Maurizio Cattelan’s show at Moderna Museet is not only an exhibition, but the fourth in a series of new presentations of the collection. Thus, only seven of the more than two hundred works on display are by the Italian artist. The rest are the property of the museum. Oddly enough, it still feels like a Cattelan exhibition, as if the cohesion of the presentation is the artist himself rather than any particular theme or message.
It starts off with grand gestures. One of the most iconic paintings in the Moderna collection, Salvador Dalí’s large-scale The Enigma of Wilhelm Tell (1933) meets Cattelan’s equally well known meteorite-stricken Pope. The title of Cattelan’s work, The Ninth Hour (1999), refers to the hour of the day when the crucified Jesus turned to the Almighty and asked “why have you forsaken me?” The question highlights the mystery of Dalí’s painting, namely why Wilhelm Tell, in the guise of Vladimir Lenin, is kneeling. After all, the legend of Tell is about him not bowing down to authority. If Lenin bows, it must be to the popular uprising of which he claims to be the leader. The possibility of egalitarianism, and how to prevent the emergence of an elite, seems to be the mystery.
After that, I stood for a while among the human-sized dolls in Swiss artist Eva Aeppli’s Group of 48 (1969–70), whose faces and expressions look like they’ve been through a war. Suddenly, the Pope seemed to be addressing not only the God of Christianity, but the worldly powers that turn us into paupers, wage slaves, and cannon fodder. Why has democracy failed us? That is, why are we abandoning ourselves through democracy? Cattelan may abhor power, but he seems to accept that we will inevitably have to obey. So the question becomes: what form should our submission take?
The exhibition revolves around this question. Two traditional models (religion and politics) are presented and, I believe, rejected. They are each given their own room, which are the only two parts of the exhibition that don’t lead on; that is, they are dead ends. One is a miniature of the Sistine Chapel that we can walk into and see what Christianity wants art to do: honour the Day of Judgment. This is perhaps the ugliest idea ever about the destruction of all egalitarianism – an idea designed to scare people into submission. The miniature format clearly shows that this is a reduction of art.
Then, we have to go back to Aeppli’s dolls and take another corridor where we see religion being filled with political content. In Cilla Eriksson and Hanns Karlewski’s The Lord’s Prayer (1969), each verse of the famous prayer, which Jesus supposedly taught his disciples, is paired with press images of the American imperialist takeover of the world. Opposite this beautiful, almost dreamlike work, the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King are crucified as political martyrs, their halos askew. In my view, this demonstrates a weakness in political thinking, as it relies on religious imagery.
From there we reach something called “the square,” a place that symbolises almost everything the West claims to cherish: culture, the place of Socrates’s free thinking, of political meetings, and of the market. A public place where people can spend their free time, decide for themselves what they do. A place that power should stay away from. The walls have been covered with works from the collections. But Cattelan has made no selection: the works hang in exactly the same way as they do in storage, without themes, concepts, styles – with no intention other than to make room for everything.
Supposedly, the idea is to show how the square is for anyone (during the opening weekend, it was even for a street musician). The art is there in the same way as the pigeons which Cattelan has scattered throughout the show. They are all individuals, yet we can’t help but see them as part of a mass. From the cave paintings onwards, art is a single motley, unruly mass – just like the people in the square!
Adjacent to the square is a room that I think of as the room of politics. The walls and floor are a totalitarian red, with Hitler kneeling in front of Roy Lichtenstein’s version of Uncle Sam’s pointing finger. Cattelan made the sculpture, HIM(2001), for a show at Färgfabriken in Stockholm, apparently because he thought it would be interesting to portray Hitler in a country that remained neutral to pure evil. The sculpture is rather small, so from behind it is quite reminiscent of Sweden’s current prime minister, who is famous for his diminutive stature. There he sits, asking us to forgive Nazism so he can rule over us with the support of the Sweden Democrats, a party that arose out of 1990s neo-Nazism, and which aims to transform the country through culture politics. This room is also a dead end. Even politics fails to provide a sustainable form for the freedom of culture in the public square.
