"All" Maurizio Cattelan
"All" Maurizio Cattelan
As he had done throughout his half-life career Maurizio Cattelan set tongues wagging and pens scribbling with his Guggenheim show titled "All". From the beginning of his career, he has created sculptures, and produced events with their dissemination as photographic images in mind. In the exhibit Cattelan dangled from ropes and cables every single work—or their images—he had created in the twenty-one years of his ‘making art,’ a gigantic mobile. Titled "All," fills one of the most famous architectural voids in the world with what surely ranks as one of the largest, most complicated, visually muddled mobiles in the history of art. The sculpture, seemingly so out of context, invites the viewer to imagine how it was originally conceived and displayed it was quite a feat of engineering, as each work had to be balanced with all the others.
As you walk up (or down) the Guggenheim's signature spiral, instead of looking out, you look in: at the stuffed burro and the super-elongated foosball table; at the Pope felled by a meteor and John F. Kennedy in a coffin; at Cattelan's many scupltural self-portraits, often engaged in childish behavior; at an elephant dressed as a ghost (or is it a Klansman?) and a huge-headed Picasso springing from a Lichtenstein. The result is dizzying, thrilling, magical.
Looking up from the ground floor, I saw a cascade of imagery. Taxidermied animals slumped from invisible wires. There was the mahogany horse, and also a donkey with a cart attached to its back. They looked transplanted from another scene—just like that olive tree that has also been uprooted and put on display. Winding up the ramps, I saw at various angles: A lifelike sculpture of a pope—made with human hair. Jutting out of a board, a series of three arms in Nazi salute, a cartoonish sculpture of Picasso—in a striped shirt, of course, taxidermied dogs, what appears to be dinosaur bones, but is only polyvinyl and fiberglass a sculpture of a giant hand,
As he had done throughout his half-life career Maurizio Cattelan set tongues wagging and pens scribbling with his Guggenheim show titled "All". From the beginning of his career, he has created sculptures, and produced events with their dissemination as photographic images in mind. In the exhibit Cattelan dangled from ropes and cables every single work—or their images—he had created in the twenty-one years of his ‘making art,’ a gigantic mobile. Titled "All," fills one of the most famous architectural voids in the world with what surely ranks as one of the largest, most complicated, visually muddled mobiles in the history of art. The sculpture, seemingly so out of context, invites the viewer to imagine how it was originally conceived and displayed it was quite a feat of engineering, as each work had to be balanced with all the others.
As you walk up (or down) the Guggenheim's signature spiral, instead of looking out, you look in: at the stuffed burro and the super-elongated foosball table; at the Pope felled by a meteor and John F. Kennedy in a coffin; at Cattelan's many scupltural self-portraits, often engaged in childish behavior; at an elephant dressed as a ghost (or is it a Klansman?) and a huge-headed Picasso springing from a Lichtenstein. The result is dizzying, thrilling, magical.
Looking up from the ground floor, I saw a cascade of imagery. Taxidermied animals slumped from invisible wires. There was the mahogany horse, and also a donkey with a cart attached to its back. They looked transplanted from another scene—just like that olive tree that has also been uprooted and put on display. Winding up the ramps, I saw at various angles: A lifelike sculpture of a pope—made with human hair. Jutting out of a board, a series of three arms in Nazi salute, a cartoonish sculpture of Picasso—in a striped shirt, of course, taxidermied dogs, what appears to be dinosaur bones, but is only polyvinyl and fiberglass a sculpture of a giant hand,