THE PRANKSTER.(Profile of artist Maurizio Cattelan)(Interview)(Biography)

Ten o'clock on a May morning in Paris, by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Maurizio Cattelan, the world's only punctual artist, is slightly late, but the sun is warm, the breeze is cool, and vividly dressed art students crowd through a narrow gate in the tall iron grille that separates the Ecole's courtyard from the Rue Bonaparte. My wife's mobile phone rings. It is Cattelan, calling from his bicycle to say that he's three minutes away. Three minutes later, he glides to a soundless stop beside us. Cattelan is Italian. Tall and lean in his jeans and black T-shirt, he has close-cropped dark hair and a long, quizzical face anchored by an auspicious Roman nose. He wheels his bike into the courtyard, chains it to a stand, and looks around at the architecture. "Not bad," he says, whistling softly.

One of the new international, post-studio artists who go from place to place installing singular and often highly disconcerting works of art, Cattelan is here to inspect a space that has been offered to him for his latest project. The piece is scheduled to go on view in early October, in a show organized by the Musee Moderne de la Ville de Paris, but it will take place at a venue outside the museum because Cattelan wanted it to be in a setting that "you go into and come out of." Lucio Zotti, an old friend from Milan who collaborates on many of Cattelan's projects, recommended the seventeenth-century chapel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and two curators from the Musee Moderne, Angeline Scherf and Lauren Bosse, are on hand to show it to him. After brisk handshakes in the French manner, they lead us through an arch and, via a side door, into an ancient, dark, somewhat cluttered chapel with a very high ceiling, where we are joined a few minutes later by Henry-Claude Cousseau, the director of the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts. Cousseau, a distinguished-looking man in an expensive sports jacket, gives us what the Michelin guide calls "un peu d'histoire" regarding the chapel. Commissioned originally in 1608 by Marguerite de Valois, the divorced wife of King Henry IV (she was called La Reine Margot), it became, after the French Revolution, a public museum housing important works of French sculpture. In 1836, it was awarded to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and it has been used ever since as a repository for plaster casts of medieval and Renaissance sculptures, which students here still study and draw, and for copies of Italian Renaissance paintings sent home by French winners of the Prix de Rome.

Cattelan lopes around the long, narrow space, taking everything in--replicas of Michelangelo's sculptures for the Medici tombs, of Verrocchio's gigantic equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, of Ghiberti's doors for the Baptistery in Florence. Dutiful copies of paintings by Masaccio, Raphael, Carpaccio, Ghirlandajo, and others cover one long wall, bracketed at either end by Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" and Giotto's frescoes for the Arena Chapel in Padua, Cattelan's home town. A stranger to modern art, the chapel doesn't know what it's in for. Nor does Cousseau, who has agreed to let Cattelan use the space without knowing precisely what he plans to put in it. This is brave of him, considering some of the artist's completed projects: "La Nona Ora," for example, a full-size wax sculpture of Pope John Paul II in papal regalia but lying on his side, crushed to the ground by a jagged meteorite; or "Him," an equally lifelike Adolf Hitler, reduced in size and kneeling in prayer. Just last spring, Cattelan confronted the city of Milan with the spectacle of three adolescent boys with ropes around their necks, hanging from a branch of an oak tree in a public square.

Since the early nineteen-nineties, when Cattelan's work began appearing in big, international group shows, he has been variously described as a jokester, a sensationalist, a troublemaker, a conceptual artist, and an innovator of unrivalled originality. Cattelan likes to say that his installations provoke debate rather than controversy, but the hanging children upset one Milanese so much that he got a ladder, climbed the tree, and cut two of them down. At that point, the man fell out of the tree and was carted off to the hospital with a mild concussion; the fire department, called in to cope with an increasingly large and restive crowd, cut down the third one. There was plenty of talk about this piece, which was on view officially for only twenty-seven hours, but which drew headlines in the Italian press for several days. The mayor and the city's cultural commission, having authorized it, were obliged to defend their decision at a special session of the City Hall Council, according to Cattelan's friend Massimiliano Gioni, who, as director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation, in Milan, had commissioned the art work. Gioni told me that a neighborhood mother taped an open letter to the tree saying she regretted the loss of the art work, because it had called attention to the problems that real children face growing up in Milan; others wrote comments on her letter during the next few days, and the debate, if that's what you'd call it, was still going on two weeks later. Cattelan, whose English is serviceable but hesitant, resists discussing the ideas behind his work. He has said only that the piece, to him, was "like an act of love."

On the day of our visit to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, only a few people were aware that his new piece, called "Now," would be a life-size sculpture of John Fitzgerald Kennedy lying in a coffin. The two curators from the Musee Moderne knew, along with their colleague Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and so did Laura Hoptman, the curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, where a second version of "Now" will go on view when the Carnegie International Exhibition opens, on October 8th, and of course his friend Lucio Zotti, whom the artist describes as his "spiritual consultant, the closest person to me." But Cattelan wanted it kept secret from the rumor-hungry art world, to preserve the impact of its first appearance. "After that, it will lead a ...