Maurizio Cattelan | books

Cattelan is the senior editor of a new publication, due early next month in time for a May 19 show in the café at P.S.1. Called, for no particular reason, Charley, it's his oddest and funkiest book project so far: the fat, compact, 400-page paperback that resulted when more than 70 curators, critics, and artists (Vanessa Beecroft, Dan Cameron, Glenn Ligon, Kaspar König, and the Voice's Jerry Saltz among them) were each asked to choose 10 emerging artists to watch. Every artist is represented by a single, already published image—typically, a page torn from a magazine or a catalog—that design director Conny Purtill photographed on what looks like a dirty concrete floor. The finished product is ugly, infuriating, and historic, summing up this very moment in the art world with offhand authority and fuck-it-all cool. Whether this compendium will have any relevance five years from now doesn't really matter. Although I imagine its editors—Flash Art's Massimiliano Gioni, Parkett's Ali Subotnick, Dia's Bettina Funcke, and Cattelan—would be pleased to have come up with a blueprint for the immediate future of contemporary art, Charley was never intended to be definitive, only inclusive.

   
  Charley is only the latest of Cattelan's publications, the most provocative and regular of which is a Paris Review-sized paperback journal called Permanent Food ($11.50 at St. Mark's Bookshop). Published roughly twice a year since 1995 and now in its ninth issue, Permanent Food is a perfect postmodern product. Every page has been appropriated from another magazine and re-presented here free of its original context. Because the choice of photographs, drawings, art, and graphics—made these days by Cattelan and Paola Manfrin—is so savvy and unexpected, even the most jaded magazine addict (you talkin' to me?) is guaranteed a quick fix of frisky images, recontextualized to the max. Although issue eight includes a note, cleverly inserted into a Numéro contents spread, crediting Cattelan and Manfrin, most issues appear anonymously. According to that same note, "Permanent Food is a non-profit magazine with a selection of pages taken from magazines all over the world. Permanent Food is a second generation magazine with a free copyright."



"We were making a virtue out of necessity," Cattelan explains via e-mail. "Basically, we wanted a magazine. And we wanted it to be as real and as functional as any other magazine." Permanent's first issues were compiled much as Charley was—from pages torn out and sent in by artists and designers. "Permanent was a magazine with no style or personality," Cattelan writes, "simply because any style was available, any personality interchangeable. So it wasn't mine and it wasn't yours." Even if the selection is much more his these days, the magazine still represents a bracingly idiosyncratic, determinedly democratic overview of life on the printed page.
The scrapbook sensibility that informs both Charley and Permanent Food is postmod but has roots in Pop (notably Ruscha and Warhol) and precedents in the tossed-off brilliance of Richard Prince's Adult Comedy Action Drama and Gerhard Richter's commodious Atlas. It can be traced further back to the New Objectivity of Albert Renger-Patszch, whose 1928 book, The World Is Beautiful, set the standard for the deadpan photographic inventory and influenced the influential Bernd and Hilla Becher. The most prolific contemporary practitioner of this sort of visual sampling and image hoarding is Hans-Peter Feldmann, one of the first artists asked to contribute material to Permanent Food, and clearly an inspiration for Cattelan. Asked about Feldmann, Cattelan acknowledges his debt to the German artist's many books, saying, "After all, we are all dwarves on the shoulders of giants." Just how giant Feldmann is may not be immediately apparent to most New York gallerygoers, who have seen only patchy bits of his oeuvre, so his current retrospective at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris (which continues through May 13) is something of a revelation.
from "Hunting and Gathering: Plundering the Image Bank With Cattelan and Feldmann" by Vince Aletti, The Village Voice (April 17 - 23, 2002)

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