Images in the PiazzaThe Destruction of a Work by Maurizio Cattelan (Milan, May 2004)
Vandalism constitutes a continuous phenomenon throughout history. It can be described as an interaction between people and their material environment. Because of its nature it captures the interest of material culture’s scholar. In this paper, several sociopolitical and aesthetic aspects of the phenomenon are examined by the conservator’s point of view. The sociopolitical background of the act, the role of established and dominant social values and the role of the single person or of a minority are among them. It is argued that these sociopolitical dimensions of the topic that initially might seem irrelevant with conservation practice constitute the actual foundation upon which conservation of cultural heritage is based. The conscious conservator has to be aware of this complicated web of contradicted values and significances when standing in front of a vandalized object. Thus, the conservation decision making turns out to be a rather human-centric rather than an object-oriented approach.
Vandalism, Milan, Maurizio Cattelan, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi
Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2004. Group of three sculptures; fiberglass, fabric, variable dimensions. Installation view: Piazza Ventiquattro Maggio, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi.
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The one thing to say about art and life is that art is art and life is life.
—Ad Reinhart, 1962
In May 2004, a case of iconoclasm occurred in Milan that mobilized the city and the local and national press for several days and had significant reverberations in foreign newspapers. On the evening of May 6, a man armed with a ladder and shears cut the cords by which three life-size hyper-realistic figures of children had been hung from the oldest tree in Milan, the oak in Piazza Ventiquattro Maggio. Untitled, an installation by the famous artist Maurizio Cattelan commissioned by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, had been unveiled just the day before and was to remain on display in the piazza for a month.1 The destruction of Untitled became immediately a political affair that revealed conflicting ideas about the city and its public spaces. The event brought to the surface anxieties about Milan’s reputation as a cultural magnet, as well as incompatible ideas about contemporary art in the public arena. The press transformed the event into a miniaturized and grotesque representation of Italian politics and relegated it within the domain of the entertainment industry. While it was an eminently site specific event, embedded within the Italian loud, self-deprecating, and anxious public discourse, in this article, I argue that the destruction of Maurizio Cattelan’s installation pertains to the wider context of recent destructions of works of art in public spaces and most importantly, that it cannot be understood unless we link it to the historical tradition and meaning of public images. [End Page 79]
Maurizio Cattelan’s project was commissioned by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, a nonprofit institution founded in 1996 that since 2003 has supported interventions by major international artists in non-museum spaces scattered around Milan. A close engagement with the city and its forgotten or abandoned spaces is the mission of the Fondazione. Its projects have been at once innovative and popular, and well received by both the citizenship and the art world.2 In this regard, Untitled was an exception, yet the debate it stirred and its destruction raised fundamental issues about the status of art and images in general in the public domain. Piazza Ventiquattro Maggio, where the work was installed, is one the city’s most symbolic squares: the figures were hung from the oldest tree in Milan, a huge oak that was placed there in 1924 in memory of those who had fallen in World War I. Near the tree, a neoclassical arch celebrates Napoleon’s victorious entrance in the city in 1796. The date marked the beginning of a significant period in Milan’s history when the city was first the capital of the Cisalpine Republic and then of the Kingdom of Italy.3 Untitled consisted of three life-size figures of children hanging from the branches of the oak. Realized in fiberglass and wax, they were quite realistic when viewed from a distance. They were not hung as if lynched, even through the cords were around their necks, but were suspended and looked down from above on passersby, turning slowly. They were barefoot and, as many noticed, their feet were dirtied with earth (Fig. 1).
