Maurizio Cattelan

Italian-born artist Maurizio Cattelan is best known for his satirical sculptures, such as La Nona Ora, 1999, an effigy of Pope John Paul II in full ceremonial dress being crushed by a meteor. His work has been shown internationally and he co-curated the Berlin Biennial in 2006, with Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick. His most recent project has been editing new picture magazine, Toilet Paper, with the photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari. In November 2011, a retrospective exhibition of his work will open at the Guggenheim in New York.

How would you connect fashion to elegance?
Once, a long time ago when I was in Italy, I was working as a cleaning person in a laundry, and they found me washing my own laundry at work. They asked me what I was doing and I replied, "Washing my uniform! Where else am I going to wash it?". They fired me. That was the first time I'd been fired. And when one thinks about it, it is easy to say that I got fired because I believed in elegance. You see, it would have been better for me to believe in fashion – I would have worn the same clothes for days because it was fashionable to be grunge. And I wouldn’t have been fired. That’s the tragedy in contemporary life: you wash your clothes because you want to look elegant. You want to look elegant because you want to be good at your work. And then you get fired.

What is the role of history and art history in your conception of fashion?
I don’t really know if I have a 'conception of fashion'. Anyway, I don’t believe in history or art history. I believe in images. I eat them, I swallow them, and then I turn them into other images, that are my works. I guess fashion is just another source of images.

Would you describe fashion as a language and a discourse, as Barthes did it?
When I first arrived in Paris, I attended the lectures of Roland Barthes, and he made a great impression on me. His idea of 'death of the author' is genius. I always think about it when I wake up, or when I look at one of my works in which I have represented myself. I look at it, and I just tell myself: where am I? I have to pinch myself to see that I’m not dead and to understand that Barthes was wrong – at least is, for the moment. I didn’t know he had said that about fashion, he wasn’t really lecturing about that when I followed his class. But as I said, fashion for me is more about images than it is about a discourse. Of course, then there can be a discourse about it. But my job is to produce images, and I think that it is also the job of fashion designers. I wanted to be a fashion designer when I was younger.

The word "intellectual" was coined in a time of great political distress. Does fashion have a political role? And in which way?
I think nobody believes in politics anymore. The only way to make people believe in it is when you shock them with an image: when you see works such as Him or La Nona Ora, I think the accuracy of the attire – the fact that the work is perfectly done, including the clothes – is part of the effect it makes on the viewer. So if such a sense of precision can interact with the viewer, I guess fashion does interact with people and then has a political role. Anyway, I think all artists’ works are political. As far as I am concerned, art is political in the sense that it expresses a man’s point of view: by living in society the artist gives an indication, an interpretation of that same society. In this sense, the work is political, even that means political in inverted commas. And obviously that’s the same thing about fashion, even more so since people don’t only look at it, they also wear it on them.

How would you relate the concept of 'fashion' to the one of 'style'?
What does style mean today, really?

What does fashion have to do with intellectuality ?
As much as an image has to do with intellectuality, an image that covers your often ugly naked body.

It is easy, when one looks at your clothes on the artworks that represent yourself, to see that you dress in great simplicity. Why don’t you want to do something more eccentric for your sculptures ?
Because the eccentricity is not in the costume. It lies in the connection between the strangeness of the situation and the simplicity of the clothes: when you see How To Install a Contemporary Work of Art: Maurizio Cattelan’s Untitled, 2001, it wouldn’t have the same effect if the sculpture were wearing a purple jacket and red shoes. Simplicity in the clothes helps the most, when you want to produce a certain feeling of unease: it creates a sense of comfort, that it is even nicer to destroy.

You often use costumes in your artworks, from Errotin le vrai lapin in 1995, for which you designed a particular attire for your gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin, to the Picasso masks you did for the Guggenheim. Why do you have such a passion for that ?
Well, you could also think of that shoot for W Magazine in which I also toyed with my own image… I thinks costumes are fun. They create nice pictures, and I love nice pictures. As far as Emmanuel Perrotin is concerned, I wanted his look to reflect his deepest personality – and he agreed to play the game. You know, I think we should all dress according to our personality, we should all have  a costume that would express who we are, and certain colours would explain what our temper is. Don’t you think it would make everybody’s life a lot easier ?

Organised around a regular pattern: in this column each interviewee picks the picture that illustrates their interview, answers six questions that are the same for all contributors and then two more that are designed specifically for them. In two weeks Donatien will be interviewing the designer and artist Adam Kimmel.