Monday, January 16, 2012

Maurizio Cattelan at the Guggenheim. A show worth seeing, even if the Guggenheim is at odds with workers fighting for their rights, so the pay as you wish from 5:45 to 7 something was fine. I paid a penny to the suggested ten dollars, which was worth it even more when I was condescendingly allowed to purchase three postcards by the gift shop hoity house help. The show lasts till January 22. All his work, sculptural and non, is suspended from the ceiling in the middle of the museum, amidst stuffed pigeons, and all of it is satirical, ridiculing among else the sacrality of art, such as Lucio Fontana's knife on canvas marks turned into a series of Untitled Zorro's signatures, or the cult of personality, as in a Picasso statue in seer stance, and the fascistic sacrality present in religion, culture and sexuality with a figure of Hitler on his knees, as if praying, or the billboard presentation of a new image of woman in a fascistic mausoleum white perfume bottle, presented as Which will be the next woman? in Italian, by a supposed firm ridiculing the Schiaparelli signature as tired and assish or, last but not least, his ridicule of the art world's presentations of plushies in various form and of alter sexuality in a plastic threesome with a male figure placing a flower's stem in a receiving female's anus. The crowd it drew was incredible. All were mostly serious and blankly pondering just how to simulate an artistic appreciation that reflected positively on themselves, with the exception of a man saying "Hold on Paco-I'll show you something funny: a horse's ass". There were a couple of racists struggling through a list of Italian names mispronouncing one and all, then finally giving up, saying "Jersey Shore" while walking off in frustration,and a woman in her twenties holding and caressing a stuffed animal simulating a white persian cat, misunderstanding the taxidermied work that dangled from the ceiling, such as one that brought to mind the Italian proverb sleeping dogs don't bite, also bringing to mind that perhaps they do. Talking about misunderstandings, a child pointed at a sculpture saying to a woman accompanying him: "look at that horse-it looks like its head is cut off", both then giggling sadistically, or a woman speaking of a taxidermied dog saying "that dog is disgusting", or a man with the learned intent stare of a connoisseur admiring as beauty the crassness of a nude female torso. These attitudes are exactly what the work is deriding, and it is interesting how a mere reference should draw closeted admirers desperate for a titillating which was far from there. Maybe they were all united by some degree of sincerely perverse masochistic affection for the caricaturistically realistic.

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