piero manzoni 1

12
0\WKV DQG 0HDQLQJV LQ 0DQ]RQLV 0HUGD GDUWLVWD $XWKRUV *HUDOG 6LON 5HYLHZHG ZRUNV 6RXUFH $UW -RXUQDO 9RO 1R 6FDWRORJLFDO $UW $XWXPQ SS 3XEOLVKHG E\ College Art Association 6WDEOH 85/ http://www.jstor.org/stable/777371 . $FFHVVHG Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal. http://www.jstor.org

Upload: sarrasine-zambinella

Post on 24-Oct-2014

143 views

Category:

Documents


2 download

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Piero Manzoni 1

College Art Associationhttp://www.jstor.org/stable/777371 .

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

Page 2: Piero Manzoni 1

Myths and Meanings in Manzoni's Merda d'artista

Gerald Silk Marcel Duchamp spoke to me, during the course of the Second World War (traveling between Arcachon and Bordeaux), of a new interest in the preparation of shit, of which the small excretions from the navel are the "deluxe" editions. To this I replied that I wished to have genuine shit, from the navel of Raphael. Today a well-known Pop artist of Verona sells artists' shit (in very sophisticated packaging) as a luxury item!

-Salvador Dali, 19681

n May 1961, the Italian artist Piero Manzoni packed and sealed ninety cylindrical cans, each containing thirty grams of his own excrement (fig.1). Atop each tin are the

words PRODUCED BY, followed by the signature Piero Manzoni, and a stenciled number designating its place in the run. A label affixed to the body of each consists of rows of the artist's first and last names strung together and repeated over and over. This PIEROMANZONIPIEROMANZONI functions as a back-

ground on which is printed the words:

Artist's Shit CONTENTS 30 GRAMS NET

FRESHLY PRESERVED PRODUCED AND TINNED

IN MAY 1961

On every can, these words appear in four languages- English, Italian, French, and German. Merda d'artista, to be sold by weight based on the current price of gold, was first exhibited in August of that year at the Galleria Pescetto in Albisola, Italy.

Few works of art address the subject of scatology so directly, and Manzoni's Merda d'artista invokes various myths and meanings about art and its production. These myths and meanings will be placed in several contexts, including the role of the avant-garde artist in modernism, Manzoni's preoccupation with the body and its products, and Sigmund Freud's theories of anal erotism.

It would be naive on my part and, I believe, on the part of Manzoni to assume that Merda d'artista was not intended to shock its audience. Merda d'artista thus operates within a strain of modernist avant-garde history defined by art that is innovative and risky. Pressure on the vanguard artist to break new ground not only leads to stunning and provocative results, but also encourages novelty, shock, and extremism.

Although this notion has been under attack in recent years, at

........

FIG. 1 Piero Manzoni, Merda d'artista (Artist's Shit) no. 058,1961, metal, paper, and fecal matter, 2 inches high, 2? inches diam. Courtesy Edizioni di Vanni Scheiwiller, Milan.

the time Manzoni made Merda d'artista, he was undoubtedly in the grips of this more conventional interpretation.

Functioning within this avant-garde context, Merda d'artista brings to mind the remark attributed to Marcel Duchamp that "a painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting."2 For Duchamp, however, art provoked not simply because of its potential offensiveness, but because of its unexpectedness or inappropriateness. Often this is a result of his conceptualism, to which Manzoni's work owes a major debt. That anything the artist calls art is art, that christening rather than crafting makes art, lurks behind Manzoni's deci- sion to offer up his excrement as art. As well, Duchamp's most notorious example of this attitude, his "ready-made" urinal titled Fountain (1917), produced problems not only because it was a common object signed and placed within an art context, but also because of its links to natural bodily functions and waste.

