Maurizio Cattelan Rocks Our World

As you may or may not have realised the RWC Crew don’t mind the odd sly joke for art’s sake so we thought it was about time we posted a blog on one of our favourite art jokers.

Maurizio Cattelan is fast approaching 50 years old, he has worked as a cook, gardener, nurse and mortuary attendant, before turning to making art with the hope that the art world might offer him a better life, he did not attend art school but taught himself. Today he is one of the most well-known Italian artists to have emerged internationally in the 1990s, and his reputation continues to grow.

In some ways an heir to the legendary Italian 'anti-artist' Piero Manzoni (canned shit fame), Cattelan produces witty, unorthodox performances, sculptures and photoworks that are as varied as they are unsettling. Since the early 1990s, his work has provoked and challenged the limits of contemporary value systems through its use of irony and humour. He teases and mocks the art world without ever falling into the naive trap of thinking he can subvert a system of which he is a part. This humorous, untraditional art often takes an off-centre standpoint at the margins of mainstream society to poke fun at art history, monumentality and nationalism.

Cattelan has presented work at the Venice Biennale a total of five-times. On one occasion Cattelan had failed to produce any artwork and on the planned morning of installation went to the local police station to report his car broken into and the imaginary artwork stolen. Later in the day Cattelan displayed the framed police report documenting the theft of the imaginary artwork at the Biennale.

Over the years, Cattelan has worked with themes that vary from thievery to escapism to childhood. The Suicidal Squirrel is a great example of the often tragi-comical evocations of desperation and escapism that can be found throughout Cattelan’s work. Like a good black comedy, Cattelan’s work leaves you with a wry smile upon your face.

In the UK Cattelan is most famously known as the artist that killed the Pope with a meteorite at the controversial ‘Apocalypse’ exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2000. It is acts of insubordination like this that have made Cattelan a legend. He has consistently produced significant artworks that have captured the attention of viewers and the international art world alike and established him as one of the most exciting artists working today and this is why we love him.

Together with two editors turned curators, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick, Cattelan founded the Wrong Gallery in the Chelsea district of New York. The Wrong Gallery was nothing more than a parasite sucking off the Kreps’ Gallery next door to it. It stole screws, drills, ladders and even electricity but kind of understandably when you discover the Wrong Gallery was basically a glass door with about a 50cm deep space behind it. The lack of actual psyhical gallery space was somewhat confusing to the uninitiated especially.

This entirely non-commercial gallery was literally only accessible to window shoppers and to those in the know it offered some of the greatest exhibitions in NYC. Cattelan jokingly referred to the sliver of a gallery as "the back door to contemporary art" - one that's "always locked". You certainly had to be aware of it to appreciate what was on show there. Most of the interventions it has staged have played in some way on the idea that there might be more - or less - to the gallery than met the eye. The Polish artist Pawel Althamer hired two Polish illegal immigrants to smash in the door with a baseball bat every Saturday whilst Jamie Isenstein displayed a "will return by" sign that was motorised so that its clock always pointed a quarter of an hour into the future and when the RWC Crew visited it simply displayed a sign that read “Fuck Off we’re Closed”.

The Wrong Gallery has now unfortunately been evicted. On our last visit to London we discovered that the Wrong Gallery has been granted temporary asylum at the Tate Modern with a full-scale mock-up construction. Unfortunately the point has now been lost as you are now no longer confused by the lack of actual gallery. In the Tate Modern you know what you are looking at is art and the confusion of not being able to walk into the gallery is redundant. In some ways the reason for calling it the Wrong Gallery is even more poingiant than before. The name came about because, as Cattelan now explains: "We loved the idea of people saying: 'It's a great show, but it's in the wrong gallery.' " The RWC crew like to view the Wrong Gallery as an artwork in it’s own right; a prank artwork that allows other prank artworks to take place. Whether the parasitical nature of the Wrong Gallery will continue in its host will be seen. If all else fails you can buy your own 18in-high scale model of the doorway for just under £700, which includes miniatures of all the artworks ever shown there (a homage to Marcel Duchamp's famous museum in a suitcase). "The idea is that anyone can play at being a dealer at home," Cattelan says. "It is a sign of the times. In the 1960s every man could have become an artist; now everyone wants to make money."