Maurizio Cattelan is remarkably blasé about his role in the weirdest court case of the year. Although the men who stole an 18-carat solid gold toilet from his exhibition at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire are about to be sentenced, it transpires he doesn’t even know that the sentencing hasn’t happened already and asks me what the guilty parties got.
“I wanna hear the end of the story,” he smiles. (It tickles him, when he finds out later, that the sentencing will happen on June 13 — Friday the 13th.)
He’s in a minority in his lack of interest. The media has gone mad for the story since the men were convicted in March (the BBC alone has churned out a half-hour TV investigation and a four-episode series on its The Crime Next Door podcast, while The Trial podcast produced no fewer than seven episodes on the subject).
Well, two of them. Of the five seen, in 2019, smashing their way into Blenheim Palace and dropping the glittering throne out of a window to be transported to a waiting car, three remain unnamed and unapprehended.
Although several of Cattelan’s friends suspected him of being responsible for the loo’s disappearance (“Can you imagine?” he says, incredulous — and I don’t say, yes, you once dressed an art dealer in a rabbit-eared phallus costume for five weeks as an exhibition; I can imagine you’re capable of anything), it’s thought that the resplendent loo, titled America, which was plumbed in and available for use by the public, was partly melted down within days. The sale of the gold netted at least £500,000, according to a photo message sent by one of the thieves, depicting a sports bag full of cash. The whereabouts of the remaining metal, which could fetch another £2 million or so, are also unknown.
But Cattelan, 64, has “zero” attachment to his artworks, he says, once they are produced (it probably helped that this one belonged to a private collector and not to him by the time it was nicked, but it was also insured for £4.6 million). “Once they are out they have to fend for themselves,” he says.
Cattelan is more interested in finding “a new life where many people will have it” for the loo, and for his famous banana too — the latter artwork is properly known as Comedian, and manifesting as a banana duct-taped to the wall — in some sort of digital form, though he’s not yet sure how. Cattelan is Italian and can converse very well in English, but a clear description of how physical art (the lav and the yellow fruit) may transfer into the world of crypto is beyond either of us to unpack. “I will let you know,” he says, rather touchingly invigorated by the prospect of this new idea.
We’re meeting on the occasion of his latest exhibition, at the blue-chip commercial gallery Gagosian in Mayfair, London. “This is a commercial show, I have to admit it,” he says, though he stresses, putting his long finger solemnly in the air, that “I’m not working with this gallery”. He hates the idea of being formally tied to a commercial space, but they had shown an interest and he wanted to make the works now on display, so he agreed — not for the first time.
The show consists mostly of gold-plated steel panels that have been violently pierced by two or three large-calibre gunshots. There’s also a large boulder with horns that resembles a bull’s head, perched on a sofa, which we don’t really get to the bottom of, and a bottle containing a tiny guitar-playing skeleton in a ski mask.
• How was the Blenheim gold toilet stolen? Anatomy of a heist
He did a series of similar works at Gagosian in New York. One critic said he had turned “his sardonic gaze on the unsettling subject of gun violence”. He recoils at this. “No, it’s, you know, I always try not to … when you are too precise and become political then it’s like the work is not any more interesting. The work should be open for interpretation, not clearly taking a position.
“The real problem is press officers,” he continues, indicating the discreet door at the back of the gallery behind which said operative has concealed themselves. “They need to address what you do in a way that can [give] rise to press. Sometimes we have a conflict.”
For him, “art works in this way: movies, music, literature, let’s say we complete [it]. It’s like when you love a person, you become a whole. It’s a fair exchange, where you receive something from it and you participate, and you add your own conclusions — right or wrong, but I believe it should work in this way.”
It’s fair to say that most of his work isn’t exactly what you’d consider “commercial”, at least at first glance. Bidibidobidiboo (1996) consisted of a taxidermied squirrel slumped at a miniature formica kitchen table, with a handgun on the floor. La Nona Ora (1999) was an effigy of Pope John Paul II lying on the floor in full regalia under a meteorite. In Untitled (2007) a taxidermied horse appears to be mid-leap — except that it’s stuck in the wall up to the neck. No weirder, in a sense, than a hunting trophy, but somehow I suspect less appealing.
• The price is ripe as banana artwork sells for $6.2m at Sotheby’s
Yet sometimes he really nails it. When he first exhibited the banana, I mean Comedian, at the art fair Art Basel Miami Beach (a frenzied jamboree of commerciality) in 2019, it caused a global news sensation, and the fair had to remove it from display for fear that other artworks would be damaged by the jostling crowds who flocked there to see it.
Although the critical reception ranged from celebration to outright disgust, all three editions of the artwork — which, when sold, consists of a certificate of authenticity and detailed instructions on how to tape a banana to a wall — sold out, two at £92,000, the third at £115,000. Which sounds like a lot, but is nothing compared with the £4.8 million that the crypto billionaire Justin Sun paid for it at auction at Sotheby’s New York in November last year. Shortly after, Sun ate it.
Was Cattelan surprised at the amount it went for? “I mean, a bit, yeah,” he says. “Surprised, a little bit.” He laughs, and has the decency to look sheepish.
What’s interesting is that there is a deep sincerity to everything he does. Comedian, however ridiculous, does feel suspiciously like a thoughtful response to the question of what it is that we really value. Is sincerity important, I ask?
“Absolutely,” he says at once. “People will detect immediately. Maybe they don’t get, or they get wrong with the jest, but sincerity, they get right.”
Absurdity isn’t the only controversy that has attached itself to his work. When he showed his shot metal works in New York, an artist called Anthony James implied that they were derived from works he’d made at least a decade previously. Cattelan nods vigorously when I bring it up. Had he seen James’s works? “No, but also, I’ve seen like at least 15 different artists using stainless steel associated with weapons.” He looked up the work after he heard about what James had said. “He was interested in cosmology. Sometimes you have the same result, different [process]. But you know what? Every show I have an Anthony James.”
He reels off a couple of pieces (including the banana) to which other artists have laid claim over the years. “When you reduce symbols to the, how do you say, when you go to the origin of symbols, obviously they’ve been around for 1,000 years. It would be impossible to not repeat them.”
He doesn’t like being called a joker, I note. “It’s not that I don’t like it,” he begins (he literally said he hated it in an interview last year), “but I think they only see one layer of my work.”
Cattellan is a clever man, but he finds interviews a trial (mercifully the days when he answered in riddles and jokes are over). He grew up in a working-class family in Padua, and struggled at school in a system that didn’t suit him, forging his parents’ signatures on reports and suspension notes to avoid getting into trouble at home.
He eventually finished his studies at night school, and is self-taught, learning on the job in another artist’s studio. He was 28 before he became an artist in earnest, after a bit of backhanded encouragement from the Italian postmodernist Alessandro Mendini.
“I was making my living with homemade furniture, and I went around with pictures of the stuff I was making, and ended up in [his] studio. And it was so kind of him to take half an hour of his time for no one, because then I was no one. And at the end of the meeting, he said, ‘I don’t understand what you’re doing. But that’s only happened twice, and the other person was Germano Celant [doyen of the Arte Povera movement].’ And I thought, ‘OK, I’ll take that.’”
Maurizio Cattelan: Bones is at Gagosian Davies Street, London, to May 24, gagosian.com. Scams and Scandals: The Golden Toilet Heist is on BBC1 at 8pm on Apr 14 and on iPlayer