In the centre of the square is a replica of a public commission that Cattelan made for the Milan Stock Exchange: a hand extended in a fascist salute, but with all its fingers but the middle one missing. Incidentally, the sculpture is the only work in the exhibition that represents the artist’s rather extensive critique of all things market-related, such as when he taped a gallerist, and later a banana, to a wall. Here, at least, it is clear that the square should not be understood as a marketplace.
The title of the exhibition is The Third Hand. I imagine that religion and politics, along with the market, are the two hands that Cattelan dismisses, and that the rest of the exhibition addresses a third option for how we should relate to power. I think the first part of his answer is in how he submits to the demands of his employer by making a square. Because, thanks to the idea of a square not being a space of exclusion, Cattelan doesn’t have to choose the works himself. Any art will do. Just go take the works out of the warehouse. I think that kind of intelligent solution is what gives the whole exhibition a Cattelan-feel. And it’s not so much to do with a conceptual level. It’s his worker’s attitude: he has, with minimal effort, met the museum’s demands to curate its collection. But there will be no artist talks in this exhibition – this is where he draws the line.
What holds the exhibition together is Cattelan’s attitude, not a specific theme. This is important to understand. He is often described as a provocateur, an insider making fun of the system, or a jester. He has denied the former, and the latter seems to be a terribly obsolete model for an artist. I think it’s more appropriate to understand Cattelan as a slacker. It’s a derogatory term, but only from the employers’ perspective. Those of us who, like Cattelan, have a history of shitty jobs know that the slacker is a working class hero. The slacker does exactly what the employer has the right to demand, not more, and jokes around at work. I think this is the attitude Cattelan refers to when he says that art is a job.
For instance, at the 45th Venice Biennale, he let an advertising agency rent his space and called the piece Working Is a Bad Job (1993). When he curated the 6th Caribbean Biennial together with Jens Hoffman in 2000, the invited artists were given time off instead of having to show their work. As a slacker, Cattelan knows that there are good reasons for not always going the extra mile at work; virtue reinforces the grip of power and allows it to grow beyond what it is entitled to. By counteracting this, the slacker is an important freedom fighter.
In the rest of the exhibition, we see this third hand making art outside the square, as it were, for pleasure. It’s a more intimate relationship with art that has more to do with life than power. In one room, a group of horses hang with their heads through the wall. The title, Kaputt (2013), refers to a novel in which some horses escape a fire and run into a lake, which freezes around their protruding heads. I was now under the ice, away from the public square, among the uninhibited prancing of bodies. Here it felt like I was approaching the forces behind joking in the workplace, or the impulse (not the concept) behind a work of art. Nikki de Saint-Phalle’s Tableau Tir (1961), made by covering paint cans with plaster and then shooting holes in them with a rifle, suddenly looked more like a manifestation of leisure than an artistic strategy. The work has an aura of idle summer days.
And, as if by magic, the minimalist tradition of Rosemarie Trockel’s Unplugged (1994) disappeared. Instead, like Alice in Wonderland, I found myself standing in front of a giant stove where the plates had been rearranged according to anything but practicality. My body felt as small and childish as Hitler’s in the next room. Where did these impulses and sensibilities come from?
The last room offered an answer. On the floor, a man and a dog lie peacefully asleep together. The work is called Breath (2023), and the sound of the wind from Eija-Lisa Ahtila’s tree film in the previous room reinforced the sense of breath – the tree’s, the dog’s, the man’s. The relationships between them were, for a moment, completely egalitarian, and it was so quiet and peaceful that time seemed to be slowing down. On the walls, in the darkened room, several versions of the same annunciation motif by Cecilia Edefalk appear as if emanating from the bodies, like breath. Here, religious symbolism is transformed into the spontaneous giving of free existence. The third hand.
As a critique of power, Cattelan’s show might not be much. But it is a good case study of how minimal compliance can turn art into a pretty good shitty job, and make the day of rest rewarding.