As this issue of Art Journal demonstrates, there is no dearth of examples of stercoraceous subjects in the history of art. But there is a certain modernist pedigree that goes

ART JOURNAL

65

Page 3: Piero Manzoni 1

66

FIG. 2 Manzoni signing a Scultura vivente (Living Sculpture) at the Studio Filmgiornale Sedi in Milan, January 13,1961. In Freddy Battino and Luca Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni: Catalogue raisonn6 (Milan: Edizioni di Vanni Scheiwiller, 19911

beyond mere defecatory allusions. Maurice Denis provided the surprising example of Paul C6zanne, who when asked by Edouard Manet what he would submit to the Salon of 1870, replied "a pot of shit."3 Common to nearly all aesthetic correspondences between art and excrement, Cezanne's pu- tative proposal is not simply an act of antagonism and irrever- ence, but also establishes ties between presumed opposites: the high of art and low of shit. In a related and perhaps equally apocryphal incident, sometime in the 1920s Con- stantin Brancusi or Maurice Vlaminck is reported to have told Ezra Pound that eventually artists would display "shit on a silver platter,"4 thus mixing not only the high of art with the low of ordure, but also the exalted and precious material of silver (and its connections to money) and the debased and mundane material of feces. Manzoni's exploitation of such connections and oppositions in his interrelation of gold, feces, and art will be discussed in more detail, but it is at least worth mentioning that such affinities and polarities have been frequently commented on. The most famous example comes from Freud who noted that "the contrast between the most precious substance known to men and the most worth- less, which they reject as waste matter. . . has led to this specific identification of gold with faeces."5

Such attitudes were not uncommon in Futurism and Dada, and in those thought of as antecedents and followers of these movements. Among the more notorious examples are Alfred Jarry's 1896 play Ubu roi, which flaunts excremental

references, and Guillaume Apollinaire's ambiguous 1913 manifesto, "'Antitradition futuriste," which distinguishes between the progressive and thereactionary, awarding a rose to the former and shit (in the thin disguise of "mer de") to the latter. Several years before Duchamp added a mustache, goatee, and the letters L. H. O.O. Q to a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, simultaneously confusing her sexuality and offer- ing an orgasmic explanation for her supposedly inscrutable grin, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder and leader of Ital- ian Futurism, had already spoofed this symbol of the past scatologically. Known in Italy as La Gioconda, "the Merry" or "Smiling One," she was relabeled by Marinetti "La Gioconda purgativa," "The Purgative Smiler," which implies that her pleasure is one of relief at having successfully moved her bowels. In a broader fusion between such functions and art, American Dadaist Arthur Cravan's 1914 statement- "Painting is walking, running, drinking, eating, and fulfill- ing one's natural functions. You can say that I'm disgusting, but that's what it is"-augurs aspects of Manzoni's oeuvre.6 Examples include Manzoni's Sculture viventi (Living Sculp- tures), works of art that obviously live, breathe, and perform natural functions (fig. 2), and the actual or planned use in his art of his feces, fingerprints, breath, and blood.

Duchamp himself made a curious pairing of excrement and art. In a characteristically paradoxical vein, he asserted in 1914 that "Arrhe est a art ce que merdre est a merde."7 This typical Duchampian exploitation of homonyms and puns, which creates confusion among nouns, verbs, and preposi- tions, when spoken translates as: "Art is to art as 'shitte' (or to shit) is to shit." Hovering between nonsense and truism, the remark recalls both Gertrude Stein's later utterance "rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," and Apollinaire's olfactory and aesthetically dichotomous prizes expressing disdain and love-shit and roses. (Duchamp also used the double or extra "r" to give double and extra meaning to the name of his female alter-ego "Rrose S61avy," which when read is yet another rose and when spoken might imply that what "life is" is "eros"). But as Nancy Spector points out, the word "arrhe" also refers to the French plural noun "les arrhes," which means "down payment,"" thus coupling the spoken sense of Duchamp's phrase as something self-evident and absurd with its written sense of affinities between art and money matters and art and fecal matter. In a customary attempt to give his ideas a mathematical, scientific, philosophical, or linguistic ring, Duchamp in this 1914 essay restates the concept as an equation or formula:

arrhe merdre.9 art merde

And if we are to believe Salvador Dali, Duchamp actually proposed the packaging of shit as art sometime during World War II (see the epigraph above).

Manzoni's Merda d'artista, in its transubstantiation of the dross of defecation into the gold of art, harks back not only to Duchamp's conceptualism but also to his connections with

FALL1993

Page 4: Piero Manzoni 1

FIG. 3 Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock, 1950, photograph.

shamanism and alchemy, although Duchamp's ties with these latter ideas have been called into question. The assertion that one's own body waste is art is an extreme example of the notion that anything an artist makes is art. Manzoni's linkage of excreta with gold invokes alchemy and also mythology: he becomes the artist with the Midas touch, converting feces into gold. Moreover, shamans and alchemists ritualistically and experimentally used body products such as excrement, urine, blood, and breath, believing them to be sacred, thaumaturgic substances.10 (Manzoni declared: "Paintings are and always have been magic, religious objects.")" As mentioned, he made pieces involving not only his feces but also his breath, and proposed works incorporating his blood.

