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Friday, May 17, 2013

In 2011, artist Maurizio Cattelan famously vowed that he was retiring from making art, transforming his retrospective of iconic satirist sculptures dangling in the rotunda of New York's Guggenheim into something of the artistic equivalent to a rock band's farewell tour. But even then, Cattelan was already pursuing a second career. He was the co-founder—and co-editor and co-image-maker along with photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari—of Toilet Paper, a magazine that is a wild photographic odyssey of surrealist misbehavior, shot with a high-fashion aesthetic and a mind for tumult, distaste, hilarity, hijinks, and a no-holds-barred culture-war mentality. (A 21st-century glossy version of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un Chien Andalou [1929] seems an apt description.) In other words, the imagery was pure Cattelan set in ink.