The Brooklyn Rail

Maurizio Cattelan’s Sunday at Gagosian isn’t funny. Cattelan has made it clear that he doesn’t consider himself a “joker,” only to then confront those who came to the opening with the phrase “Beware of yourself” rendered in a twisted graphic font reminiscent of Jared Leto’s forehead tattoo or Heath Ledger’s handwriting in their performances as the famed Batman villain. Cattelan’s wry gesture feels in some ways like Andy Kaufman going on Letterman to tell the audience his life had been ruined, before stepping off stage and asking them for money. For a comedian to say, “this is not a joke” makes the forthcoming laughter of the audience the subject; their unrelieved anxiety, and the lengths they will go to in order to laugh reveals what they would prefer not to be compelled to consider.

As Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai have noted, “comedy is always a pleasure-spectacle of form’s self-violation.” While Cattelan’s work often satisfies this definition, it is purposefully humorless. He often operates with the rhythm and cadence of a set-up and punch-line, but there isn’t ultimately any space for the cathartic relief of the punch-line. Sunday (2024) is an act of cultural interference that makes the everyday violence of American culture audible through a thin wall. Composed of gold plates perforated by bullet holes, Sunday’s surfaces seem to swell, making them formally strange—somehow both ballooned-up and torn-through. Their self-violation as a luxury surface is produced by an uncanny shockwave of physics. Freud defined humor as an important act of transgression, and it is the separation of the audience from what went into making the sixty-four gold-plated panels that is transgressive: in a top-secret invite-only warehouse in Queens, through trick doors and passcodes, Catellan led a group of collectors and art-world VIP’s into an underground shooting range where marksmen fired on the gold plates, an act that detourned the process of violence by making it into an exclusive event.

The work, perhaps, wants to be taken as an extension and revision of Lucio Fontana through the context of American violence, but it still has a close affinity with Duchamp. Duchamp and Cattelan share in their desire to find a kind of art that is uninhibited by the confines of the art world. As Sarat Maharaj relates, in Duchamp’s Notes and Projects for the Large Glass the artist explains that he set out to make a “hilarious” painting, a painting that had never been thought of, that became art through its process of formation. Cattelan’s Sunday may be an extension of this impulse. The idea of a “hilarious” new painting was one of the ways, according to Maharaj, that Duchamp saw art as “a marker for ways we might be able to engage with works, events, spasms, ructions that don’t look like art and don’t count as art, but are somehow electric, energy nodes, attractors, transmitters, conductors of new thinking, new subjectivity and action that visual artwork in the traditional sense is not able to articulate.” Cattelan similarly envisions a future that uses circulation and attention ecologies to produce an art world-less art. But here, however counter-intuitively, it is a symbolic act of violence perpetrated on behalf of those most thoroughly enmeshed in the art world that ultimately shows us the urgency of America’s culture of violence with a power that can no longer be ignored.

Generally speaking, art only escapes the insular conversation of the art world and enters into the larger public sphere through auction records or controversy. Cattelan is one of the few artists able to choreograph this movement and connect to the world at large through a practice of “ruction” and “event.” The artist often creates from a first-idea best-idea framework, that generates energy but also controversy. For example, the artist Anthony James’s lawyer has already sent a legal missive addressing the similarity between Sunday and James’s Divine Infinity (2022), and the similarities to earlier work by Matthew Day Jackson have also been noted. Beyond the literalness that Cattelan is often attracted to, he often seeks out subjects generally perceived as being out of bounds. In November (2024), an unhoused person in the fetal position pisses onto the floor in front of the gold firing wall. While focusing our attention on the marginalized, the price tag of the wall itself competes with some of the city’s budget lines for care of the unhoused. Whether the unhoused figure is a monument or a prop, then, may also flirt with the danger identified by R.H. Lossin’s critique of the recent Josh Kline retrospective at the Whitney: “it reinforces the class violence that it claims to redress and exonerates the guilty parties.” But in the end Cattelan doesn’t seem to implicate himself in this process—or if he does, it is subtly done.

Cattelan’s show opens at a time when laughter and catharsis perhaps deserves to be suspended. The reality is that there are few living artists, if any, who have the appropriate distance to speak to the experience of being unhoused. This shows us a structural limitation of creative activity within the art world—it is said, for example, that you wouldn’t know that the Vietnam War happened at all if you were only able to attend art exhibitions in the early 1970s. Cattelan, however, has generated his own aura, in the lineage of Duchamp, to establish when something creates itself as art. In doing so, he now knows he has the platform to circumvent, at least in part, his larger dilemma. Considering the complex tensions and ironies embedded in this exhibition, we see how Cattelan has chosen to bring the largest gallery in the world into intimate contact with the issues that exist at all times outside of it, while also questioning what should be done within its bounds. Does the white cube still offer a space within which we may be haunted by the tragedies of the outside world?