In Merda d'artista, another modernist myth regarding the facture of art sardonically emerges: the role of process and its link to product. For Manzoni, perhaps the most powerful progenitor was recent gestural painting. The fin- ished work of some of the artists associated with Abstract Expressionism, Tachisme, and l'art informel (of which Man- zoni's early art was a part) allegedly carried the residues of their processes of creation. More important, the publication in 1951 of Hans Namuth's famous photos taken in 1950 of Jackson Pollock at work (fig. 3) emphasized process to an extent that certain artists, from the mid-fifties through the present day, began writing about and producing art in a manner in which the making of a work becomes as important as the work made. Examples include George Mathieu's 1956

public and high-speed execution of a twelve-foot painting on the stage of the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris before a packed house and Yves Klein's "pinceau vivant" ("living brush") works begun in 1958 and called Anthropomdtries in 1960. Under Klein's direction, nude females basted them- selves in paint and then rubbed their bodies against can- vases, leaving haunting smears and imprints. In 1960, at the Galerie Internationale d'Art Contemporain in Paris, under the title Anthropomitries de l'dpoque bleue, Klein and his lady "brushes" publicly performed the procedure to the strains of his appropriately and punningly titled Symphonie mono- tone-cellists and violinists playing the same note over and over.

Manzoni simultaneously enlists and caricatures the issue of process and its link to product in Merda d'artista. Like that of an anguished Pollock working, a photograph of a smiling Manzoni apparently documents the making of Merda d'artista (fig. 4).12 In its comparison of art produced by physical urges and needs with those produced by psychic urges and needs, the image is shocking, humorous, and irreverent, and it recalls Marinetti's making the Mona Lisa the butt of ridicule in proposing a scatological interpretation of her smile. Manzoni's piece, done when the rhetoric sur- rounding action painting was being challenged, deconstructs the myth that in the existentialist translation of aspects of Surrealist automatism into bold, muscular gestures, the

FIG. 4 Ole Bjorndal Bagger, Manzoni with Merda d'artista, at the Angli Shirt Factory, Heming, Denmark, November 1961, photograph. Courtesy Ole Bjorndal Bagger.

ART JOURNAL

67

Page 5: Piero Manzoni 1

68

C IeU

FIG. 5 Manzoni, Linea di lunghezza infinita (Line of Infinite Length)l 1960, wood, ink, and paper, 6/ inches high, 17/a inches diam. Courtesy Archivio Opere Piero Manzoni.

artist simultaneously taps more directly into and gives ex- pression to his unconscious and essence.13 In response to l'art informel, Manzoni engaged in activity that produced a material and physical art that expunged the "meta" from the metaphysical.14

Merda d'artista abounds in paradoxes regarding art facture in relation to individuality, uniqueness, common- ness, and mass production. Each container holds excrement, a substance producible by everyone and anyone, although the make-up of one's feces is distinctly his or her own. Manzoni's presentation of fecal matter, a substance that partakes of the universal, mass, common, individual, unique, exalted, and debased, suggests both mechanically reproduced art and product manufacture. Like most signed and numbered multi- ples, uniqueness is compromised through reproduction. Within a series, however, works of art often are not precisely identical; certainly, the composition of Manzoni's feces must vary from tin to tin. At the same time, multiples generally issue from mechanical or industrial processes, and Man- zoni's ninety cans of human waste suggest products of indus- trial manufacture, especially in their labeling with allegedly factual descriptions of their contents.

Questions about Manzoni's methods also make one wonder whether the cans truly contain shit, akin to the mystery of what makes the noise in Duchamp's With Hidden Noise (1916).15 Like Manzoni's lines on paper sealed in tubes that operate more in the realm of imagination and idea than perceivable actuality (see fig. 5), these containers of excre- ment, designed to remain closed, are ultimately conceptual. Paradoxically, Manzoni bridges two potentially polar ap- proaches: as one who often trades in material factualness, especially in the body and its substances, he is the ultimate empirical materialist. Yet as the maker of unverifiable things that deal with art and life but exist in the realm of thought and imagination, he is also a seminal conceptualist.

