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Lot Essay
The present work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Galleria Paolo Vitolo.
Created in 1990 shortly after the artist moved to Milan, Strategie (Strategies) is the first of Cattelan's artworks to deal directly with the mechanics of the art world. During this early phase in his artistic career, Cattelan was almost a complete outsider to the contemporary art scene in Italy and had adopted the self-defined role of a trickster who, Coyote-like, worked on the peripheries of the contemporary art world. Refusing any close involvement with galleries, museums or publicists, Cattelan played to his own selected audience, poking fun at the fragile internal structures of the contemporary art world and questioning its relevance to society as a whole.
Strategie is one of the first of his works to deliberately mock the structures of the art world while also directly referring to Cattelan's own position of being an outsider looking in. Presenting a pyramid structure made entirely from past issues of Flash Art - the Milan-based magazine that is the unrivalled voice of Contemporary Italian art and the only art magazine Cattelan allowed himself to read at this time - Cattelan presents a construction that satirizes the contemporary art world, showing it to be an elitist and one-sided towering house of cards. The sculpture was made and photographed to form the cover of a pirate issue of Flash Art (see illustration) which Cattelan made and had published as a spoof edition. The edition of this magazine which the artist also entitled Strategie was a deliberately subversive act by the artist, aimed at exposing and perhaps even undermining the kind of marketing strategies that had come to play such a dominant role in all fields of society in the 1980s, and which in this context had come to form a cornerstone of the Italian contemporary art world.
Created in 1990 shortly after the artist moved to Milan, Strategie (Strategies) is the first of Cattelan's artworks to deal directly with the mechanics of the art world. During this early phase in his artistic career, Cattelan was almost a complete outsider to the contemporary art scene in Italy and had adopted the self-defined role of a trickster who, Coyote-like, worked on the peripheries of the contemporary art world. Refusing any close involvement with galleries, museums or publicists, Cattelan played to his own selected audience, poking fun at the fragile internal structures of the contemporary art world and questioning its relevance to society as a whole.
Strategie is one of the first of his works to deliberately mock the structures of the art world while also directly referring to Cattelan's own position of being an outsider looking in. Presenting a pyramid structure made entirely from past issues of Flash Art - the Milan-based magazine that is the unrivalled voice of Contemporary Italian art and the only art magazine Cattelan allowed himself to read at this time - Cattelan presents a construction that satirizes the contemporary art world, showing it to be an elitist and one-sided towering house of cards. The sculpture was made and photographed to form the cover of a pirate issue of Flash Art (see illustration) which Cattelan made and had published as a spoof edition. The edition of this magazine which the artist also entitled Strategie was a deliberately subversive act by the artist, aimed at exposing and perhaps even undermining the kind of marketing strategies that had come to play such a dominant role in all fields of society in the 1980s, and which in this context had come to form a cornerstone of the Italian contemporary art world.