In an interview published the following day in La Repubblica, the Italian newspaper with the largest circulation, Cattelan explained that the “children [are] alive [and] they look down from above, almost like three judges or prophets”; “[the] bodies seem to levitate, or detach themselves from the ground, more than hang,” but at the same time “they represent the way in which we are treating our dreams” and are a “signal regarding childhood and violence.”4 Beatrice Trussardi declared that the mission of the foundation that she led was to “restitute to the citizens specific sites of the city by emphasizing them.” The Mayor feared traffic problems but was satisfied by this “fine example of anti-conformist culture which will create much debate.”5 The daily Corriere della Sera, the historic and authoritative voice of the city, also expressed satisfaction because the debate the work was arousing among art experts and common people brought Milan back to the glorious times of artistic avant-gardes like the years of Futurismo or the 1950s and 1960s, when Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni transformed the art of painting.6 Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Milan had been a focal point for Italian artistic and cultural innovation, but by the early 2000s, the city had stopped playing this pivotal role. Frustration with the current approach to cultural management, and nostalgia for a time when the city was able to absorb and metabolize any cultural provocation with Milanese style and elegance, was one of the various side effects triggered by Cattelan’s installation. Yet, according to La Repubblica, which covered the unveiling of Untitled on the front page, despite the debates in the shade of the oak tree, people were indifferent and Cattelan’s installation was not sufficiently provocative because according to the author of the editorial, “not only fiction, but even Art can no longer surpass the horror of reality.”7 That day, splashed across the very same front page was Private Lynndie England with the Iraqi prisoner on a leash at Abu Grahib prison in Baghdad (Fig. 2). [End Page 80]
Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2004. Group of three sculptures; fiberglass, fabric, variable dimensions. Installation view: Piazza Ventiquattro Maggio, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi.
As a matter of fact, indignant reactions to the installation were instantaneous and immediately politicized: the city government’s conservative majority was united against the mayor (although he, too, was conservative). It declared that the installation was a scandal that would potentially provoke uncontrollable reactions, and that it had to be immediately removed.8 The leader of the secessionist party Lega, which was also part of the majority, declared that unless Untitled was taken away from public view, Lega’s militants would take care of it, armed with “ladders and shears, cutting the nooses and being careful not to ruin the great artist’s extremely precious work.”9
The day after the inauguration, at nine in the evening, Franco di Benedetto, a forty-three-year-old man immediately nicknamed in the press the Tarzan of the Ticinese (the neighborhood surrounding piazza Ventiquattro Maggio), approached the tree with a ladder, asked some kids to distract the security guards and, climbing up, cut two of the cords [End Page 81] before falling onto the railing of the flower bed below. He was apparently drunk and he did not injure himself. The prosecutor’s office automatically put De Benedetto under investigation for damaging a work of art. The next day he acknowledged his act, stating that he had only fulfilled a widespread desire. His motivation was that those mannequins “seemed real” and that his intention was “only to remove an ugly image from the sight of vulnerable people.”10 Although prepared to pay a fine or go to jail, he maintained that he was not a vandal.11 The right-wing nationalist and the secessionist parties, strange bedfellows in this matter, stood behind De Benedetto and undertook a collection of funds for the man they considered a champion of the city’s honor.12
On May 7, two days after the inauguration, the city administration decided to remove the third mannequin as well, for reasons related to public order. The Fondazione Trussardi announced that it would not charge De Benedetto but would interrupt the exhibition, which consisted exclusively of the installation in piazza Ventiquattro Maggio, declining to display the work in an enclosed space. Curators, gallerists, and art critics wrote to the press, asking that the work continue to be shown and that freedom of artistic expression by safeguarded.13 The mayor defined his co-citizens as “thickheaded” and became the target of attacks from all sides.14 The next day, a few Lega members declared that Cattelan’s work was “not art, [but] media terrorism,” and hung three inflatable dolls purchased in a sex shop from a tree close to City Hall.15 One member of the nationalistic party declared that: “The Mayor is legally responsible for the injured man and for the children who’ll need psychotherapy. The artist should receive compulsory psychiatric treatment and a commission should examine the Major’s and the Culture Commissioner’s good taste.”16
On May 10, at the city council meeting, the majority united against the mayor demanded the revision of the procedures that regulated the city’s official approval to art exhibitions and cultural events. Paradoxically a large section of the opposition agreed with the majority, their argument being that mediation with the citizenry and educational programs were indispensable when a work of art was placed in a public space. The opposition also raised the issue that an installation like Untitled could be perceived as too close to the images of war and torture that were a daily sight on televisions across the world in the spring of 2004. As in a comedy of errors, the members of the Communist Party ended up supporting both Cattelan—in defense of the artist’s freedom of expression—and the mayor who belonged to Berlusconi’s party, because he had restrained from exerting censorship.17
As it emerges from this political debate, Untitled brought to the surface a diffused perception of fear and danger. It also let explode anxieties about Milan’s reputation as a cultural magnet, and opposed perspectives concerning the city’s cultural policy and what kind of censorship the administration should exert. The extraordinary lack of preparation and passivity of the city administration was one of the main factors, if not the most relevant, that brought about the destruction of Untitled.
