Interviews, Issue 10

Maurizio Cattelan

Ambivalence is the engine

Words TRAVIS DIEHL

Photography ROBERT RIEGER

Maurizio Cattelan has a problem: with him, people expect surprises. Now in his 60s, the Italian conceptual artist has taped his gallerist to the wall, hung all his sculptures from the Guggenheim Museum’s skylight, and cast a toilet from solid gold. What could possibly be next? The trick is that he isn’t sure. As an artist, he’s comfortable with not knowing.

Contradictions are the hallmark of Cattelan’s humor. To him, they make an artist’s life possible. He’ll poke holes in his mystique to describe how much artists rely on the cult of personality. But he never seems to deflate. The fact that he’s willing to fail, often spectacularly, seems to keep him afloat.

When Cattelan was starting out in New York in the 1990s, he’d send a proxy to give interviews. These days, he seems to prefer email. That’s not because he’s shy, exactly — as this feature demonstrates, he’s at ease in front of a camera. But he wants to keep his audience off balance, blurring the line where the performance ends and the man begins.

Cattelan makes sculptures, photographs, and publications — but his medium is ultimately the artist’s life itself. Whatever catches his attention or engages him could inform a future work. Even the sometimes-tedious parts of fame, the salesmanship and the dinners and the interviews, offer rich material. He flows through life with wit and ambivalence. This manner of being and digesting directly informs his artistic practice, both teasing and challenging his viewers. As Cattelan told me in our exchange, “Ambivalence is not a flaw, it’s the engine.”

TRAVIS DIEHL Let’s start with a mood check. You’re showing in galleries again, and you’ve got a new edition of your unauthorized autobiography, “Stuck.” I don’t imagine artists ever truly retire. How are you feeling? Have you arrived? Are you restless?

MAURIZIO CATTELAN I don’t think artists ever really arrive. If you do, you risk turning into your own souvenir. Showing again, working with Gagosian, publishing “Stuck” — it all feels less like a destination and more like another loop in a long conversation. I’m grateful, but suspicious of comfort. Restlessness is useful. It keeps you moving toward the next discomfort.

TD This makes me think of the enduring myth of the tortured artist. Do artists need to suffer to make good art? Do you suffer for art?

MC Suffering has a very good press office, but it’s not a very reliable working method. Life already provides enough friction without turning pain into a career plan. What matters is staying a bit exposed, a bit unsure. Comfort is more dangerous than difficulty. Art doesn’t need martyrs; it needs attention.

TD I wonder if you try to reach beyond the art industry with your work. With viral pieces like the gold toilet or taped banana, but also in several earlier pieces, like projects that either directly or indirectly involved the police, you seem interested in prompting a response from an audience that isn’t limited to the usual art-going public. How do you think about the border between “fine art” and everything else?

MC I’ve never been very good at respecting polite borders. The art world is a small ecosystem, and it’s easy to end up speaking only to insiders. I’m more interested in when work leaks out — into newspapers, courts, or awkward dinners. If a piece only works in a museum, maybe it’s too well-behaved. A second life elsewhere is often the real test.

TD One of my favorite projects of yours is maybe a bit of a B-side, but it’s the 2011 edition of the JRP Ringier shareholder report. They’re this big Swiss publishing outfit, they own dozens of magazines and also print artist monographs, and every year they commission an artist to design the shareholder report. Yours is a special issue of Toilet Paper, and the report itself comes in a booklet packaged around an actual roll of toilet paper. It’s funny, and literal, and cheeky, but there’s also a way that Ringier invites this kind of abuse. How do you keep things interesting for yourself, and keep the work provocative, when maybe provocation is something your patrons and supporters expect?

MC Some situations work because they come with an official invitation to misbehave. The real risk is when provocation turns into a service you provide on demand — it becomes decoration with bad manners. To keep things alive, I try to change the rules rather than raise the volume. Sometimes the most radical move is to be quieter, or harder to read.

TD Toilet Paper gets at a concern of yours, I think one of the major ones, which I want to call metabolism — bodily function, basically. Eating, excreting, expiring. Shitting and dying. It’s the cycle of consumption and waste, which keeps going until it doesn’t. Do you think about the creative process that way? What sort of “food” do you seek out?

MC The creative process feels closer to digestion than to inspiration. You take in too much, most of it is useless, and a small part becomes energy. I’m drawn to things that already feel off — excessive, awkward, unresolved. The “food” I look for is what doesn’t go down easily. If the work is too healthy, it’s probably not mine.