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Untitled, 2001, © Maurizio Cattelan, Photo: Attilio Maranzano, Courtesy the artist
Maurizio CaTTELaN
8. 6. – 6. 10. 2013
FONDATION BEYELEr
VisiTors
GuidE

Francesco Bonami
Maurizio CaTTELaN
KapuTT priMaVEra
(1)
SuRVIVAL INSTINCT
“‘Did it ever occur to you,’ I said, ‘that the Swedish landscape is equine
in character?’ Prince Eugene smiled and asked, ‘Do you know Carl Hill’s
drawings of horses, Carl Hill’s hästar?’ And he added, ‘Carl Hill was mad;
he thought trees were green horses.’ ‘Carl Hill,’ I replied, ‘painted horses
as if they were landscapes…’”
I came across this dialogue in Kaputt, a novel written by Curzio Malaparte.
The characters engaged in this conversation are the author himself
and Prince Eugene of Sweden. The first part of the novel is titled “The
Horses” and it alone would be enough to gain an understanding of Maurizio
Cattelan’s horses. In it, Malaparte writes about horses in a magical
way, bringing to mind over and over again all the horses used by Cattelan
in his work. In particular, the rotten mare in a pool of mud recalls Untitled
(2009), Cattelan’s horse with a swollen belly pierced by a pole bearing a
Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2007, Photo: Axel Schneider, Courtesy Maurizio Cattelan’s Archive
sign with the inscription „INRI.“ Or the horses trapped in the frozen waters
of Lake Ladoga in Finland during World War II, with only their heads
sticking out, their eyes frozen in terror. Malaparte tells of the frozen heads
being used by soldiers as benches on which to smoke their cigarettes
and pipes. And of the horrible stench of the rotten corpses when spring
arrived, the ice melted and the bloated, dead horses started to float on
the surface of the lake. It sounds gruesome and horrendous but actually
Malaparte’s writing is very much like Cattelan’s visual language, located
somewhere between the magical and the poetic, the tough and the lyrical.
Prince Eugene, again, seems to describe it simply but perfectly: “La
guerre même n’est qu’un rêve.” War itself is nothing but a dream. The
work of Maurizio Cattelan is nothing but a dream—a disturbing dream,
perhaps, but nevertheless a dream.
The title of this text is Kaputt Primavera. It refers both to Malaparte’s
novel and to his description of spring on the shores of the Finnish lake
and, oddly enough, to Botticelli’s Spring. There can be no two images
that have less in common than the one of the frozen horses’ heads sticking
out of the ice in the middle of a brutal war and Botticelli’s sugary,
over-the-top, decorative, allegorical vision. Yet I feel that both converge
perfectly into the five horses hanging headless from the wall at the
Fondation Beyeler. Fear, despair, tragedy, and allegory are combined in
Cattelan’s sensitivity, which has brought him a long way, from being simply
a donkey to feeling like a trapped horse. As I said, Malaparte’s novel
could be enough for us to gain an understanding of Cattelan’s art. I could
easily stop writing here. But instead, I will indulge in an unlikely competition
with Malaparte and pave my own path to Cattelan’s five horses. It
will be a personal chronology with very personal references, far removed
from any scholarly dissertation on Cattelan’s art. For me to talk about
Cattelan like a scholar would be an oxymoron. My story is not linear and
it’s roughly divided into five short chapters, each of which discusses a
work of art that I believe will bring us closer to understanding Cattelan’s
parade of suspended horses. The five horses are somehow different
from the individual horses that Cattelan presented in the past. The lonely
horse is a kind of attempt to escape solitude, a feeling the artist is cons-
Sandro Botticelli, Spring, c. 1482
© 2013. Photo Scala, Florence, Courtesy Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali
tantly fighting. The jump, the effort is delusional and yet heroic. The five
horses transform delusion into panic, they escape in a stampede and the
individual effort in a feverish crowd. It’s an exodus we’re witnessing, not
a search for freedom. Like Malaparte’s horses in Finland that run away
from the burning wood into the frozen lake, Cattelan’s horses do not seek
freedom but survival.
(2)
FIVE DEGREES OF HISTORY
Winter Sunset with a Rider and a Rearing Horse is a painting by Carl
Fredrik Hill (1849–1911), the Swedish painter mentioned above. I do not
know where this painting is and when the artist did it. However, the posture
of the horse is all we need to know, and the sky becomes Cattelan’s
wall: a wall that is the border between winter and spring, between death
and life again. You can read into this as much as you wish, or nothing at
all. Is it just a coincidence? But then, if art is simply a coincidence, why
even bother? Maurizio Cattelan wishes to unsettle us and he’s succeeding,
in his own way. The wall is also a border between the historical and
the mundane, between the souvenir and the trophy, the memory and
the anecdote. All these elements conspire along this obvious and yet
invisible border. Cattelan erases the sunset, the rider is gone, only the
rearing horses remain, beheaded, or maybe not. We are looking at the
animals from under a frozen sheet of ice, waiting patiently for spring to
come and free us.