In an interview given in 2002, Maurizio Cattelan said about his work: “If I could situate my work anywhere, I would place it somewhere between softness and perversity. [End Page 82]
Maurizio Cattelan, Andreas and Mattias, 1996. Plastic, clothing, shoes. Environmental dimensions.
It should be tender, comforting and seductive, and yet corrupted, twisted and consumed.”18 The idea of childhood is crucial in Cattelan’s work, serving both as a fiction and as a metaphor for existential defeats and resistance. Throughout his career Cattelan has created hyper-realist looking figures, and in various instances people felt compelled to “save” or attack them, as if they were mistaking them for living creatures. Andreas e Mattia (1996) and Kenneth (1998) were lifelike mannequins of homeless men left as if slumping near the GAM in Turin (Galleria Municipale di Arte Moderna) and on street corners of a campus in Milwaukee. They were largely ignored by passersby because they were perceived as “real” homeless people (Fig. 3). Like the children hanging from the oak, the homeless men were types, “basic images” in Cattelan’s words, yet they aroused the opposite reaction: indifference.19 Also iconic and lifelike was La Nona Ora (Ninth Hour) (1999), the life-size wax mannequin of Pope John Paul II fallen under a meteorite which, at least in London, [End Page 83] had also shattered the skylight of the room in which it was shown at the Royal Academy in 2000 (Fig. 4). When the work was shown at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw the same year, three indignant gentlemen tried to save the pope by removing the meteorite (Fig. 5). The Nona Ora was already a form of iconoclasm with regard to the image of the pontiff, which had in turn triggered a further iconoclasm with regard to the image created by the artist.20
Maurizio Cattelan, La Nona Ora, 1999. Polyester resin, painted wax, human hair, fabric, clothing, accessories, stone, and carpet. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Royal Academy of Arts, London, Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art, 2000.
Unlike Andreas e Mattia, the three children in piazza Ventiquattro Maggio were unnamed. The visual sources for the work are difficult to individuate: Goya engravings and “ancient folk rites” were mentioned with no further identification. The City Commissioner for Cultural Affairs declared that the request for the permit to place the installation on public land stated that the work was inspired by the story of Pinocchio.21 The iconography [End Page 84] of angelic figures seems the most pertinent reference: contemporary angels contemplating the city and its dwellers from above. But the only journalist who alluded to Catholic iconography was Roberta Smith of the New York Times, suggesting a curious sociological interpretation of the piece: “The three figures form a sort of crucifix, divided along typical Italian class lines: the slightly higher central figure is blond, like an aristocratic northerner; his companions, the ‘thieves’ are dark, from the heel of Italy’s booth. The work also implies an ascension or a last judgment.”22 Roberta Smith also provided much more relevant information: Cattelan had already proposed the installation for the Whitney Museum Biennial, but the institution rejected the proposal in that form. Since its early stages, it was apparent that the piece was potentially explosive.
Maurizio Cattelan, La Nona Ora, 1999. Polyester resin, painted wax, human hair, fabric, clothing, accessories, stone, and carpet. Dimensions variable. Installation view: Zacheta National Galler y of Art, Warsaw.
