International Artist-In-Residence
New Works 00.2

Maurizio Cattelan

Milan, Italy

June 08–July 16, 2000

about the artist

Maurizio Cattelan was born in Padua, Italy in 1960. Based in Milan and New York, Cattelan has exhibited his work widely throughout the 1990s. He has had one-person shows in Europe and the U.S., including projects at Galeria Neon, Bologna (1990); Ars Futura, Zurich (1996); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (1997), Wiener Secession, Vienna (1997); Espace Jules Vergne, Centre d’Art de Britigny-sur-Orge, (1997), INOVA, Milwaukee (1998), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998); Kunsthalle Basel (1999); and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2000). Cattelan represented Italy at the 1997 Venice Biennale, sharing the Italian Pavilion with Enzo Cucchi and Ettore Spalletti. In addition, he has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the Aperto 93, Venice Biennial (1993); Kwangju Biennial (1995); SITE Santa Fe’s Truce (1997); Sculpture Project Munster (1997); Istanbul Biennial (1997); Manifesta (1998); and dAPERTtutto, Venice Biennial (1999). In 1999, he organized the 6th Caribbean Biennial in St. Kitts, British West Indies. His work is the subject of a monograph published by Phaidon in 2000.

Cattelan’s works blur the boundaries between art and entertainment, performance and reality. Situationist humor is key to Cattelan’s work, which provokes the viewer while pushing the boundaries of the self-contained art world and the frame of the exhibition space. His sculptures, installations, actions and performances critique the dominant structures of cultural production, questioning the politics, hierarchies and class systems that define contemporary life.

Maurizio Cattelan was selected for his ArtPace residency by the March 1998 panel consisting of Dan Cameron, Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Amada Cruz, Kellie Jones, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and Nancy Rubins.

about the project

Maurizio Cattelan’s ArtPace project inverts the format of the International Artist-in-Residence Program. Rather than exhibiting his work in the gallery, the artist installed his project in ArtPace’s artist apartment. To see the work, then, the viewer must visit the “private” zone of ArtPace’s building. The West Flat—a fully furnished, self-contained apartment on the second floor—is the site of Cattelan’s installation. Inside the lived-in apartment, distant sounds of squeaky chipmunk-like voices emanate. Upon closer inspection the viewer finds a mouse hole discretely dug into the apartment wall. With a miniature trashcan in front, the hole is sealed with an equally small door. The sounds of a domestic fight, tempers flaring, are inside this tiny portal.

This tableaux relates to earlier works by Cattelan, particularly the emotionally charged Bidibidobidiboo (1996) in which a taxidermy-squirrel appears to have committed suicide. By reducing the human experience to a miniature scale, Cattelan exaggerates the fragility of life. Cattelan’s work balances a child-like innocence and humor with violence or death.

In Cattelan’s installation, the viewer searches for a world within a world, a domestic narrative within a domestic environment, under the roof of a public space. Finding the private conflict is unsettling even though it is presented in a comic manner. It is perhaps too familiar, evoking early memories of discovering the difference between the real and imaginary worlds. By dislocating the experience from the white cube of the gallery space to family environs, Cattelan shifts the art experience from the public realm into the personal. Yet at the same time, the private is made more public.

While on the surface Cattelan’s works entertain, on closer consideration the tragic condition of comedy unfolds. The artist reminds us that laughter heals—not as escape but as a release of our experiences.

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