By Carter B. Horsley

There's nothing like a little controversy to warm up the art market and the cover illustration of this catalogue's auction shows a realistic image of Pope John Paul II felled by a large rock but still alert and clinging to his crozier. It is "La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour)," Lot 317, a work of art by Mauricio Cattelan (b. 1960) and Christie's answer to Jeff Koons's "Michael Jackson and Bubbles," a larger-than-life-size sculpture of the famous rock star and his pet monkey that sold at Sotheby's May 15, 2001 for $5,615,750 (see The City Review article).

Large figurative pieces, of course, are not new in contemporary art as witnessed by the work of Duane Hanson (1925-1996), who is well represented in this auction by Lot 313, shown below. Christie's thought enough of Hanson's marvelous sculpture to put it in its large and colorful entrance vestibule giving it even more visibility than Cattelan's work.

The Cattelan lot is shown in the catalogue in a large room with a very high ceiling the skylight of which has been broken, presumably by the huge rock that has landed on the sculpture of the Pope. At Christie's, the work received the place of honor in the center of the large staircase at the auction house, which unfortunately, at least for Cattalan, does not have a skylight. Nonetheless, the work was very effectively shown as indicated by the photograph at the top of this article.

There is a second version of this work that was exhibited in the "Apocalypse: beauty and horror in contemporary art" exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London from September to December last year and this work was illustrated in that exhibition's catalogue and has been requested for this year's Venice Biennale exhibition that starts in June.

This is the first of the two versions and it has a conservative estimate of $400,000 to $600,000. It sold for $886,000, including the buyer's premium as do all results mentioned in this article, breaking the previous world auction record for the artist of $270,000 set at Christie's just last November.

It was the subject of considerable controversy when shown in London and protests when it was shown at the Zacheta Gallery of Contemporary Art in Warsaw in December, 2000 where two people tried to remove the rock and stand the Pope up. The sculpture's viewing at Christie's was not marked by any protests.

In an interview with Alicia Bona published in the auction catalogue, Cattelan discussed this work at length. The following are excerpts from Cattelan's remarks in the interview:

"I like to think of La Nona Ora as a sculpture that doesn't exist; a three-dimensional image that dissolves into pure communication - an object disappearing in the flux of information, news, comments, headlines, reproductions, newspapers and other seductive spectacles. On the other hand, La Nona Ora could simply be a bad joke taken too seriously, an exercise in absurdity....Ideas never really come. They go: it's all about distribution. I gather fragments, bits and pieces, crumbs of reality. Art works need to function very quickly, no matter how complex and varied they are: La Nona Ora is first of all a quick image - a mechanism for incorporating difference in a visual synthesis. When people are different, they tend to interact only through art or war. I prefer to use art as a field study for confrontation. That's where La Nona Ora came from or maybe that's where La Nona Ora ended up....I don't subscribe to the image of the artist as an isolated figure, hiding inhis ivory tower. I'm trying to connect images and tensions,to bring together different impulses: I want religion and blasphemy to collide, as they do in our daily life....Our life is based on contradiction. In this sense, the Pope is just a pretext, a way to hold up a mirror to our daily mediocrity and existence, so we might as well start enjoying our symptoms....I grew up in a Catholic family, but right in the middle of the Jewish district in Padua; in my house there were images of saints and Virgin Marys everywhere, but when I went tovisit my friends, they all lived in apartments where images were prohibited. In those houses with no crucifix and no religious paintings, you could still feel the presence of something sacred, a strange respect or maybe just a pure disposition to sacrifice. I think my osbsession for images comes out of those experiences; I learnt to fear icons and, at the same time, I learnt not to trust them....I might be idealistic or naive, but I think that any reaction is valuable and legitimate. Reactions transform art works, they change their shape and reception. Objects are nothing but projections of desire, images of a struggle. And I love when struggles happen right there in the daylight, so that everybody can see. What happened in Poland was a sort ofupside down miracle; salvation wasn't coming from the sky but from the earth, from the people.....Messages are for advertising, not for art; I always thought that art is not about explanations. It's about opening up possibiities. Advertising, just like religion, tries to tell the truth. Art, instead, should try to tell lies."

Cattelan's work is about fragility and ambiguity. He recently used Hitler as a subject and he has hung a stuffed horse from rafters.