Angels are among the most pervasive elements of both Catholic iconography and Italian visual culture, and according to Cattelan’s description, the work was rooted in [End Page 85] ancestral literary and visual folk tradition. But this obvious reference, particularly to Italian viewers, went entirely unnoticed. Probably, the “angelic” nature of the figures juxtaposed with the evident commentary on the negligence of our times with regard to childhood constituted and irresolvable contradiction blocking viewers’ comprehension, if not appreciation, of the work. There was something unfinished and unresolved about the installation that surely contributed to its destruction. Interviewed the day after the removal, Cattelan suggested that the piece was a point of departure for inventing and telling stories to children who saw it.23 On the Web many comments emphasized that one of the issues Untitled brought up was precisely the incapacity of adults to tell stories, to mediate between images and reality and interpret them for their children. Who knows if anyone suggested inventing a story for his daughter to Alvaro, a father interviewed in the square who wanted to “press charges because his four-year-old daughter had cried incessantly and once back at home continued to repeat ‘why are they doing that to those dolls?’”24
However upset she may have been, Alvaro’s child had not mistaken the three figures for real children, and in fact, in spite of the paranoia of politicians and parents it was quite difficult for anyone to take the three mannequins for real youngsters. The saving impulse of the Polish gentlemen with regard to the Nona Ora, like that of De Benedetto, was not triggered by any confusion between image and reality, but precisely by the fact that in their opinion one cannot bombard the icon of the pope with a meteorite or hang the icon of childhood from a tree in a city square. Iconoclasts make war on images, not on reality.
Verisimilitude is a crucial visual device in Cattelan’s work. Its power and effectiveness is based not on the illusion of real life, but on the so-called substitutive nature of the image: the lifelike image does not reflect reality, but constitutes another, different one that is for some people more vivid.25 In Western tradition and especially in northern Italy, lifelike images historically had a precise function: to channel attention and activate emotional involvement. The Sacro Monte of Varallo in the Piedmont region is one of the highest examples of the genre (Fig. 6). The sanctuary is composed of a sequence of chapels containing scenes that reproduce places and moments from the life of Christ, realized between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries with hundreds of life-size sculpted and painted figures against illusionistic painted backgrounds. In Varallo the visitor is engaged “in a directly empathetic relationship with the scene,” and proceeds from one chapel to another according to a deliberately orchestrated visual and emotional crescendo. But an elaborate grille separates him from the scenes he is looking at (Fig. 7).26
The destruction of Untitled suggests that even today, verisimilitude can arouse unexpected reactions for reasons that have deep roots in our visual cultural. If we combine our ancestral visual memory with the uncanny feeling caused by the apparition of an icon of childhood in an unsettling context, a violent reaction seems a likely result.
And yet, iconoclasm, especially toward works displayed in public places, has never been a spontaneous or individual act, but has always reflected a climate, interpreted a political idea, however confused or hysterical, about what can or cannot be seen in a public space.27 In particular, De Benedetto’s action, like similar actions taken against works in [End Page 86] public spaces, cannot be traced back to forms of paranoia or pathologies shared by most of those iconoclasts who attack works preserved in museums.28 Anyone who destroys art in public spaces does so for political reasons, because he feels invaded in his own home, or because, like De Benedetto, he proclaims himself as the interpreter of a widespread desire and the avenger of his own community.
But in Milan, unlike in other cases, the reaction was immediate. Elsewhere, the iconoclastic plan needed some time to clarify itself: in Bienne, Switzerland, during a temporary exhibition in 1980, despite mediation with the residents and notable educational efforts, 44 out of 107 works of art displayed in various spots in the city were vandalized or completely destroyed over the course of a few weeks. The same thing occurred on the occasion of the exhibition Sculpture Boulevard, organized in Berlin along Kufusterdamm in 1987–88 to celebrate the seven-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the city’s foundation. As in Milan, the acts of destruction were accompanied in Berlin by the mobilization of many inhabitants and widespread media exploitation of the situation.29 Perhaps the most glaring recent case of iconoclasm was the destruction of Hans Haacke’s Und ihr habt doch gesiegt, in Graz, in 1988. Within the frame of an exhibition commemorating German’s annexation of Austria in 1938 and Stiria’s enthusiastic participation in Nazi politics, Haacke chose to cover an eighteenth-century column on the city’s main street, as the Nazis had done in 1938. A month later neo-Nazis burned the column, seriously damaging the monument.30 In the case of lawful demolitions of public artworks ordered by the court, like that of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc destroyed in New York in 1989 or Rachel Whiterhead’s House (Fig. 8) destroyed in London in 1993, the process obviously took longer, but in all the examples mentioned, it was necessary to metabolize the work before destroying it.31 This was not the case in Milan.
