| It is not surprising. Maurizio Cattelan, international star of the contemporary art scene, and Banksy, international star of the counterculture scene, have a lot in common. Arriving at the MoMA in New York from the Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua, Cattelan owes his success to a true communicative talent, the ability to falsify, the capacity to hit his target from anywhere he aims. His work has always distinguished itself for the sensationalism it is able to create, for the gap it sets between the observer’s expectancy and its results—all part of a paradox between art system and its anarchical negation. |  |
Stefano Questioli
It is not surprising. Maurizio Cattelan, international star of the contemporary art scene, and Banksy, international star of the counterculture scene, have a lot in common. Arriving at the MoMA in New York from the Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua, Cattelan owes his success to a true communicative talent, the ability to falsify, the capacity to hit his target from anywhere he aims. His work has always distinguished itself for the sensationalism it is able to create, for the gap it sets between the observer’s expectancy and its results—all part of a paradox between art system and its anarchical negation. The young Banksy, on the other hand, an unauthorized protagonist of the London streets, is waiting for the recognition of the art world, still hesitant victim of its own chronic near-sightedness. The accusation of vandalism has never disturbed him. The street remains his chosen stage in the obsessive quest for visibility. A vaster audience knows Banksy for his smart and illegal pieces within the urban landscape, through his Web archive and thanks to a splendid edition—immediately sold out—for “Century-The Random House Group Ltd.” Many have been interested in him, from critics in the field to mass media journalists writing for British and international newspapers, and even for mainstream television. The reason behind the present comparison doesn’t derive from the necessity to reach a judgment. Rather it derives from the observation of a unique linguistic likeness between these two eccentric manipulators of the imaginary. Even if half a generation apart, the two are joined by the rhetoric of amphibology in a parallel, incessant search for semantic ambiguity. Even if they make use of different techniques and contradicting ethics in their attempts to confuse beauty and ugliness, good and evil, truth and fallacy, their expressive alphabets are, at any rate, analogous. Four “narrative territories” will ease the way to a more concise analysis.
Narcissisms
The first territory, the artist’s self, offers some important points to reflect on. In 1992, with the work Supernoi [Super us,] Cattelan explored this terrain in a series of “indirect” self-portraits carried out by professional police artists on the basis of various physical descriptions of Cattelan himself given by others. The figurative multiplication of the “similar,” amplified in others’ reflections, exploded in a blow-up of the ego. In Spermini [Small Sperm] (1997) the face of the artist is again the focus of an individual hyperbole obtained through the creation of self-portrait masks. This without taking into consideration the many Cattelan puppets spread throughout the art galleries of the world, which transform hyperrealist tautology into an ironic self-worship.
Accenting the multiplication of the self is not alien to Banksy, either, who, instead of resorting to image, relies on his calligraphic virtues in order to publicize his own pseudonym. In a colossal undertaking at the Bankside in London in 2001, the word “Bankside” was changed to “Banksy.” Even though the work falls within the tradition of “writings,” being his signature, it shows an unusual refusal of a purely aesthetic aspect. Beyond this, every one of the Londoner’s executions is signed at the bottom. The original font is chosen to create an inseparable whole. Thus, in order to speak about themselves, both artists have imposed the emphasis and the negation of their own images at the same time.
Private Zoos
Their attention to the animal world is another common arena that hosts their long-distance challenge. Mice, cows, dogs, and cats become the subjects of a synthesis, giving life to a fairy tale that is poised between lyric accents and violent sarcasm. Cattelan invaded the galleries with horses hanging from the ceiling, ostriches with their heads in the ground, donkeys alive and kicking, lethally sleeping dogs, threatening groups of pigeons sneaked into exhibits, ghost elephants, and all of these together, one on top of the other. He made them seem alive, even though for the most part stuffed. Banksy deals with sheep, cows, and pigs, painting directly on their hides, almost as if to remind us of the obsessions present in a bulimic Western world, always warding off chicken flu, mad cows, and animal farming systems borrowed from the theories of Göbbels. He has placed sinister-looking ravens on top of security surveillance cameras, intent on pecking away at the electrical wires in an act of subversive sabotage. In 2003, he broke into different zoos around the world, with the intention of leaving his trace and sharing the captivity of his unknowing hosts.
The passion that unites the two artists the most is that for the rodent world. Cattelan put two mice in a glass box in order to let them devour one of Italy’s (alimentary) symbols, Bel Paese cheese. For Bidibidobidiboo, he set up a minuscule domestic interior with proletarian airs as the dramatic theater for the suicide of a squirrel. Banksy has dedicated himself with tenacity and insistence to the world of rats. He has narrated them (always in stencil) in the middle of strange performances: sky diving, sawing trap doors, taking locks off their hinges, proclaiming anarchical messages, dirtying walls and signs. He continues to create his rats in the name of the disgust and diffidence they provoke. He has painted them as insolent jesters collecting their ransom.
Power to Authority!
The concept of authority represents the third “narrative territory” these artists question through their poetry. With Frank and Jamie Cattelan overturns the function of the guardians of the law with two lifelike Plasticine cops, in uniform, by leaning them against the gallery wall on their heads. Ten years earlier, with an approaching inauguration and a lack of ideas, Cattelan reported the robbery of an imaginary opera to the police department of Forlì. It wasn’t just a hoax. It was the ironic, self-aware admission of an artistic failure, expressed by the hypocritical acceptance of the attributes of authority. The police force is one of the Londoner’s favorite targets as well. With a lively libertine spirit, Banksy portrayed two policemen in stencil enfolded in a passionate kiss. He gave life to a royal guard in the act of writing a giant anarchic “A;” another urinating in full view, as if in one of Crespi’s genre scenes; another sniffing a white line snaking its way through the city streets for kilometers.
