Maurizio Cattelan

Fermare il tempo è un atto di resistenza contro le forze dell’oblio: la felicità è ciò che resta quando nulla conta più, né un prima né un poi. Il libro indaga e analizza alcuni eventi che hanno messo alla prova la danza e la performance contemporanee attraverso condizioni estreme e impossibili, come danzare a corpo morto o al buio, nell’immobilità o fuori luogo (ossia in musei o gallerie). Come una pratica in contrappunto alla cultura del rendimento e del compimento, e contro le ideologie ossessive del profitto e della visibilità. La danza e la performance sono oggi, invece, direttamente impegnate in un dibattito che riguarda le maggiori trasformazioni dell’esperienza del tempo: bloccato, intensamente trattenuto, radicalmente sospeso, fermo.
Il libro affronta i lavori coreografici, performativi e filmici di:
Angela Viora
Adolph Bolm e Dudley Murphy
Leonid Mjasin
George Balanchine
Kenneth MacMillan
John Neumeier
Virgilio Sieni
Angelin Preljocaj
Robert Lepage e Pedro Pires
Maguy Marin
William Forsythe
Alessandro Sciarroni e Cosimo Terlizzi
Cristina Kristal Rizzo
Kazuo Ohno
mk/Michele Di Stefano
Yasmine Hugonnet
Laurence Yadi – Nicolas Cantillon – Cie7273
Teresa Vittucci
Cindy Van Hacker
Hofesh Shechter

Che relazione si crea tra un’opera d'arte e la struttura dove essa si colloca?
A cosa serve la cosiddetta “arte contemporanea”?
Cercando di rispondere a queste e altre domande, "L'arte in scatola" analizza la distanza fondamentale che, artisticamente parlando, separa la persuasione dalla dimostrazione.

La imaginación escultórica de Xavier Mascaró abreva en los mitos de civilizaciones antiguas como la egipcia y las culturas del Egeo. No se trata únicamente de los referentes temáticos —la barca fúnebre, las máscaras micénicas—, sino que también la selección y el tratamiento de los materiales participan de esta evocación de una afectividad religiosa eterna.

A propósito de Talismán,
Proyecto H Contemporáneo, 18 marzo-15 de junio 2016,
Colonia Roma, Ciudad de México.

AFK - an acronym for “away of keyboard” widely used online - is an anthology of texts written for catalogues and exhibition brochures along the last five years, featuring twelve texts about eleven artists and an artist duo: Rosa Menkman, Jon Rafman, Gazira Babeli, Martin Kohout, Maurizio Cattelan, Enrico Boccioletti, Constant Dullaart, Jill Magid, Aram Bartholl, Emilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Evan Roth and Addie Wagenknecht. In different ways, these artists experienced the impact of digital means of production and dissemination, they experimented with them, they thought about them, and all this is reflected in their work. As Peter Sunde, the co-founder of the Pirate Bay, they think the internet is real, and they spend a lot of time in this real space of life, communication, love, hate, surveillance, sharing, and copying. Most of the works discussed here are made to be experienced in a brick and mortar space, away of keyboard; but reflect the current way of living, communicating, loving, hating, spying, sharing, copying, on and away of keyboard.

A substantial part of Maurizio Cattelan’s oeuvre refers to childhood, either in topics and gestures. The analysis of a sample of his works shows that childhood refers to the real period of the artist’s life, but also to the metaphorical position of his generation in the context of art and cultural history. The study takes into consideration Cattelan’s statements in interviewes as well as the literature on his works by art critics and curators, but mainly relies on the description of his pieces of art. Data sources also include recent studies on consumer childlikeness and childlikeness in contemporary art. Finally, I argue that Cattelan’s oeuvre is a good case study of the paradigm of childlikeness in the ongoing western and westernized societies.

Maurizio Cattelan: Performing the Pulcinella Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) likes to get laughs. Cattelan's early performative work and conceptual actions, which he staged primarily between 1989 and 1997, were often seen as pranks, earning the artist the oft-used label of the " trickster. " While the label of trickster is in some ways fitting, it does not include fundamental elements of Cattelan's performative behavior, nor does it establish a historical lineage for the artist that relates specifically to his Italian heritage. In order to remedy this oversight, this paper will suggest that the Pulcinella, a stock character that originated in the 17 th century as part of the Italian absurdist theater commedia dell'arte, is a more accurate model for Cattelan's practice than that of the trickster. In his performative actions Cattelan utilizes the same language of humor and satire taken from the comic theater as a counter-history to undermine official narratives of the past. In much the same way that postmodernist discourses sought to develop alternatives to the prevailing modernist histories, Cattelan employs humor in performance as a subversive method of commentary. This paper will thus examine how Cattelan's use of humor has been his primary strategy in making work that seeks to confront the Italian art-historical past.

In this article, I explore different notions of iconoclasm. In a first part, I describe this phenomenon in past, referring to concepts of Bruno Latour and Dario Gamboni. In a second part, I analyze artworks such as Julita Wójcik's "Rainbow" or Maurizio Cattelan's "La nona ora" that were perceived as seditious and outrageous in post-transformative Poland. My goal is to portray a space of visual culture as a battlefield of tensions between opposite political strategies driven by different concepts of an image.

A dream of a life of fame is not why men join the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church. Maurizio Cattelan's sculpture La Nona Ora (1999) of Pope John Paul II depicts a scene where the Pope has been struck down by a meteorite that has crashed through a skylight from the heavens. This is a particularly apocalyptic fate for a figure who, during his extremely long tenure as Pope, reached an unparalleled level of celebrity in his native Poland and worldwide. However, this status of fame, which manifested itself in depictions of this holy figure in mass media representations, paraphernalia and cheap souvenirs, is problematic for an individual whose life and spirit are meant to be devoted to the Church. Cattelan's extremely controversial installation of the sculpture at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw called into question the nature of the unprecedented meteoric rise of this religious leader and aimed to draw out the issues surrounding the celebrity status of this figure, especially in his native Poland. This paper examines the problem of celebrity in the figures of the Catholic Church through an in depth analysis of Cattelan's work and the role of the modern Pope.

South Eastern College Art Conference
University of North Carolina at Greensborough
October 2013

Panel: Illustrious Individuals: Visual Articulations of Celebrity and Heroism.
Chairs: Lara Kuykendall, Ball State University, and Letha Clair Robertson, University of Texas at Tyler