Garage Magazine
Kendall Jenner by Maurizio Cattelan
Photographed by Campbell Addy
2020
Maurizio Cattelan
Post-copyright Flash Art #329
Post-copyright
Special cover by Maurizio Cattelan
Flash Art #329
February—March 2020
Special project for Flash Art:
Maurizio Cattelan, LARRY, 2019. Collage. Photography by Paige Powell.
Today’s image consumption has become a primal, even nurturing aspect of our daily life. Whether originating from commercial or private streams of communications, we ingest and recirculate images incessantly. Yet the meaning of each image is entirely dependent on context; the same image with a different caption may deliver entirely new content, as if freshly produced.
This issue of Flash Art explores a sort of archeology of images. The questions we wish to pose have moved beyond notions of legality; for our purposes, we are not engaged with issues of intellectual property, nor are we interested in determining whether an idea, slightly modified from an already existing one, is more or less relevant than the original.
We aim to reflect on issues of appropriation and authenticity in their most contemporaneous sense, whereby any original or preexisting artwork, image, or product can be invested with a multiplicity of meanings. For this new sense of authenticity Gea Politi, Flash Art Editor-in-chief, has coined the term “Post-copyright,” and to that end the issue have focuses on several case studies of artists who are working to remove categories or definitions, even breaking down the barriers between consumer images and art objects.
All the artists featured in this issue — beginning with Maurizio Cattelan, who has conceived a special cover project for our theme, here in conversation with the genre-bending artist and designer Virgil Abloh — combine language, iconology, and the everyday sensibilities of the “iPhone generation.” From artists of the Pictures Generation, as Sherrie Levine, to the manifold messages in Barbara Kruger’s images; from the “affective proximity” in Arthur Jafa to the complexities of the human brain in Jordan Wolfson; from the Alice Channer’s repudiation of authorship to Olivia Erlanger’s embracing of the image as a free-floating signifier, each uses appropriation as a means of grappling with our relentlessly refractive present.
Also in this issue:
An essay on “the Copy as Origin and Renewal” by Jane Ursula Harris on the work of Renee Cox, Deborah Kass and Yasumasa Morimura; a conversations from the late 1980s between Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Ashley Bickerton, and others; lastly, a special artwork conceived by Dinamo.
Maurizio Cattelan — Shit Pillow
Maurizio Cattelan
Shit Pillow
Design and Decorative Arts
Polyester, feather padding
19.68 x 19.68 in
50.0 x 50.0 cm
Dry clean only
Melodrama – Luxembourg & Dayan
MELODRAMA, Act 1: London
24 June – 20 August 2016
MELODRAMA is an exhibition in two acts taking place between Luxembourg & Dayan’s London and New York gallery spaces. The show includes seven sculptures and a series of photographs that function as characters in a melodramatic play. Cloaked under commonplace appearances, the works perform dramatic attitudes, generate heightened emotions, and pervade pathos into the gallery space.
Act I: London. Pino Pascali’s ‘fake sculpture’ Coda di Delfino (1966) seems to have already escaped the gallery into the wall leaving nothing more than a trace of its tail. Maurizio Cattelan’s Untitled, taxidermied horse (2007) follows Pascali’s dolphin with a leap of its own, into the opposite wall of the gallery. The plot thickens with Fischli & Weiss’s inanimate black rubber Heart (1987), which lies still on a pedestal, hidden and over- looked like a character in one of Beckett’s plays; the show, however, must go on. Finally, a series of metic- ulous photographs by Franco Vimercati from his Ciclo Zuppiera (1983) generate, as the saying goes, ‘a storm in a tea cup’. These black and white photographs of a soup terrine transform a domestic object into a tragic and melancholic timeless diva.
In New York from 14 July – 17 September, the scene is set with Vincenzo Gemito’s 19th Century bronze bust placed in an unpredictable dialogue with a Jeff Koons cast bronze sculpture. At the same time, Urs Fischer faces a work by Richard Serra, each experimenting with weight and balance – a solid grounding facing precarious uncertainty. End of Act Two.
MELODRAMA was conceived in collaboration with curator Francesco Bonami with the aim to examine structures of exaggerated narratives and performativity in the medium of sculpture. Following the gallery’s recent survey of Alberto Giacometti’s pre-war sculptures in London, and a show of César’s works from the 1960’s in New York, MELODRAMA is the third exhibition in Luxembourg & Dayan’s season of sculptural investigations, a project that traces the blurry line that lies between materiality and imagination in the realm of sculpture.
Artissima
SHIT AND DIE
An exhibition produced by Artissima
Organized by Maurizio Cattelan, Myriam Ben Salah and Marta Papini