As we have seen from the politicians’ hysterical reactions, the city administration was caught completely off guard by the operation and demonstrated its manifest incompetence with regard to the cultural management of public space. The press, whatever its political orientation, gave enormous importance to the rows at City Hall, presenting the affair as a miniaturized and grotesque version of national politics. And yet the journalistic coverage of the destruction of Untitled brings to the fore another central issue that comes into play in any discussion over art in public spaces: the role of the audience, or more precisely, of the so-called captive audience. Newspapers gave ample space to those who defended the rights of the “community that lives outside the galleries and has different sentiments which it expresses, lacking the artistic intelligence to admire and contemplate the three innocents at the gallows,” as one member of the City Council put it.32 In other recent cases of iconoclasm, both illegal and legal, such as the Bienne exposition, Serra’s Tilted Arc and Whiteread’s House, the protection of the captive audience was the iconoclasts’ strongest argument. In reality, the captive audience has a formidable weapon: it can obliterate not only the aesthetic value of an installation but also its same status as a work of art.33
One of the most often recurring arguments in defense of the captive audience is the invocation of a universal, “beautiful” art, “an art that even kids like,” as Stefano Zecchi, then professor of esthetics and president of the Academy of Brera, declared.34 On the other [End Page 87] hand, arguments in favor of the need to contextualize the work, educational programs and mediations with the citizens prioritize the work of art over its audience, their point being that the audience can be “educated” to even appreciate the work in the best of possible scenarios or ignore it in the worst. The issue of contextualization and mediation was a recurrent theme in the articles and forums on the Web, whereas it was hardly discussed in the press.
Sacro Monte di Varallo, Chapel 33: Ecce Homo, 1609–10. Statues by Giovanni d’Enrico (polychrome terracotta); frescoes by Il Morazzone.
As we have seen, fear and danger were the central themes of the debate: the majority of those who were quoted in the press, politicians and “experts” alike, judged the work highly dangerous and thus to be displayed only in protected locations, risky for children who would be frightened by it and for the more “impressionable” people who might be incited to emulate it.35 The desire to defend children was De Benedetto’s motivation, but few in the press suggested that the paranoia and hysteria aroused by the matter were excessive.36 Like the discussion over the power of verisimilitude, the theory that images can be dangerous has a long history in Western tradition. From its Renaissance beginnings, the pedagogical theory of images has been based on the supposed imitative reactions of women and children in the face of more or less edifying images. During the Protestant Reformation, it inspired widespread iconoclastic campaigns against religious [End Page 88] images considered dangerous for “weak minds” and vulnerable people.37 The destruction of Cattelan’s work shows that for centuries the notions that have informed the theory of the power of images have remained largely unchanged, notwithstanding the radical transformation of our visual and cultural landscape.
Sacro Monte di Varallo, grilles protecting the chapels 34 and 35.
