Vertigo at the Guggenheim

A few days ago I stopped into Maurizio Cattelan’s … er, retrospective … at the Guggenheim. Roberta Smith described the effect of the exhibition, in which all of the artist’s works are strung up in the rotunda of the museum, as “initially startling, but ultimately disrespectful and perverse.” With Smith’s review in mind, and having already seen numerous images of the exhibition, I wasn’t particularly startled. I also wasn’t offended by this most unconventional career retrospective (Cattelan has said that this exhibition marks his retirement, a pronouncement which nobody seems to be taking seriously). More than anything, I was scared—not of the taxidermied animals, nor of the creepy wax effigies—but of the vertigo which this exhibition, more than any other I’ve seen at the Guggenheim, threatens with every turn.

When you first step onto the rotunda floor and look up, as you always must at the Guggenheim, you see the works dangling above you in several tiers. This is somewhat threatening, especially when you consider the heft of certain of Cattelan’s better-known works, like All (2007), a group of life-size marble sculptures which read as shrouded corpses. The current exhibition shares its name with this work, and as the wall text notes, the exhibition's installation, which is evocative of gallows, underscores “the undertone of death that pervades the artist’s work.”

I have always been struck by the low railings that line the Guggenheim’s spiral walkways. They just seem so … low, for a building so vertiginous. Never have they seemed lower than they do at Cattelan’s exhibition. Ordinarily, visitors to the Guggenheim hug the walls, which is, after all, where most of the art is found. Here, however, the walls are bare; all of the art is in the rotunda, driving the museumgoers toward the railings, where they gaze upwards and downwards, paying scant attention to the other museumgoers who are engaged in the same risky (am I the only one who sees this?!) behavior. I confess to having been very nervous at times, so much so that I backed away from the railings, sacrificing optimal views for a feeling of safety.

I doubt that Cattelan considered this effect when he proposed this peculiar installation, but it seems appropriate to his morbidly absurdist ethos to draw attention to the scarier side of this high church of art. Or maybe he’s trying a bit too hard to conjure the kind of vertigo that wonderful works of art can sometimes induce in a susceptible viewer.