When Cattelan's Pope does stand up, he would probably go over and chat with Duane Hanson's "Lady with Shopping Bags," Lot 313, a polyester resin and fiberglass sculpture, polychromed in oil with accessories, life-size, that was executed in 1972. Like most people, the Pope would likely be fooled by Hanson's ultra-realistic sculpture of a weary women laden with bags, perhaps pausing to catch her breath before proceeding on her journey. She is perhaps a bit too well groomed to be the stereotype homeless bag woman. She has dignity in her bundles, but she has cares, ones that the Pope surely will care about.

In an age of very quick takes and one-liners, double-takes are gold and Hanson's sculptures, of which this is a very fine one, always elicit double-takes. It has a conservative estimate of $250,000 to $300,000. It sold for $270,000.

The sale total was $22,589,350, almost double its pre-sale low estimate and well above its pre-sale high estimate of $17,100,000. Christopher Burge, the auctioner, described the sale as "fantastic" and "terrific," notigthat 21 workssold forover their high estimates and only 5 sold for below their low estimates. Of the 51 offered lots, 43 were sold, a respectable percentage. The sale set 10 world auction records for artists.

Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) had five lots in the auction. Two passed and two sold within the pre-sale estimates. One went into the stratosphere, a dramatic indication that a "name" alone does not insure success.

Lot 330, "Henry Moore Bound to Fail (back view)," is a 26-by-24-by-3 1/2-inch wax over plaster sculpture by Bruce Nauman (b. 1941), shown above. The unique work was executed in 1967 and has an estimate of $2,000,000 to $3,000,000. It sold for $9,906,000 which prompted the standing-room only crowd at Christie's to applaud, only the second such occurrence of the current auction season. The first broad outburst of applause came the night before when "Large Flowers, a 82-by-162-inch painting by Andy Warhol executed in 1964 sold for $8,476,000, the second highest auction price for Warhol. Christopher Burge, the auctioner, described the record price for the Nauman after the auction as "sensational," which is an understatement. Nauman has also produced a cast-iron edition of nine of this work. Warhol is more famous than Nauman. Warhol's "Large Flowers" was a quite decorative and very large and colorful work with a certain abstract quality. Nauman's work, on the other hand, is monochromatic and not terribly decorative. One cannot compare apples and oranges easily and Warhol's work is easier to digest than Nauman's conceptualism. The catalogue offers the following commentary: "Nauman's choice to use his own body in his work is a simply one: he is most familiar with it and it is most accessible to him. Segments of his own body represent something larger, partial views of the body also invite the viewer to participate, to draw upon their own knowledge to complete the viewing experience." "The artist," it continued, "has restricted his own movements, signifying the enormous burden of the artist's vocation." "Epitomizing the tongue in cheek approach that unifies Nauman's work, in Henry Moore Bound to fail (back view), the artist created a fragile yet powerful relief. At once the work expresses Nauman's concern in regards to the future of traditonal freestanding figurative sculpture and simultaneously salutes the very tradition from which Henry Moore emerged." It is nice to learn that Nauman is "most familiar" with his own body, but "partial views of the body also invite the viewer to participate,to draw upon their own knowledge to complete the viewing experience" is poppycock, not even bolderdash. The same year that he did this work he also did two other "body-part" sculptures, both aesthetically much better than nice, "From Hand to Mouth" in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and "Untitled," a pair of crossed arms that grow out of a knot of thick rope, in a private collection in Switzerland, both reproduced in the auction catalogue. The catalogue also reproduces a drawing and photograph of the same subject in this lot by Nauman. One need only conjure the great images of Bosch or the many Renaissance images of saints tied to pillars and stuck with arrows to realize that the notion of constraint is not new in art. Not everyone will find this Nauman work beautiful, or be able to easily reconcile its "market value" even when limited to "post-war" and "contemporary" art, or, perhaps more interestingly, to Nauman's own oeuvre.

Lot 329, "Untitled," is a 72-by-4-by-3-inch fiberglass and polyester resin sculpture executed in 1965. It is brown and uneven in shape. It had an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000 and sold for $446,000. Lot 331, "Four Heads," a 39-by-26 1/2-inch watercolor, graphite and Ashaltum on five sheets of paper was executed in 1990 and had an estimate of $100,000 to $150,000. It sold for $138,000.

