JOURNAL VII:
PROVOCATION, MADE ABSOLUTE — VOL. 7
PIERO MANZONI
Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) stands as one of the most radical figures of European avant-garde. Based in Milan, his practice moved rapidly away from painting toward a direct confrontation with the nature of the artwork itself — its material presence, its consumption, and its value within social and economic systems. Unlike American Pop Art’s fascination with imagery and mass culture, Manzoni belongs to a distinctly European Pop lineage, one grounded in reduction, ritual, and provocation.
Property of a Distinguished Gentleman
PIERO MANZONI
1933 - 1963
ACHROME
In the Achromes of this period, the iterative visual cell was composed of real bread rolls, the Milanese michette, to be precise. In others he used pebbles or expanded polystyrene balls. White always overlaid everything, desensitizing and rendering everything a surface that was both very present and estranged. Still others were composed of packs of newsprint or wrapping paper sealed with cords, lead and sealing wax as if they were parcels, and presented in pairs.
ACHROME, ca. 1962, Bread And Kaolin, 31 × 31 cm
For Manzoni, art is not representation but a condition.
He rejects composition, expression, and narrative in favor of presence, declaration, and belief. Art exists because the artist states it does.
“A work of art is the absolute freedom of the artist.”
Within European Pop Art, this position replaces visual abundance with conceptual exposure. The object is not celebrated; it is tested.
LINES, MATERIALS OF HIS TIME
25 APRIL - 26 JULY 2019
NEW YORK, 22ND STREET
Curated by Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo, director of the Piero Manzoni Foundation in Milan, the exhibitions ‘Piero Manzoni. Materials of His Time’ and ‘Piero Manzoni. Lines’ unfold over two floors and focus on Manzoni’s most significant bodies of work: his Achromes (paintings without color) and Linee (Lines) series.
Linea m.11, 1959
Ink on paper in a cardboard cylinder
Manzoni invited friends in Milan to attend a ritual curiously reminiscent of a Catholic mass.
The artist boiled eggs on a range set on a table. Then he marked each egg with this thumbprint. As people filed in they were given eggs to eat. The event lasted for an hour and ten minutes. The quasi-religious aspect of this-preparation, consecration, communion, is hard to avoid. In some cases, even art historians see in the egg a reference to the sacred wafer.
Jesus his body?
“A common legend says that after Jesus' Ascension, Mary travelled to visit the Emperor Tiberius in Rome and greeted him with: "Christ has risen" [a traditional Orthodox Easter greeting, also adopted by many Christians]; whereupon he pointed to an egg on his table and quipped,
"Christ has no more risen than that egg is red." The egg, it is said, immediately turned blood red. Jesus his blood?”
Piero Manzoni 1933-1963 will run through 2nd June 2014
La merda d'Artista, Piero Manzoni
Manzoni said: “I should like all artists to sell their fingerprints or else stage competitions to see who can draw the longest line or sell their shit in tins. The fingerprint is the only sign of the personality that can be accepted: if collectors want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there's the artist's own shit, that is really his.”
In May 2007, a tin was sold for €124,000 at Sotheby's. The tins were originally to be valued according to their equivalent weight in gold – $37 each in 1961 – with the price fluctuating according to the market. The cans are made of steel, they cannot be x-rayed or scanned to determine the contents, and opening a can would cause it to lose its value; thus, the true contents of Artist's Shit are unknown. Critics of modern art will at least applaud the irony.
The Egg with Thumbprint
1960
PIERO MANZONI
The Eggs, which were born at the same time, were presented in the solo show at Køpcke in Copenhagen in June 1960; they are hard-boiled eggs the artist transforms into works, marking them with his own fingerprint: a body archetype bearing the most conventional form of identification. The enjoyer may eat them, thus physically entering into communion with the artist’s identity and existence. The ‘eggs consecrated with my fingerprint’ were presented in July of that same year in Consumazione dell’arte, dinamica del pubblico, divorare l’arte, the last show held at Azimut. The spectators were invited to eat 150 eggs by Manzoni in an authentic happening that, upon first sight, may seem playful but of great significance. The symbolic and conceptual mechanism entails, if the eggs are eaten, that it become a body like Manzoni’s, that the viewers present take into their own bodies an artistic physical quantity, fully participating in the artist’s experience and in the sacredness that is acknowledged. Instead, if the egg is not eaten but kept in the version as a sculptural object, we find ourselves with a classical case of fetishism, or, more specifically, of something that has a lot to do with evoking the ancient cult of relics. ‘In fact – Gualdoni declares – the sacrilization of the artist, of his identity and even of his body is one of the artistic aspects that makes Manzoni reflect the most, at that time. The artist’s body can be taken in like a sacred body, in many ways, and his work is a relic par excellence, which is highly desirable to possess
“Art must be consumed”, Piero Manzoni