In his "canning" lines (prior to producing Merda d'artista), Manzoni brilliantly mixed art, commodity, and concept. Made between 1959 and 1961, each work consists of a single ink line of varying length drawn on paper, which is rolled up like a scroll and stuffed into cylindrical tubes or drums. Since the line cannot be seen, only imagined, Man- zoni catapults this fundamental component of art into the realm of thought and idea. His Linea di lunghezza infinita (Line of Infinite Length), produced in an edition of nineteen in 1960 (fig. 5), exemplifies this imaginary and conceptual status, again calling into question his procedures while suggesting his wizardry. Although some Lines have been displayed unfurled ("only for demonstration purposes," said the artist), Manzoni insisted that "the cylinders that contain them remain perfectly closed, because opening them makes them [the lines] disappear."16 "I put the line in a container so that people can buy the idea of the 'Line.' I sell an idea, an idea closed in a container."17 Like the price of his Merda d'artista based on weight indexed to the value of gold, and that of his Fiato d'artista (Artist's Breath), based on the quantity of air the artist expelled into a balloon (see fig. 9), the cost of the lines increased with their length: art sold by the meter.

Manzoni's selling of Lines of Infinite Length like other body products was not a mere marketing ploy. As an artist, he regarded line as a personal and general body product no different from his excrement or breath. From 1960 to 1962, he also made pieces consisting of inked imprints of his finger and thumb prints, body products that became art because he signed (something of a redundancy), dated, and numbered them. Ironically, signature and fingerprint provide two levels of self-reference-one artistic, the other legalistic. As marks used to establish identity, the fingerprints become absolute

FALL1993

Page 6: Piero Manzoni 1

self-portraits, since changes in likeness occur over time but fingerprints remain constant (although each imprint varies at least slightly). Manzoni again confounds issues of individu- ality and reproducibility, since some of the fingerprints are punningly prints in a series and part of a portfolio. No doubt, Manzoni regarded his body secretions and excretions as marks of his identity, aesthetic and otherwise, remarking in 1961: "The fingerprint is the unique sign of the [artistic?] personality, but one must admit: if collectors want something from the artist that is more intimate and truly personal, then the artist's shit would truly be the best."'18

As I have suggested, a major issue that Merda d'artista addresses is the relationship between art and commodity. Characteristically, Manzoni participates in and parodies this nexus. Duchamp confounded the interconnectedness of art, money, and excrement; Manzoni continued this ironic inves- tigation by assigning prices based on the current quotation for gold to Merda d'artista and by packaging it like goods sold in stores. The exploration of the commodification of art by two of his contemporaries-Yves Klein (whom Manzoni met in 1957) and Arman (whom Manzoni met the same month he executed Merda d'artista)-may have had particular impor- tance. In 1958, Klein held an exhibition at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris, titled "La Specialisation de la sensibilit a I' tat matiere premiere en sensibilite picturale stabilisde" ("The specialization of sensibility from the state of prime matter to the state of stabilized pictorial sensibility"), or "Le Vide" ("The Void"). Everything in the gallery was removed, and the interior walls were painted, or one might say, purified in white. Klein began meditating, pumping "pure pictorial sensibility" into the room, intending paradoxically to sell "immaterial paintings." Opening-night crowds arrived to a space absent of material art objects. The guests were served blue cocktails based on his unique International Klein Blue (IKB) pigment, which were intended to imbue them with the artist's aesthetic sensibility, and which would cause their urine to be blue for several days.

In a follow-up to Klein's "Void," Arman made "Le Plein" ("The Full") in 1960 at the same gallery. Instead of emptying the space, he filled it up with heaps of garbage so that his exhibition could not be entered. This exhibition/event was a dramatic example of what the artist called "accumula- tions," which involved "the pseudobiological cycle of produc- tion, consumption, and destruction," as he described it. "I have been anguished by the fact that one of its most conspic- uous material results is the flooding of our world with junk

FIG. 6 Manzoni signing Uova con impronta (Egg with Thumbprint), at the Studio Filmgiornale Sedi in Milan, for Consumazione dell'arte dinamica del pubblico divorare I'arte (Consumption of Dynamic Art by the Public Devouring Art) July 1960. In Battino and Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni: Catalogue raisonn6.

and recycled odd objects."19 Affiliated with nouveau real- isme, the European movement closest to American Pop art and assemblage, Arman probed the virulent consumption- abandonment-replacement cycle of postwar consumer tech- nological culture that so intrigued his American counter- parts. In salable and portable versions of "The Full" that sanctify waste matter in a manner akin to Manzoni's elevation of excrement, Arman also encased trash in Plexiglas enclo- sures, offering up the results as works of art.