While these works sold within their estimates, Lots 332 and 333 failed to sell. The former, entitled "Five Pink Heads in the Corner," wa a 50-by-8 1/2-by-7 1/2-inch epoxy resin and fiberglass cloth sculpture of five pink-colored heads that was executed in 1992 and had an estimate of $800,000 to $1,200,000. It was failed to sell and was passed at $600,000. The latter, entitled "Eating Buggers (Version II),"is a 24-by-36-by 9-inch neon tubing mounting on aluminum monolith that was created in 1985 and had an estimate of $300,000 to $400,000. It failed to sell and was passed at $260,000. It was the most colorful and most attractive of the Nauman lots. Being colorful and attractive, of course, does not count for much probably in the Nauman canon. What is difficult to explain, however, is how the 9-digit bidders for Lot 330 could pass up the opportunity to grab other works by the artist at such relatively bargain-basement prices. A Nauman is not a Nauman is not a Nauman, or something.

The art market so far this season has been rather wild with some extraordinarily high and strong prices indicating no lack of available money and with so pretty high-ticketed failures creating a lot of uncertainty for future consignments. Clearly, the allure of a good, or at least well-publicized, provenance has become increasingly important as has the notion that particularly works are "icons." The auction houses this season have generally outdone themselves with impressive and elaborate catalogues that often reproduced other artist's work in the entries on some artists to apparently lend even higher respectability or "associative" power, even when the alluded to works are not always clearly related in a substantive way. Some of the lengthier catalogue entries are almost generic commentaries on the artists and others are quite specific about the actual lots. One can only admire the tremendous amount of labor that goes into dashing out these catalogues and such efforts are generally laudable, especially when they are informative and help the reader better understand the artist's perspectives, influences and intentions.

The catalogue's interview with Cattelan, cited above, is excellent as the artist's comments are revealing, provocative and very interesting. The accompanying text on Nauman, unfortunately, does not clearly establish the significance of his art although it does comment on the artist's frustrations with art, which suggests to some observers that exasperation is not surprising. Cattelan's La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour) fared reasonably well in the auction, but conceivably it could have done much better given its notoriety and the intellectual stance of the artist.

Nauman's lot is about himself and his feelings of inadequacy. Cattelan's lot is about one of the most revered and important public figures in the world and the challenges facing him. Hanson's "Lady with Shopping Bags" is about an "everywoman" and her daily struggles and chores. All three are very legitimate subjects and essentially share a ultra-realistic style, yet the differences in their market values as indicated in this auction are not easy to explain. Each of them stops short of having explicit messages, leaving the viewer free to apply interpretation. Hanson's sculpture is the most complete: we do necessarily need more information to relate to it. Cattelan's work broaches more possible interpretations. Nauman's work, on the other hand, is more disconcerting in part because it is not as clear as his drawing of the same subject, which is better than his photograph of the same subject, and in part because it represents only a fragment of the subject and at first glance, wrongly, an apparently unfinished fragment. Some observers, at least this one, would probably have been more comforted if all three works were in the same relative "market value" range. The Nauman price is simply preposterous, but that's not Nauman's or Christie's fault and may they long rejoice and it certainly reconfirms that auctions can be very exciting and fascinating.

Jeff Koons (b. 1955) is represented in this auction by "Woman in Tub," a porcelain sculpture of a naked woman missing the top half of her head clutching her breasts in a bubble bath. The 1988 work, Lot 311, is number one of an edition of three plus one artist's proof and has an estimate of $1,500,000 to $2,500,000. It sold for $2,866,000. Another work in this edition sold a year ago at Christie's for $1,711,500.

Lot 335, "Buro," by Thomas Demand sold for $99,500, significantly exceeding the previous world auction record of $61,716 for the artist set at Christie's this past February.

Lot 308, "Smash The Reds" by Gilbert & George sold for $314,000, breaking the previous world auction record of $253,866 for the artist set at Sotheby's in London this past February.

Lot 341, "Drawings for Projection Series: Johannesburg-Second Greatest City after Paris Monument Mine Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old," by William Kentridge, sold for $149,000, breaking the previous world auction record for the artist of $101,500, set at Phillips last November.

Lot 344, "x + y = 0," by Chris Ofili sold for $237,000, breaking the previous world auction record for the artist of $211,500 set at Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg May 14, 2001.

Lot 310, "David, Victoria + Brooklyn," by Elizabeth Peyton, sold for $94,000, breaking the previous world auction record for the artist of $77,300 set at Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg May 14, 2001.

Lot 325, "Interfacing," by Jenny Saville, sold for $198,500, breaking the previous world auction record of $84,353 set at Christie's in London in December, 1998.

Lot 312, "Untitled Film Still," a handsome photograph by Cindy Sherman, sold for $336,000, breaking the previous world auction record for the artist of $269,750, set at Sotheby's last May.