examine and reflect on the past.