By Kiša Lala
Maurizio Cattelan, Guggenheim Museum New York, 2011
Tragicomic poet-prankster, Maurizio Cattelan, has turned the Guggenheim’s rotunda into a hanging carousel of colorful characters, effigies, surrogates and stuffed dead things that dangle from their gallows in chaotic companionship. Cattelan has also announced his retirement and, in this final exhibition, his magnum opus, he unites ‘All’ his lively, eccentric offspring, staging the ultimate mass execution.
Nancy Spector, the chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, worked with Cattelan in putting the show together. I asked Spector if the artist’s use of taxidermy was to inspire empathy in his audience. “Absolutely, the animals are anthropomorphic and they are self-portraits and surrogates of him, they have a humanizing quality, if you think of Aesop’s fables – where there is usually a moral to the story – it is very much on that level.”
“Where does he get the animals from?” I asked, imagining him picking through the dead pigeons piling up in Venice’s Piazza San Marco.
Installation View - Maurizio Cattelan, Guggenheim Museum New York, 2011