Untitled resonated with the long-term history and meaning of public images in yet another aspect. The hanging man, alive or dead, is the image of infamy par excellence. Some elderly people interviewed in piazza Ventiquattro Maggio alluded to their either direct or indirect memory of Piazzale Loreto, another famous square in Milan, where on April 29, 1945, the already-dead Benito Mussolini and his acolytes were publicly hung for the world to see. The images of Piazzale Loreto are a cornerstone in Italian history and collective memory. Yet, in the case of Untitled, the comparison with late Medieval images of infamy is more pertinent, precisely because it is impossible to confuse a hung mannequin with a hung human being. Furthermore, then as now, public images of hung people could taint the reputation of a city. From the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, in northern and central Italy, realistic paintings in public places of people who had committed crimes, enhanced with captions, were extremely common and met complex legal criteria. At the end of the fourteenth century in Milan, public images of infamy were prohibited and removed because they were so numerous that they damaged the city’s reputation, since they literally covered its walls with images of delinquents.38 In May 2004, there was [End Page 89] no need to look in history books for images of infamy: one just needed to open the newspapers or turn on the television to see the snapshots of tortured Iraqi people taken by their tormentors, the American soldiers serving in the prison of Abu Grahib in Bagdad. Did the hyper-realist figures of children hung from the oak tree bring to the surface an ancestral image—the icon of infamy—or did they trigger an unconscious furious reaction addressed to other and much more disgraceful images that pervaded the visual landscape in those very same days? Images that, since they were “real,” were unassailable.
Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993. Concrete. Commissioned and produced by Artangel.
The tortures committed in Iraq, aside from sporadic references, did not enter into the comparative field constructed by the press around Cattelan’s work: the national television industry provided the only conceivable context for any reflection on images. The most recurrent comparison was to the recent appearance of a serial killer on public television. The multiple murderer condemned to thirteen life sentences for seventeen homicides had been a guest on the most popular Sunday afternoon show, where he confessed his crimes live in front of millions of viewers, who did not change the channel. The scandal was obvious, and Maurizio Cattelan was compared to the host of the program, a television star in Italy. For a critic writing in the left-wing Manifesto newspaper, both were cynics and vulgar manipulators of the emotions of simple “children of and fervent believers in the new cultural anthropology created and fed by global neoliberalism.”39 The critic from a more conservative newspaper compared the destruction of Untitled, which aroused neither displeasure nor indignation in him, with a man’s suicide attempt on live television during a [End Page 90] famous pop music festival.40 Both critics agreed that Cattelan’s installation was not “truly” provocative like the artistic experimentations of the 1970s had been. As for the politicians, the outrage of some intellectuals was not triggered by the vandalism, but by the fact that Cattelan had invaded a public space and subverted an idea. In this case it was not the icon of childhood, but the parameters of artistic “provocation” as they had been defined by late modernist canon. In the press Untitled lost its status as a work of art to become a “device” conceived to trigger a public reaction and whose effectiveness was measured with respect to the hysteria and the violence of the reaction.
For other commentators Cattelan’s installation had the merit to make evident the city’s cultural decline: for the Corriere della Sera, for example, the lack of irony demonstrated by citizens’ hysterical reaction was a clear sign of decline. Those who promoted the idea that cultural production could be an engine for urban development called for a “cultural training” project for the city, which, it was suggested, might contribute to making Milan a more welcoming place for a creative community that otherwise may have emigrated.41 In this perspective, the iconoclastic action aroused indignation because it jeopardized the city’s cultural status; the same reaction had occurred in Germany, Austria, Great Britain, Switzerland, and the United States in analogous cases. Interestingly, none of these comments made reference to a famous case of iconoclast fury that had occurred in Milan a few decades earlier: in 1968, within the frame of students’ rebellions and cultural revolution, a group of young architects and artists had literally destroyed a large architecture exhibition on view at the Triennale, an important and by no means conservative local cultural institution. Giancarlo de Carlo, one of the most respected and innovative Italian architects of the period, had curated the exhibition.42