Manzoni, however, removes the "pseudo" from Arman's pseudobiology by producing pieces that highlight not only "natural" waste but also "natural" consumption. In July 1960, Manzoni held an exhibition/event recorded on film and in photographs at the Studio Filmgiornale Sedi in Milan (although the invitation names the Galleria Azimut as the location). He boiled seventy eggs (symbols of birth and creativity), signed them with his thumbprint (art made via a magical touch), and placed each in its own lined box. He then ate several eggs himself and gave the remainder to the gallery-goers to eat (fig. 6). Entitled Consumazione dell'arte dinamica del pubblico divorare l'arte (Consumption of Dy- namic Art by the Public Devouring Art), the piece owes a debt to "The Void" of Klein. Both make reference to consumption- waste cycles, break down art-life distinctions, and allude to the magical powers of the artist, most emphatically in Klein's filling a vacant gallery with intangible "pictorial sensibility." Both impregnate the public with the sensibility and stuff of art. If the Abstract Expressionists tried to envelop the viewer in epic-sized pieces, to effect a direct transaction between viewer and art sometimes with metaphysical or spiritual pretensions; if happenings, in the spirit of ancient rituals,

ART JOURNAL

69

Page 7: Piero Manzoni 1

70

FIG. 7 Manzoni standing on Base magica (Magic Basel no. 2, becoming a Living Sculpture, at the Angli Shirt Factory, Heming,e Denmark, November 1961. In Battino and Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni: Catalogue raisonn6.

converted spectators into participants; then Manzoni and Klein carry these efforts to new heights and depths, simul- taneously involving spectators on physiological and sacra- mental levels. Manzoni, dabbler in blood and also user of bread in his Achromes, aptly called a 1961 variant of this event "Communion with Art."20

The invitation by Manzoni and Klein to eat or drink the art further emphasizes the idea of art as a commodity to be consumed. Yet this consumption fuses the viewer and the art through an act that destroys the conventional artwork as we know it. In an odd adumbration of "process" art, the only way to retain a tangible product of this experience is if the artist or the viewer/participant (converted into artist) were to preserve the urine or feces that contained the digested and then excreted cocktails or eggs, precisely as Manzoni did in

Merda d'artista. In this regard, Manzoni's Merda d'artista bizarrely exalts, rather than defies, commodification. By packaging and at times displaying it in a manner that resem- bles a common product, and by offering it at a price tied to the gold market, he enlists and also exposes the idea of art as a packageable and marketable commodity. Manzoni's cans of shit announce the identification of art with commodity in a literal and extreme way that makes other contemporaneous references to the connections among art, commodity, and everyday product via the can-namely Andy Warhol's depic- tions of cans of Campbell's soup (the earliest dating from 1960) and Jasper Johns's sculpture of ale cans (Painted Bronze, 1960)-pale by comparison.

Manzoni's pieces allude not only to the sacramental but also to the related notion of the sacrificial in art. His selection of feces refers not simply to a cycle of ingestion, digestion, and excretion, but to feces as part of an organic continuum, a fertilizer for growth. By canning the excrement, Manzoni not only produces a personal and actual version of the product- types favored by Pop artists; he also prohibits its ability to function as organic stimulus and irritant at the same time that he promotes its ability to operate as an aesthetic, cultural, and intellectual stimulus and irritant.

Merda d'artista can also be understood within the context of Freud's theories on anal eroticism, or erotism, as he called it. Germano Celant, the most trenchant analyst of Manzoni's art, was the first to suggest this nexus; later, several authors elaborated on the concept.21 Freud's theories on anal erotism appear throughout his writings, and they received further exposition and clarification in Norman O. Brown's Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, published in 1959, two years before the appear- ance of Manzoni's Merda d'artista.22 Freud argued that feces, as matter that comes from within oneself and then becomes matter outside and thus independent of oneself, is recognized by the child as his "creation." In this recognition, the child frequently uses feces for love, offering it up as a gift to those for whom he cares. As something which he makes and which becomes his own (and is not bestowed on him externally), the child perceives of feces as personal property that defines independence. The child also recognizes that this substance, often problematically received by the world, can be used aggressively, as a weapon. Thus a child's sense of mastery, power, and defiance derives initially from manip- ulation of excrement.

