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Dimensions: 152 by 62 by 63cm.
59 7/8 by 24 3/8 by 24 7/8 in.
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Provenance: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION
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Exhibited: Bergamo, Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Accademia Carrara, Ottovolante, 1992
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Literature: Francesco Bonami et al., Maurizio Cattelan, London 2000, detail illustrated on the back cover and catalogued incorrectly
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Notes: This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.
"This work, while violent and crude on one level, reveals a sophisticated formalism, and is a cryptic quotation from Italian art history. The gash on the... safe recalls the artist Lucio Fontana's gesture of stabbing his clay spheres just before they were cast in bronze, thus rendering them monuments to the power of human action." (Francesco Bonami, et al., Maurizio Cattelan, London 2000, p. 73)
-76,000,000, from 1992, wittily exposes the idea of the 'Readymade' work of art as originated by Marcel Duchamp in 1915 and since developed by many of the 20th century's most important artists. From this fundamental basis of the idea of an actual object which has been removed from its everyday function and exhibited as an artwork in order to highlight a different aspect of its aesthetic or symbolic power, artists have adopted the 'Readymade' to create movements such as Pop Art, Arte Povera and Appropriation Art. The Pop artists borrowed consumer culture en masse and turned it into high art, the Arte Povera artists highlighted the naked beauty of re-presented nature, the Appropriation artists borrowed other artists' works and presented them as their own, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have borrowed objects and re-made and re-presented them to adapt to their own complex Conceptual ethos.
By re-presenting a safe which has been broken into as a sculptural work of art, Cattelan has taken these ideas one stage further by cleverly highlighting the criminal nature of this activity as outright theft. -76.000.000 is a real broken safe from which 76 million lire was stolen. In the broken safe, he has ingeniously discovered a metaphor for the bankruptcy of ideas in post-modern communication, or what Roland Barthes termed "The Death of the Author". As an artist burdened with the rich history which comes before him, Cattelan is constantly needing to break into the historical locker for inspiration.
His highly conceptual and now iconic Untitled (1992) was another venture on the idea of theft. Unable to produce the necessary work for an exhibition due to open the following day, Cattelan went to the nearest police station and reported the theft of a non-existent work of art. When the report had been diligently typed up by a policeman Cattelan promptly framed the report and placed it in the gallery thus reflecting on one of the worst vices of Italian society: bureaucracy.
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