You Don't Make a Masterpiece, You Survive One - Maurizio Cattelan

On the occasion of Seasons, Maurizio Cattelan’s exhibition at GAMeC, art historian Lisa Parola, investigates how contemporary art can redefine the idea of the monument: no longer an immobile place of celebration, but a critical space of removal and transformation, promoting new relationships with both history and the present. Parola reflects on the changing concept of the monument and how cultural institutions choose to deal with layered and sometimes contradictory symbols. Lorenzo Giusti, curator of the exhibition, accompanies the essay with an insight on the works presented in order to show how, in Cattelan’s work, symbols stratify, shift, and contradict each other. How the imperial eagle becomes a vulnerable body; how the nineteenth-century statue dedicated to Garibaldi is turned into a pedestal for something else. Who? A grandson on his grandfather’s shoulders? A new Garibaldian? Or a little vandal mocking ancient values? By so doing, he notes how between history and nature, cracks, fractures, and new possibilities may be opened up.