In a city like New York, it’s hard to stand out from the crowd. And if you do, you’ve got to have something exceptional to show for it. Such is the case with architecture in the city; such is the case with its art.

The Guggenheim Museum has been around for over half a century. A celebrated institution, the building is an artwork unto itself; aesthetically, it has been subject to a fair amount of controversy. Some say that Frank Lloyd Wright ‘designed his building as an asymmetric nose-thumbing at the rigid order of New York’s streets and architecture’[1]; others believe that he was an architect ahead of his time.

“Mr. Wright’s greatest building, New York’s greatest building.” said Architect Philip Johnson, “one of the greatest rooms of the 20th century.”[2]

Its contested expansion in 1992 (a rectangular annex was added to the museum’s backdrop) provoked further outrage and debate. Woody Allen likened its new scape to a “giant lavatory basin”.[3] And, though the museum sits directly across from Central Park’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, Ms. Onassis was in unison.

I have always loved The Guggenheim Museum. Located on the Upper East Side’s Fifth Avenue, to me it is emblematic of New York’s landscape; an architectural feat that I continue to be in awe of. Whether looking at it from the outside or from the within, it’s a fascinating structure that stands the test of time and continues to inspire. As for its art – the museum’s renowned permanent collection measures up to whatever temporary exhibit may be on show.

If you haven’t ever seen or visited The Guggenheim, picture a cylindrically shaped building resembling a coffee mug; its exterior designed to look like a spring, akin to a perfectly curled orange peel – in white. The art gallery is housed in the building’s walled interior and accessed by a spiral walkway that rounds and rounds its way to the top. (If you’ve seen the movie, The International, featuring Clive Owen and Naomi Watts, you may remember a lengthy action scene that took place in [a replica of] the museum’s interior).

The primary focus is designed to be on the art showcased along the inside of the building’s circumference, though balconies do look over its centre, which is punctuated by a domed skylight high above. Off of the walkway are four levels worth of gallery rooms, exhibiting Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and contemporary art works.

“There is an old saying about the Guggenheim; you come to see Kandinsky or Picasso, but you stay to see Frank Lloyd Wright.”[4]

Recently, I visited The Guggenheim to see the popular, yet equally lauded and criticized exhibit, Maurizio Cattelan: All. Said to be the final show of the artist-going-into-retirement, his retrospective hangs like a bejeweled chandelier of giant proportions in the heart of the museum’s rotunda, illuminated by the skylight immediately above.

Unfamiliar with Maurizio Cattelan’s works until recently, I was intrigued to view the exhibition that has been the subject of a number of mixed reviews.

“Hailed simultaneously as a provocateur, prankster, and tragic poet of our times, Maurizio Cattelan (b.1960, Padua, Italy) has created some of the most unforgettable images in recent contemporary art.”[5]

Known for his rebellious nature, it is fitting that Cattelan’s final artwork/installation be shown at The Guggenheim. Not a stranger to controversy either, this is probably best exemplified in his past reactions over the anxiety of exhibiting his art:

~unable to generate any ideas for his first solo exhibit, Cattelan instead placed a sign on the locked door of the gallery that read: Torno Subito or ”Be Back Soon”. (This plastic sign was branded an artwork in 1989.);

~having caved under the pressure of the Venice Biennale, and consequently with no work to show, he leased his allotted space to an agency who put a billboard in its place. (Branded an artwork too, he titled it: Working is a Bad Job (1993).)

Cattelan has also been known to spread rumours about his artwork for reasons of self-promotion, and has been caught for creative theft.

“His source materials range widely, from popular culture, history, and organized religion to a meditation on the self that is at once humorous and profound… While bold and irreverent, the work is also deadly serious in its scathing critique of authority and the abuse of power.”[6]

All shows the majority of Cattelan’s works (with a couple of exceptions, given owners refused to pass them over), strung by ropes from a circular steel support structure. The overall feel of the exhibit is decidedly morbid; death is one of its stronger underlying themes. Perhaps the installation symbolizes a ‘mass execution’[7] of sorts.

Cattelan’s body of work extends over a 21 year long career; his style – satirical, political, and humorous. One of his earlier and more famous works includes La Nona Ora, a sculpture of Pope John Paul II felled by a meteorite. Translated to “The Ninth Hour” (1999), the title implies the hour when Christ died on the Cross[8]. In 2000, this piece was shown in the Warsaw Zachęta National Gallery and “resulted in a public furor (that) ended in the resignation of Anda Rottenberg, the museum’s director, who refused to remove the work even after protests by members of parliament from a Catholic nationalist party, two of whom … attempted to succor the pope by picking him up from the ground.”[9].

A more recent work, titled ‘L.O.V.E.,’ an acronym in Italian for love, hate, vendetta, eternity, was erected near Milan’s stock market this year (2011). Referred to as ‘the finger’, the 36-foot white sculpture of a hand, with middle finger giving the birdie, was in response to the financial crisis of 2008. Read more here: WSJ.com.

Both these works hang in the installation as smaller interpretations of the originals. “I prefer to be attacked to being ignored.” Maurizio Cattelan

True to his character, even the way Cattelan’s installation has been executed deviates from the norm. Where the museum’s perimeter would be the showcase for artworks; for now, it stands empty. It is stark in its whiteness, devoid of any art, futuristic-looking. In a reversal, the focus is on the museum’s centre.

It wouldn’t too far fetched to think that erecting the installation at the core of the rotunda was Cattelan’s way of paying homage to the artists petitioning against the building, decades ago: in 1956, a group of artists, including Willem de Koonig, submitted a complaint to The Guggenheim’s trustees about the museum’s less than ideal gallery space – the walls were too concave for hanging art; the floor, uneven; the low ceilings would mean spatial issues.

That said, with the focus on The Guggenheim’s centre, museum-goers can comfortably admire Cattelan’s installation from a distance instead of working their way around the potentially cramped quarters of the gallery’s niches.

Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, and curator of Maurizio Cattelan: All, explains the museum’s standpoint:

“Cattelan’s career resists summation by any traditional exhibition format. Many of his early, action-based meditations are impossible to reconstruct, and his singular, iconic objects function best in isolation. (The exhibition) is thus a full-scale admission of the inadvisability of viewing his work within the context of a conventional chronological retrospective. The artist has resisted that model, creating instead a site specific installation that cunningly celebrates its rebelliousness. “

The exhibition is alluring, yet quizzical and erratic in its presentation – there’s disorder, lack of context, and disarray. The works raise questions as to their intent, then… and now. Is this installation Cattelan’s final artwork? Is it in part a subtle social experiment, where museum goers are now on the outside, looking in – life observing death?

“Perversely encapsulating Cattelan’s career to date in an overly literal, three dimensional catalogue raisonné, the installation lampoons the idea of comprehensiveness.” Nancy Spector

I am not surprised that the exhibit has generated mixed reviews. You want to understand this giant body of work, but you can’t help but wonder whether the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Albert Einstein

I came away from The Guggenheim with an appreciation of Cattelan’s perspective and was inspired to learn more about his individual works. Perhaps this was attributed in (large) part to the gallery space being utilized in a completely different way. It was a stroke of genius to use the core of the rotunda to feature All; a new perspective allowed for new eyes. There’s gotta be something said for that.

The Guggenheim provides further details on the exhibition here:

Maurizio Cattelan: All.

To learn more about Cattelan’s individual works, The New Yorker’s, Peter Schjeldahl talks through them in an audio slide show tour:

Slide Show