With Italian conceptual artist
Maurizio
Cattelan
serving as one of its curators, the fourth
Berlin
biennial, "Of Mice and Men," which opened in March 2006, aroused much curiosity.
Cattelan
was, after all, known for subversive, prankish displays, including a locked gallery with a "back soon" note posted on the door, an "invisible" piece of art consisting of a police report describing a work that had been stolen from his car the night before, and a real, live art dealer duct taped to a gallery wall.
Cattelan
was born on Jan. 6, 1960, in
Padua, Italy
. A self-taught artist, he began his career designing furniture but turned to sculpture and conceptual art in the early 1990s and quickly garnered a reputation for a sense of humour and a penchant for blurring the distinction between art and reality. He described himself as a "lazy" artist. "It only takes a minute to have the idea," he told 1993 Venice Biennale, he made a statement (and a profit) by subletting his exhibit space to a perfume company. At an exhibition in
Turin, Italy
, he knotted bedsheets together and hung them out a window, giving the impression that he had left the building.
The Guardian
newspaper. "I don't do anything." Some of his actions backed up that claim. In 1992, for example, he assembled a group of donors to award him a $10,000 grant that stipulated that he not exhibit any artwork for one year. At the
In truth, however,
Cattelan
did "do" plenty of creating. In 1999 he exhibited Pope John
Paul II having just been struck by a meteorite. That same year at a
London
gallery, he displayed a miniature replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, located in
Washington, D.C.
, that had engraved on it the score of every soccer match lost by the English national team. His commemoration of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center,
New York
police officers standing upside down. Despite so much satiric critique of the art world and society in general,
Cattelan
deftly managed—for the most part—to enthrall rather than enrage his audience and his peers.La nona ora, which depicted
Frankie and Jamie
(2002), showed two wax-figure
In the end, the fourth
Berlin
biennial turned out not to represent the kind of quirkiness that people expected from
Cattelan
. He admitted that he and his
cocurators, Ali
Subotnick and Massimiliano
Gioni
, had discussed some unusual ideas—"a biennial without art, a biennial without objects, a biennial with only objects that were not art, and so on,"
Cattelan
said. They decided against any of those ideas, however. "Let's do a show without tricks," he said, "just an exhibition that we would like to see." Was he being coy or just lazy? Much of
Cattelan
's work raised similar questions.