Both artists push the limits to the point of taking on the taboo icons of our society, a deconstruction carried out through willfulness and offhanded acrobatics. In 1999, Cattelan presents a wax statue of Pope John Paul II smashed on the ground, struck by a meteor. In another hyperrealist opera, he portrays Hitler absorbed in prayer. Banksy, then, mocks the United Kingdom’s effigy par excellence, the Queen, whose monkey-like portrait spread through the streets of London like a fungus. Lady Diana isn’t spared, either, as she appears on “Banksy of England” bank notes, literally spit out of an improbable black-and-white ATM (2005.) His pictures painted on the wall erected to divide the State of Israel from Palestine (2005,) “the biggest open-air prison in the world,” said the artist himself, are also noteworthy. The subjects represented are drawn from a popular, cartoon-like repertoire, and they seem to give preference to protest rather than stylistic quality. Numerous stencils sing the praises of peace: smiley-faced soldiers, Apache helicopters covered with pink ribbons, little girls dolled up as suicide bombers, Mona Lisas armed with bazookas. Cattelan, too, during the first period of his artistic production launched a provocatively “civil” message. In the occasion of the 1989 Italian electoral campaign he published the message, “Your vote is precious, keep it for yourself!” (Il voto è prezioso, tienitelo!) in the daily newspaper, La Repubblica. Amphibolies and paraphrases make up the grammar of this disconcerting common effort. If the goal is subversion of hermeneutic categories, the result becomes the theorization of the picaresque.
The Art of Being Anti-Systematic
Cattelan’s anarchist, burlesque spirit has never spared the art system from ferocious attacks—the same system that legitimized his poetry, making him the most cited Italian artist on the international market. He has transformed gallery space into a circus of contradiction, the denigration of his own buyers into an occasion for media celebrity. Massimo de Carlo was glued to a gallery wall with packaging tape. Emmanuel Perrotin was dressed as a rabbit with phallic connotations in a mockery of the animal’s tendencies toward “hanky-panky.” At the start of his career, in order to draw attention to his universal uneasiness in the face of the art world, which squeezes out all creativity from the artist in order to obtain an immediate success with short deadlines, Cattelan used a sheet tied in consecutive knots to represent his repeated attempts of escape from the exposition space. He then cloned Carsten Höller, stole someone else’s exhibit, and collected 10,000 dollars to offer as a prize to the first artist who agreed to stay inactive for one year. In an act of sincerity aimed at the marketing of Strategie, a monthly Flash Art publication, he represented it as a fragile castle made of cards. He made fun of an entire city, Palermo—site of an overambitious attempt to outdo the Venetian Biennale art fair—by erecting a monumental “Hollywood” sign on a hill in the city’s periphery. All of these actions have always evoked universal praise and been able to fascinate even his declared enemies.
The refusal of all forms of institution has always been categoric for Banksy. He has accented the art system’s inherent contradictions by scoffing at the critic-gallery-collector trinity. He believes that expository space doesn’t need consensus. The universe of art connoisseurs is thus scrapped in favor of the simple passer-by. A falsely official sign reading “Designated Graffiti Area” is, in fact, all it takes to set off a rapid reproduction of letterings and tags, thereby creating an open invitation to the openings of an open-air gallery. The Londoner, in his own right, entered the art Olympus without waiting for historical sedimentation through colossal pranks. He introduced himself into the temples of Western art (the Louvre, the National Gallery, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the MoMA) and illegally set up phony artwork. Banal paintings bought at a bargain price with bizarre alterations that were camouflaged onto walls full of masterpieces. Without a doubt, the “British Museum Operation” was the most successful of these enterprises. A small petroglyph representing a buffalo pierced with a spear, a shopping cart, and a primitive man hunting for survival was left on the wall for no less than eight days. Now it has been incorporated into the museum’s permanent collection.
Conclusion?
Cattelan managed to sell a common pen without any ink to a collector at a high price. This commercial maneuver was justified by the metaphor of an exhaustion of artistic creativity. Today Cattelan incarnates the strenuous defense of the idea of “aura” and the privileges associated to the term. The copyright law is used as necessary legal and creative protection. For years Banksy has invaded cities offering free sightings to passers-by. He supports himself economically through the sale of prints. In this way he gives form to an alternative idea of profit, based on the democratization of a market otherwise defined and controlled by wealthy collectors. The unique quality of a work of art, even given its reproducibility, presents itself through small daily revelations. The frequent deletion of these works turns their precarious nature into a renewed sacredness. His works can’t be bought. They were created to be priceless. The whole world is witness to the spread of his stencils, copied by anonymous admirers. In this way, Banksy seems to appropriate the innovative concept of “copyleft.” To consider Cattelan and Banksy exclusively as an exercise in visual manipulation strategies would be to subjugate their role as authentic contemporary poets. The ambivalence of their genius isn’t exhausted by mere rhetoric. They “coherently” coexist in the artistic universe, where antithesis is, in fact, synthesis.
