Maurizio Cattelan Makes Space

Bullet-riddled, metallic gold paneling spans the length of Gagosian’s Chelsea space in New York. In front of this, a white statue takes the form of a figure lying down on a bench. Upon closer inspection, it’s a fountain. The man is peeing, continuously. Such are the constituent parts of Maurizio Cattelan’s hotly anticipated return to New York City after more than a decade, titled “Sunday.” It’s a whizz-bang of a show.

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Curator Francesco Bonami, who has been working with the 63-year-old Italian artist since 1992, describes their collaborations as an experience of “wonderful stress.” What to make of the debauched underpinnings on view, immaculately rendered and situated within the most highbrow of cultural confines? “The logic that unifies these two works has to do with being rejected or rejecting the social structure,” says Bonami. Both Cattelan’s eponymous Sunday (the paneling) and November (the statue) nod to what society has collectively come to accept as normal, or inevitable—“the collapse of mental boundaries,” as the curator phrases it. “As absurd as it may sound, shooting 60 people in a McDonald's or laying down on a bench and publicly urinating are very similar actions, albeit with different results.”

The whole presentation is a less-than-thinly veiled political critique of the state of American politics, from the disintegration of a civil, rational public discourse and reality TV-esque spats in place of effective diplomacy to the standstill those tendencies have created. An issue like our homelessness crisis—evoked by the figure on the bench—has been reduced to a thing to name-drop in heated pseudo-debates to incite fear and frustration in an emotionally volatile populace rather than comprehended as a burgeoning problem requiring immediate action. 

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Meanwhile, Cattelan’s show has been hit with plagiarism accusations (not the first time the artist has weathered such charges), as Sunday appears nearly identical to a work titled Shots Fired by British artist Anthony James, which debuted to the public a show on the same night. Prior to Cattelan’s opening, the artist hosted invite-only viewings to watch the panels be peppered with bullets of varying calibers from five types of guns according to The New Yorker. Could it really be that, in the current political climate, two artists did in fact separately arrive at such strikingly similar works? Crazier coincidences have happened… probably? That said, Cattelan hasn’t shied away from openly plagiarizing other artists in the past, though he’s often done so with a brazenness that became part of the broader concept: A 2018 collaboration with Gucci, titled The Artist is Present, unabashedly lifted its name from Marina Abramović’s iconic 2010 MoMA performance. When it comes to his newest works, however, Cattelan maintains his innocence, stating he’s “very surprised” about the resemblance.

Prior to “Sunday,” the last gallery show Maurizio had in New York was “Cosa Nostra” in 2014 at Venus Over Manhattan. There, too, Cattelan created an encompassing environment, centered on a life-size diorama of him in an open coffin, placed in a recessed niche in the gallery’s floor. Here, like with the urinating man in “Sunday,” there is an element of reveal, as visitors have to peer through an opening in a worn wooden door to view the installation.

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Cattelan’s immersive concepts tend to pull the viewer into a bizarre, yet equally compelling and cheeky, version of reality. See also: the golden toilet, America, that was on view for a brief time in a Guggenheim bathroom after the 2016 election. Last fall, the artist and Pierpaolo Ferrari, the co-founders of the ever-irreverent Toilet Paper Magazine, presented a disco-themed venue, aptly dubbed Drag Me To The Disco, at Format Festival in Bentonville, Arkansas. Housed in a red barn, a small battalion of disco balls lined the ceilings, casting infinite moving squares of light on revelers and performers, while patterns of repeating motifs—snakes, roses, popcorn—on seating brought surreal overtones to the spectacle. More broadly, the venue design “boldly oozes freedom of body and mind,” they add. “Think uninhibited self-expression, inclusion and celebration of diversity,” Ferrari says of the project. 

Such dynamism, tinged with the ever-more politicized notions of body and self-expression, complicates the narrative for the often enigmatic Cattelan, whose persona is often reduced to that of the jokester. In “Sunday,” it’s impossible to ignore the American context when confronted with one’s own reflection, distorted by a spray of bullet holes. That the man on the bench is lying on his side facing the bullet-addled wall, apparently sleeping, yet perpetually urinating, does summon an ambient sense of embarrassment for the state of things as they are, and a creeping sense of horror for what may soon come to pass.

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“Sunday” is on view through June 15, 2024 at Gagosian at 522 West 21st Street, New York.