University professors or so-called public intellectuals, rather than professionals from the art world, were the authors of the few more thoughtful comments on the event. All of them nostalgically evoked a homogenous audience capable of absorbing and judging contemporary cultural production. They mourned the disappearance of what Jurghen Habermas defined as the “bourgeois public sphere”: a social entity composed of people who share a codified culture that grounds its own legitimacy on the potential inclusion of any citizen based on the possibility of learning and absorbing said cultural codes. As W. J. T. Mitchell had already noted in an essay from the early 1990s, appropriately entitled “The Violence of Public Art,” this public sphere no longer exists, neither in Italy nor elsewhere.43 In hearings relating to the destruction of Tilted Arc, Benjamin Buchloh underlined how “the proper functioning of institution of bourgeois democratic societies” depended on faith in expertise, in the field of art and culture as well. According to Buchloh, the denial of the status of work of art for Tilted Arc had led to the nullification of expertise itself and the saga of Serra’s project represented one of the many ends of modernism.44 In the case of Untitled, the experts, whether contemporary art professionals, art historians, or psychiatrists, were rarely interviewed and were never asked to interpret what had happened. The matter was treated as a disfunctional episode of local politics, a minor event in the myriad of events produced by the entertainment industry, and as such, it was buried quickly and without the honor of a funerary oration. [End Page 91]
And yet, one needed only turn on the computer to find a variety of public spheres, by no means homogeneous but nonetheless rather bourgeois, by their own inhabitants’ admission. In May 2004, one could find on the Web what had disappeared from the traditional press: articles that considered Cattelan’s installation a work of art, mentioned its visual sources, brought into consideration the role of the Fondazione Trussardi, and analyzed the hysterical reactions it had provoked. These thoughtful comments appeared not only in specialized Web magazines or discussion groups but also on mainstream sites. References to the images from Abu Grahib and the Iraq war as something that was transforming the visual landscape and the threshold of horror were frequent, even if those images were never directly compared to Cattelan’s installation. Even the comments that appeared in a few religious websites shared the understanding that Untitled was a metaphorical image inspired by a wide variety of suggestions and sources and had nothing to do with mass media.45 Finally, it was only on the Web that one could find judgments on the potential aesthetic value of the installation, and thus the recognition of its status as a work of art. In one blog in particular, Untitled triggered a more general discussion on the diffusion of culture in society that quickly became a debate about realism, that is, the possibility for contemporary art to take a position on social and political issues while being accessible also to viewers who did not master the cultural codes to interpret it.46 Participants in the discussion were not art experts nor necessarily belonged to the audience of contemporary art, and obviously had very different opinions about the work itself.
The destruction of Untitled was the result of the explosion of two negative collective representations: a feeling of fear and a sense of cultural decadence. The cacophony of responses to the installation and its destruction demonstrates that collective ideas are alive and powerful and, as was always the case, often irreconcilable. The novelty is not the conflict but the disappearance of shared patterns of mediations. Until a few decades ago, two main channels provided this mediation: on the one hand, a coherent approach to public cultural policy, often wrong and rightly challenged, but that nevertheless expressed some logic; on the other hand, the press’ role in negotiating the understanding of challenging cultural production through the combination of various experts’ opinions that the public more or less trusted. The frequent invocations of an art that is universally liked and “democratic” as a solution for this conflict completely miss the mark because they do not take into account either art or the tensions that have always existed in any public space. Untitled brought to the surface the projections and contradictions of a heterogeneous and fragmented public realm; the dynamics of its destructions clearly showed that beyond the politics of recent iconoclasm, the long-term history of public images is crucial for interpreting these conflicts.
Dr. Flaminia Gennari-Santori is currently Consulting Curator of Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami and Professor of History of Collecting and Display in the Graduate Program in Renaissance Art, Syracuse University Florence. From 2008 to 2013, she was Deputy Director for Collections and Curatorial Affairs at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens. Previously she was a Research Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Program Officer at the Fondazione Adriano Olivetti, Rome. An expert on museums’ history and American collecting of European art, she is a past Fulbright Scholar and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Art History from Università La Sapienza (Rome) and a Ph.D. in History from the European University Institute (Florence). She is the author of The Melancholy of Masterpieces: Old Master Paintings in America, 1900–1914 (5continents, Milan, 2004), and Corviale, pratiche ed estetiche per la città contemporanea (Bruno Mondadori, Milan, 2006). She has published extensively on collecting, museum studies, and public art in European and American journals and books, most recently on the collection of John Pierpont Morgan (Journal of the History of Collections 22 [2010]: 81–98 and 307–24). She is currently working on the first scholarly analysis of the decoration and collection of Vizcaya Museum and Gardens.