1994. The Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France is discovered to
contain some of the earliest cave paintings in human history. One of the
most famous paintings is of four horse heads. It is as though Cattelan is
going backwards in time. 32,000 years backwards, looking for the heads
of his horses. 1994. New York. Daniel Newburg Gallery. Warning! Enter at
Carl Fredrik Hill, Winter Sunset with a Rider and a Rearing Horse, 1877
your own risk, Do not touch, Do not feed, No smoking, No photographs,
No dogs, Thank you. This is the title of Cattelan’s first New York exhibition.
A failure. According to him, he felt like a donkey since two previous
projects had been rejected. He showed the donkey, the cousin of the
horse. The five horses are maybe the completion of that long failure that
began almost twenty years ago. The New York gallery was Cattelan’s
cave. The first rock wall on which he bumped his head, where he would
have liked to hide or bury his head. The donkey, not noble enough or not
ready to be sacrificed under the wall of fear.
Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2009, Photo: Zeno Zotti, Courtesy Maurizio Cattelan’s Archive
Venice, Saint Mark’s Cathedral. On its facade, the copies of four copper
horses. The originals are protected inside the basilica. Four horses. Like
those in Chauvet’s cave. It seems like one horse is always missing the
count. Where is the fifth horse? Saint Mark’s horses arrived in 1204 after
the Sack of Constantinople, before which, they had been stolen from
Greece. Nobody knows for sure who the sculptor was, maybe Lysippos.
In 1797, Napoleon took them and placed them on top of the Arc de
Triomphe du Carrousel. They returned to Venice 1815, after the Battle
of Waterloo. The Venetian horses look agitated, they feel they are in
the wrong place. Constantinople, Venice, Paris… They are not at home,
they belong somewhere else, on a Greek island. Their original purpose
was not to celebrate wars, imperial victories or defeats. Cattelan’s five
horses share this feeling with those four but nobler horses. They belong
somewhere else. Art uprooted never fulfills its scope. Cattelan’s work
gives the impression of being somehow uprooted and, like Saint Mark’s
horses, it gains strength from this condition, it gains life from this state
of uneasiness.
1800–1803. Jacques-Louis David. Bonaparte Crossing the Alps. Napoleon
may have been in the Alps with his white Arabian stallion in 1799, but
the four horses of Saint Mark’s had crossed the Alps two years earlier.
David made five versions of this painting. The power of its composition
does not lie in the image of the First Consul and future emperor but in the
balance of his horse, or its resistance to scale that rocky wall that is the
Jacques-Louis David, Bonaparte Crossing the Alps, 1800
© RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles)/Gérard Blot
Great Saint Bernard Pass. Napoleon is not retreating but proceeding in
his conquest of Europe. What is Cattelan doing? Retreating or advancing?
The horses in Chauvet’s cave, Saint Mark’s horses, Napoleon’s
horse, and now Cattelan’s horse and horses. The journey leads through
a complex panorama—one drawn by European civilization, on the one
hand, by merging with a Paleolithic root and on the other by springing
from Byzantium, or a place even deeper in Asia—and recalls Attila’s
legendary horses. Where does all this lead or end, or start again and
again?
Rome, 1969. Galleria l’Attico. Twelve live horses are entering the space.
They will be the subject of Jannis Kounellis’s exhibition. The Surrealist
poet André Breton once spoke about the idea of making something
impossible possible, like the Tartars bringing their horses to drink at the
fountains of Versailles. That’s what Kounellis is doing: making the impossible
possible. In a garage, history is crossing several borders at the
same time. That’s where our story is approaching its conclusion. From
the brutality of Malaparte’s Lake Ladoga and his dead, terrified horses
to the glorious gesture of a parade of live horses entering an industrial
space in Rome. From sheer devastation to sheer celebration. What is
now left of all this if not the five horses of Cattelan, which are neither
alive nor truly dead, but suspended in a state of wonder, crossing
devastation, trespassing celebration, and ending nowhere. Looking for,
seeking out another dimension, another space, another era far beyond
anything we have yet imagined.
In Henri-Georges Clouzot’s movie The Wages of Fear (1953), the character
Mario, played by Yves Montand, and his critically wounded
friend Jo (Charles Vanel) reminisce about a neighborhood they both
know in Paris, near the rue Galande. A fence is mentioned. “I never
knew what was behind it,” utters Jo, between two gasps of agony.
“Nothing,” answers Mario. Seemingly unaware of Mario’s response, Jo
asks again, “What was there behind that fence?” “Nothing, I’m telling
you, nothing.” “There’s nothing,” the man repeats, dying with his eyes
wide open, as if he were already seeing from the other side.
While standing under Cattelan’s horses, the viewer will have the same
question to ask the poor animals before it is too late.
“What do you see on the other side of that wall?”
“Nothing,” or maybe: “Just a donkey.”
Maurizio Cattelan, Warning! Enter at your own risk, Do not touch,
Do not feed, No smoking, No photographs, No dogs, Thank you, 1994,
Photo: Lina Bertucci, Courtesy Maurizio Cattelan’s Archive
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