Toilet Paper

On the occasion of his sensational retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Italian provocateur Maurizio Cattelan announced that he was retiring from art. In fact, his new career had already begun in 2010 with Toilet Paper, a magazine-cum-artist's book containing no text, only full spreads of color photographs that appropriate the slick production values of commercial photography to deliver dreamlike (or nightmarish) images. This deluxe volume gathers all of the images published in the first five issues, re-edited by Dennis Freedman in collaboration with Cattelan; it also includes a significant portion of previously unpublished images. The photographs vary in style and reference, from nineteenth-century crime scene to French New Wave film still; from optical illusions and games to word play. Among its more notorious images are a man dressed as a nun shooting up in a tawdry bedroom and a dirty ear floating in a bowl of yellow soup. In an interview with Vogue Italia, Ferrari said that "the project emerged from a passion/obsession that Maurizio and I have in common. Each picture springs from an idea, even a simple one, and then becomes a complex orchestration of people who build tableaux vivants. This project is also a sort of mental outburst." This clothbound volume is as appropriate for the coffee table as it is for the toilet.