It’s strange how the Guggenheim is framing its Maurizio Cattelan retrospective, aptly called “All,” as some kind of shuddering, troubling drama.
The gigantic show — spectacular, surreal, sui generis, dizzying — presents all of Cattelan’s work — 128 imposing objects — dangling from the ceiling of the museum, filling the space’s famous rotunda with everything from taxidermied horses to oversized comic posters. It’s a gas.
With a flying Pinocchio that’s spread-eagle like a gleeful parachutist, a replica of JFK supine in a coffin, a dinosaur-sized skeleton of a fictional beast, a huge balloon-headed Picasso and a boy-sized figure of Hitler on his knees as if at least a smidge penitent (no, he’s not), the show’s a Felliniesque fantasia, funny as it is startling, provocative as it is disturbing. It’s a thronged airborne circus aloft in a single towering ring.
How to explain it all? I can’t. I won’t. Phantasmagorias are like that – trippy, prickly, tricky.
But the Guggenheim’s take veers from my comparatively sunny view of Cattelan’s whimsies, running from the joyous (you smile at the animatronic boy tip-tapping his drum) to the fancifully macabre (you gargle a slightly bitter taste before the JFK mannequin, or the young boy hanging by a noose).
The curators dub this clamoring scene, this monstrous marionette, a “tragic artwork.” They go on: “The exhibition is most certainly an exercise in disrespect; the objects are hung like laundry to dry. More somberly, they appear as if hoisted on a gallows, emulating a scene of mass execution …”
Ack. No. That giant Picasso is as benign as a Macy’s parade balloon. Those taxidermied Labrador retrievers look at peace, happy. OK, the life-size Pope, crushed by a meteor, isn’t enjoying himself, but that damn Pinocchio, as satirical as he might be, is thinking: Weeee.
Cattelan says this is it, that “All” is all, kaput, the end. Here is the whole of his work and now he will quit making art. This, then, is his curtain call, his final bow. Take one last look at everything, he seems to say. It should be a disconcerting occasion, as the museum hints, but it’s not. It’s downright celebratory.
“Maurizio Cattelan: All”; Guggenheim; through Jan. 22
