“Sooner or later all magazines end up in the toilet,” Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan said of the rationale behind the name of his then-emerging creative studio. It wasn’t especially left field for the man known as the “court jester of the art world” who had already created “a lifelike model of JFK in a coffin, a sculpture of Pope John Paul II crushed beneath a meteorite, and a likeness of Hitler praying on his knees” and looked to establish a collaboration with his good friend, the Milanese fashion photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari, while nodding to the disposable nature of the images produced. Now, TOILETPAPER has just brought their largest ever show to Mumbai’s Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, introducing their surrealist brand to India for the very first time.
Spread across four floors of the NMACC Art House, Run As Slow As You Can primarily acts as an archive of Maurizio and Pierpaolo’s work together, charting their evolution from absurdist image makers to luxury home goods purveyors. Drawing on advertiser tropes and saturated Mad Men-era styling, the TOILETPAPER aesthetic is a consciously commercial one: the pair’s initial collaboration was for the cover of W magazine’s 2009 Art Issue, which apparently included “a man in a nun’s habit shooting up, a face with no nose, and a close-up of a bloody hand wielding a hammer.”
The first floor of the exhibition ‘Take a Left, Right?’ features a number of the studio’s favourite images (the serene face of a ragdoll cat sandwiched between two burger buns; a surly-looking chicken on a golden, shit-stained bed) scaled up to wall-size and arranged in a directional maze.
Occasionally a peal of disembodied laughter will ring out, or another ostensibly jarring noise. The intention here is to overwhelm the viewer, explains curator Roya Sachs, to “[challenge] existence and engagement in an increasingly virtual world, where we are constantly bombarded with stimuli.”
“Is There Room in the Sky?”, the cloud-patterned space on the second floor, features a series of similar images cut-out and suspended from the ceiling: a floating black stallion; a giant frog sandwiched between (you guessed it) two burger buns; metal cylinders as legs in a pair of red wellington boots; sliced, pink brains accompanied by round bandsaw blades.
The optical illusions presented are a glorified Instagram opportunity, and while Mumbai deserves to enjoy the kind of conventional social media moment Western art institutions have been trafficking in since the mid-2010s, they’re equally allowed to deem it gauche. The choice is yours, Run As Slow As You Can seems to say, we won’t judge!
In between floors, the visitor is greeted by wall-to-wall images of red sauce-covered spaghetti. The motif is an expression of the brand’s Italian identity, Pierpaolo says, as well as his daughter’s favourite food. Family and everyday objects tend to be the starting point for much of the studio’s output. “It’s a bit like the name TOILETPAPER,” he adds, highlighting a relationship between the two domestic images, “the way that we use spaghetti is a bit disgusting.”
The intestinal feel of the spaghetti reflects the somatic format of the show, which, according to Pierpaolo, was laid out with the inner workings of the human body in mind. “The Control Room” on the final floor operates as the “brain” of Run As Slow As You Can, a glossy red space that houses an archive of the studio’s print collaborations and a viewing deck that looks onto the previous level.
This third floor, “A House Is a Building That People Live In”, is the most ambitious and immersive chapter of the exhibition. Playing with the idea of the “perfect home”, the space is an uncanny approximation of an IKEA showroom. Purchasable TOILETPAPER products like hand soap and enamel mugs are interspersed with custom foam sculptures and installations, including a swimming pool filled with 10,000 plastic bananas.
Drawing on the back-catalogue of a bankable pair of Western artists, Run As Slow As You Can will undoubtedly find an audience in Mumbai – but it won’t be for everyone. In a recent symposium on Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, n+1’s contributors reflect on the film’s cultural phenomenon and “the inevitable tendency of institutions to absorb critique,” among its successes in rendering a playfully idyll matriarchy and exploring the inexplicably gendered tribulations of personhood. In their own ways, both Barbie and Run As Slow As You Can are enjoyable, successful advertisements. The exhibition taps into wider trends in culture and retail that have seen a number of immersive commercial projects appear (a giant Yayoi Kusama statue over Louis Vuitton’s Parisian HQ, for one) and perhaps it highlights an approach to exhibition-making that, in the video-socials age of late capitalism, we’re coming to expect.
‘Run As Slow As You Can’ will show at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre until 22 October 2023.
Credits
All images courtesy of TOILETPAPER