Maurizio Cattelan Pays Homage to 9/11 With Lone Black Tower in Milan
The last time Maurizio Cattelan made international headlines, it was in connection with a curved yellow fruit. At Art Basel Miami in December 2019, the artist duct-taped a banana to a gallery wall, and it immediately sold to a French collector for a cool $120,000. A replacement banana fetched the same amount. Opinion within the cultural commentariat was split right down the middle. Some saw the work as the latest farce by the fruity Italian artist-prankster, and proof that all contemporary art was a fraud. Others stood up for Cattelan’s right to show a taped banana, just as Marcel Duchamp, a century earlier, had displayed a porcelain urinal.
How the mood music has changed. Cattelan is back in the spotlight with an exhibition that can only be described as somber — staged at the giant post-industrial Pirelli HangarBicocca exhibition space in Milan. Twenty years after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, Cattelan pays silent homage to the tragedy, presenting an ominous black tower with an airplane slicing through the top. The resin work, produced in a shipyard, is 18 meters tall: it surges into the ceiling of a space where locomotives were once assembled.
As you walk up to “Blind” (the work’s title) through the dimly lit, cathedral-like space, you initially see a tall black column, then a pair of wings jutting out of either side — as if this were a giant crucifix. Tiptoeing around the structure, you make out the contours of an airplane, and get a sense of what you’re looking at.
Photographs don’t do the sculpture justice. They make the piece look like a giant toy, a trivialisation, a Cattelan joke. You need to stand beneath it, absorb the work’s scale, and gaze at the airplane wings and tail. There’s a good chance that you’ll have flashbacks to that horrific moment, whether you were in New York or not. It’s a moment that Cattelan experienced firsthand. Preparing to fly to Chicago that morning, he had to turn back and walk home from La Guardia airport, joining innumerable other New York pedestrians, and looking up in terror at the clouds of thick gray smoke choking the skies.
Elsewhere, the exhibition presents thousands of taxidermied pigeons (a Cattelan trademark) perched on wall railings. The birds, which were once living, peer down at you as you walk past.
The only other work on show is a Carrara-marble, lifesized sculpture of a man lying on the floor in a foetal position, eyes closed, with a dog lying by his side. This is the first thing you see as you come in: the sculpture is starkly lit from above.
How the mood music has changed. Cattelan is back in the spotlight with an exhibition that can only be described as somber — staged at the giant post-industrial Pirelli HangarBicocca exhibition space in Milan. Twenty years after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, Cattelan pays silent homage to the tragedy, presenting an ominous black tower with an airplane slicing through the top. The resin work, produced in a shipyard, is 18 meters tall: it surges into the ceiling of a space where locomotives were once assembled.
As you walk up to “Blind” (the work’s title) through the dimly lit, cathedral-like space, you initially see a tall black column, then a pair of wings jutting out of either side — as if this were a giant crucifix. Tiptoeing around the structure, you make out the contours of an airplane, and get a sense of what you’re looking at.
Photographs don’t do the sculpture justice. They make the piece look like a giant toy, a trivialisation, a Cattelan joke. You need to stand beneath it, absorb the work’s scale, and gaze at the airplane wings and tail. There’s a good chance that you’ll have flashbacks to that horrific moment, whether you were in New York or not. It’s a moment that Cattelan experienced firsthand. Preparing to fly to Chicago that morning, he had to turn back and walk home from La Guardia airport, joining innumerable other New York pedestrians, and looking up in terror at the clouds of thick gray smoke choking the skies.
Elsewhere, the exhibition presents thousands of taxidermied pigeons (a Cattelan trademark) perched on wall railings. The birds, which were once living, peer down at you as you walk past.
The only other work on show is a Carrara-marble, lifesized sculpture of a man lying on the floor in a foetal position, eyes closed, with a dog lying by his side. This is the first thing you see as you come in: the sculpture is starkly lit from above.
I must confess that, before arriving in Milan, I wondered how Cattelan was going to fill up HangarBicocca — and surpass the spectacular exhibition he put on at Blenheim Palace (birthplace of Winston Churchill) in 2019, which, to all intents and purposes, was a retrospective. You had to be there to see the kneeling Hitler sculpture placed inside Churchill’s grand library. Some visitors were also able to sample the solid-gold Cattelan toilet before it was robbed in a mysterious theft that filled up so many tabloid column inches.
When I first saw the thousands of stuffed pigeons inside Hangar Bicocca, I thought Cattelan was going to serve up more of the same. But his 9/11 memorial gives the show a purpose and a meaning. Once you’ve seen it, HangarBicocca turns into a place of contemplation; the dead pigeons and the marble (homeless?) man become timely reflections on death.
You sense that Cattelan has been shaken by the global Coronavirus epidemic just as much as the rest of us. He says so himself in a printed conversation with the curators. “I must say the pandemic made death visible again in our lives,” he explains. “It’s something we’re always trying to suppress and forget. We’re all so focused on comfort and on warding off any kind of pain, as if it were just a medical problem. But perhaps for the first time since our parents’ generation that lived through the war, death is once again an everyday threat.”
In a casual walkabout with me at the opening, the artist said the exhibition showed a gloomy side to his personality that was always there. He also said that he planned to show the work in New York sometime in the future. (According to Nancy Spector, interviewed in the exhibition catalogue, he proposed it to the Guggenheim but she felt it was still too soon for a New York display.)
HangarBicocca’s artistic director Vicente Todoli — who previously ran Tate Modern — said Cattelan approached him three years ago and asked if he could show his 9/11 project at the Milan space. Todoli said there had to be an accompanying exhibition, and a conversation began.
This is “the mature Cattelan,” said Todoli (pictured). “He came of age.”
