In artwork we are saying that context is every little thing. That’s very true of high-concept artwork. It’s much more related to the work of Maurizio Cattelan. Sunday, the title piece within the Italian artist’s present exhibition at Gagosian’s arena-sized, West twenty first Avenue gallery, includes a gleaming wall of 24-carat gold-plated and polished stainless-steel panels riddled with the variously sized holes of bullets shot from 5 totally different sorts of weapons.
Outwardly the 64 panels mirror the each day incidence of gun violence in America in addition to the big earnings that gun producers reap. Extra to the purpose is Sunday’s deliberate placement in a number one gallery that represents an accumulation of wealth and energy. That atmosphere, in a rustic distinguished by its residents’ constitutionally protected proper to arms, offers the piece sharp sufficient elbows to plough by way of a discipline crowded with gunshot artwork.
In 1964, Andy Warhol—now proven by Gagosian—watched in horror as a customer to his studio put a bullet by way of a stack of freshly silkscreened Marilyns; two years in the past, one offered at public sale for a whopping $125m. That is the artist who, in 1968, suffered near-fatal gunshot wounds, solely to show it round in 1981 with Gun, a portray that depicts the kind of revolver that just about killed him.
“In one other area the thought would have been much less direct,” Cattelan agreed, in a cellphone name from Costa Rica, the place he was planning an upcoming present. “There was no technique of transferring out of Marian Goodman or killing anybody,” he added. “Generally an thought could be extra priceless in a unique context.” (Comic, the banana that Cattelan duct-taped to the wall in a sales space at Artwork Basel Miami Seashore in 2019, is a working example. As soon as faraway from a fevered market, it’s simply one other banana.)
Firearms, how can we love thee? Allow us to rely the methods. Within the early Sixties, Niki de Saint Phalle loaded plaster reliefs of the feminine type with paint sacs that exploded when she shot them with a 22-calibre rifle. This was not only a radical approach to make a portray; symbolically, a minimum of, it additionally wrangled male artist hegemony into submission. Cattelan selected one in all her Tirs for The Third Hand, an exhibition at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet (till 12 January 2025), the place he blended a collection of his works with others within the museum’s assortment.
His personal canon additionally consists of Shoot, the 1971 efficiency the place Chris Burden had himself shot within the shoulder in a Los Angeles gallery. Three years later, a member of the viewers attending Marina Abramoviç’s Rhythm O put a gun to the artist’s head, however was tackled by others earlier than he pulled the set off.
Let’s not overlook William Burroughs, who not solely killed his spouse but additionally paint-balled his canvases with a gun. Tom Sachs’S 1999 exhibition of purposeful, handmade weapons included an Alvar Alto vase stuffed with stay bullets that he set on Mary Boone gallery’s reception desk as in the event that they had been mints, ensuing within the supplier’s arrest. What about Gregory Inexperienced’s suitcase bombs? “That was extra about terrorism,” Cattelan famous.
For the reason that opening of his present in Chelsea, Cattelan has acquired notes from different artists who, he was stunned to study, had used bullets and slabs of chrome steel as artwork supplies. One, the British-American artist Anthony James, is suing him for plagiarism, although one can hint the thought to Margaret Evangeline, a Brooklyn-based painter who started capturing up mirror-polished chrome steel after 9/11, and to Abdel Abdessemed, who in 1997 lined a gallery in Lyon with galvanised metal sheets perforated by bullet. Since then, Matthew Day Jackson has exhibited reflective panels massacred by gunfire to resemble craters on the moon—and mirror our personal accountability for our weaponised environments. “The extra the merrier!” Cattelan joked.
He additionally invoked Philippe Starck’s gold Kalashnikov lamps and Throne of Weapons, a sculpture that Cristóvão Canhavato (aka Kester) produced from assault rifles utilized in Mozambique’s civil conflict. Cattelan noticed it on the British Museum, “within the gallery with the Rosetta Stone”, he says. “It’s disturbing.”
So, what it’s it with artists and weapons? Violence is a part of our lives,” Cattelan replies. “It can’t be separated from our lives.” That is the not the primary time he has handled an artwork as if he had been an executioner. Beforehand, he subjected a blackened American flag to a rain of bullets. If he’s not essentially the most refined of artists, he’s not a simplistic moralist, both. The title of his recreation is social satire however, like all humour (and critique), it’s an antidote to ache—and it’s private. November, the opposite factor of his Gagosian present, is a marble “fountain” within the type of a park bench on which the determine of a semi-somnolent man is mendacity on its aspect, pants unzipped, urinating on the ground in entrance of the wounded golden wall. It’s not a center finger to gun profiteers, nor to the collectors who’ve been shopping for particular person panels for $300,000 a pop, however a memorial to Cattelan’s shut good friend and enterprise accomplice, Lucio Zotti, who died final September.
For All, his 2011 retrospective on the Guggenheim Museum, Cattelan suspended his complete oeuvre from the ceiling as in the event that they had been marionettes—or carcasses. But, he says, “It was solely final yr that I realised every little thing besides my very earliest work could also be related to loss or dying. It’s unimaginable how typically it repeats itself.”
• Maurizio Cattelan: Sunday, Gagosian West twenty first Avenue, New York, till 15 June
