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La ballata di Trockij (The Ballad of Trotsky) taxidermied horse, leather saddlery, rope, pulley 1061/4 x 783/4 x 291/2in. (270 x 200 x 75cm.) Executed in 1996, this work is unique. LITERATURE 'La Biennale di Venezia. XLVII Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte. General Catalogue', Venice 1997 (illustrated in colour, p. 299). 'Maurizio Cattelan', Bretigny-sur-Orge/Dijon/Paris 1997 (illustrated in colour, unpaged). F. Bonami, N. Spector and B. Vanderlinden (eds.), 'Maurizio Cattelan', London 2000 (illustrated in colour, p. 23). EXHIBITION Milan, Galleria Massimo De Carlo, 'Maurizio Cattelan', Jan. - Feb. 1996. NOTES 'The Ballad of Trotsky' is a powerfully persuasive work about the tragedy of being unable to act or effect change. In this work, Cattelan presents the shock of a startling single image isolated against a large and open empty space. A horse - that perennial symbol of strength and harnessed power - has been harnessed in space in such a way as to have become useless. Suspended in mid-air, its strength, power and individuality are all transformed into a potent image of impotence. As its title suggests, the suspended horse with its mournful self-pitying features represents the tragi-comic predicament of the human condition. It is a monument to failure that presents human existence as a state of being that takes place between the two poles of a romantic idealism of a universal utopia and the paralysing realities of the darker side of human nature. Like the tragic example of the idealist leader of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, the tragedy presented in this work is one of thwarted potential and of having to bear witness to the loss of an ideal or of utopia. Cattelan's use of an animal to convey such a human concept is a typical device in his work and one that he often employs to infuse his art with a certain morbid humour. The comic nature of this tragic human predicament is presented here by the image being made to seem both absurd and ridiculous. Titled as a ballad, the work is, in effect, a lament: a sad song that mourns the failure of an ideal and laments the imperfections of our lives. In these respects 'The Ballad of Trotsky' is a development from an earlier work entitled 'Warning! Enter at your own risk. Do not touch, do not feed, no smoking, no photographs, no dogs, thank you', in which, for his first exhibition in America, Cattelan placed a live donkey in an empty gallery space. In this context, the donkey was a clear representation of the artist's own psychological state. Trapped in a gallery and caught in the garish limelight of an oppressive, opulent and elitist art-world (which Cattelan appropriately signified by hanging a chandelier from the ceiling) the donkey was clearly a personal projection of the way in which the artist saw himself and his new celebrity role as that of as "assinine" art-world entertainer. The conjunction of the donkey and the chandelier emphasised the artist's almost physical sense of discomfort inside the system of the modern art-world and at the same time poked fun at this new and bizarre marriage between a Paduan street urchin and the glittering decadence of New York's rich and glamorous elite. Containing echoes of Joseph Beuys and the coyote from the 1974 action 'I like America and it likes me', Cattelan's forced encounter between the donkey and the chandelier stresses the inappropriateness of such a meeting while also generating a sense of the gallery space as a confining and imprisoning space, that actually limits the creativity of the artist. This imprisoning aspect of the work is actively extended in 'The Ballad of Trotsky', where an equine creature is physically restrained to the point of immobility within the vast interior space. Like many of Cattelan's works involving animals, there is undoubtedly an element of self-portraiture involved. His use of a donkey for his first American show was prompted by a childhood identification with the creature, and his suicidal squirrel or ostrich with its head buried in the sand are other examples of animalistic personal substitutes. In this context, the suspended horse in 'The Ballad of Trotsky' can also be seen as a metaphor for the artist's sense of his artistic role - straight-jacketed, and tied to the gallery that has hoisted the poor creature onto centre-stage for all to see. Often unsure of what to create for the numerous shows he was being asked to make artworks/objects for, Cattelan resorted in many of his works to create art that reflected the difficulty of his position. Commenting on this predicament, he has observed that "my early work... was really about the impossibility of doing something. This is a threat which still gives shape to many of my actions and works. I guess it was really about my insecurity, about failure..., I transformed something like failure into a work of art."(In: F. Bonami, N. Spector and b. Vanderlinden (eds.), 'Maurizio Cattelan', London 2000, p. 30). His finest works, Cattelan admits, are those in which the ideas of his fertile imagination are distilled into a single memorable image that, once it has struck the viewer is unforgettable. "It's something that hits my imagination and then the day after it's still in my imagination. It is keeping the imagination hooked." This image he refines until, "In the end I can't reduce this image or forget it. So I start working. I begin by thinking of all the possibilities and then I try to clean the idea. I try to find a synthesis of the idea. This is the most difficult thing. It happens though, a few times at least, every ten years or so... I like it when the work becomes an image." (ibid, p. 22). In the same way that 'The Ballad of Trotsky' can be seen as a refinement of 'Warning! Enter at your own risk...,' this work was itself continued by Cattelan in 1997 in the work titled 'Novocento'. Essentially the same work, Cattelan here exaggerated the length of the horse's legs in order to emphasis the sense of the pull of gravity and the notion of the horse being caught between two worlds. Given the new title, which derived from the Bertolucci movie of the same name and was used by Cattelan to suggest a sense of millenial angst, the suspended horse in this work represented the problematic transition from one century's concepts and realities to that of a new one full of new ideals, hope and optimism for the future. In both works, a sense of what Cattelan has described as "frozen energy" is conveyed, which speaks eloquently of the existential plight of human beings at the turn of the third millenium. Despite the joviality of Cattelan's playful stance as artworld "bad-boy" and the evident warmth of his sense of humour, behind these lurks a disillusioned realist who understands that "Animals are not so funny. I think they have a dark morbid side." (ibid, p. 24).
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