Manzoni's Merda d'artista partakes of the values that Freud assigned to coprophilia. The artist regards and uses feces as his own creation or art; he treats it as property by attaching monetary value to it; he understands its aggressive potential as something that can shock its audience and seem to blaspheme the practice of art.

Freud explained that as one evolves out of the stages of infant sexuality, the values attributed to feces are reattached through sublimation to other nonbodily objects. According to

FALL 1993

Page 8: Piero Manzoni 1

Freud, anal erotism moves from feces to money. But, as Brown describes it: "Sublimations are ... symbols of sym- bols. The category of property is not simply transferred from feces to money; on the contrary money is feces, because the anal erotism continues in the unconscious. The anal erotism has not been renounced or abandoned but repressed."23

In its expression of repressed impulses that unveils the mechanics of sublimation, Manzoni's wedding of feces and money takes on even greater meaning in light of Freud's theories on anal erotism. Interestingly, Manzoni recognized such correspondences, having written, probably in 1957, that since "the work of art has its origin in an unconscious impulse, . . . the artist must immerse himself in his own anxiety dredging up everything that is alien. . . . The more we immerse ourselves in ourselves, the more open we be- come, since the closer we are to the germ of our totality the closer we are to the germ of totality of all men ... there comes a point where individual mythology and universal mythology become identical."'24

These ideas reveal Manzoni's roots in l'art informel, which he would later somewhat reject. Nonetheless, they demonstrate how Merda d'artista again participates in and parodies certain contemporaneous art theories and prac- tices. As I described above, Merda d'artista, by offering an alternate art-making process that circumvents psychic im- pulses and issues from direct physical needs, appears to satirize the concept that gesturalism expresses a personal unconscious while carrying universal meaning. Yet Freud's insistence that how we handle feces (or later on money) is a key to one's character, expressing sublimated or repressed impulses embedded within one's unconscious, implies that Merda d'artista can be thought of as a psychologically pene- trating piece on a par with gestural painting.

Psychoanalytic theory further argues that creativity derives from the proper channeling of repression, a process that might be called constructive sublimation. Neurosis springs from improper channeling of repression, or destruc- tive sublimation. Consequently creativity and neurosis, both results of sublimation, resemble each other. In Totem and Taboo, Freud wrote:

Neuroses exhibit on the one hand striking and far-reaching points of agreement with those great social institutions, art, religion and philosophy. But on the other they seem like distortions of them. It might be maintained that a case of hysteria is a caricature of a work of art, that an obsessional neurosis is a caricature of a religion and a paranoic delusion is a caricature of a philosophical system.25 Merda d'artista functions as art even as it seems to caricature art, and in Manzoni's near-obsessive emphasis on his own body in his work, he exhibits narcissistic behavior charac- teristic of hysteria. Through these dualities, Manzoni sug- gests the psychoanalytic structuralism between creativity and neurosis.

Merda d'artista, as unusual as it may seem, takes on further coherence when placed within the context of Man- zoni's career, and it bears special comparison to the work of some of his contemporaries, in particular that of Yves Klein and Ben Vautier.

In 1959, Manzoni announced a direct concern with the human body and its functions in his decision to sign people's bodies as works of art, although he did not begin designating Living Sculptures until 1961. In January of that year, Manzoni "signed" people (seefig. 2) and, in a variation on the check- book, receipt, or legal contract that mixes art, life, commod- ity, and money, he issued each with a "Declaration of Authen- ticity," reading as follows: "This is to certify that - has been signed by my hand and is therefore to be considered as an authentic work of art for all intents and purposes as of the date below." He left room beneath for his signature, a geo- graphical location, and a date. Consecutively numbered ac- cording to the order in which the certificates were issued and bodies signed, the Living Sculptures, like the numbered tins of Merda d'artista, become part of a series that plays with the polarities of individuality and reproducibility. On April 8, Manzoni signed himself as a work of art, writing his own name and the word "Self-portrait" on certificate no. 004. Since Manzoni was now a work of art, or better yet, a work of "process" art, it hardly seems surprising that whatever is- sued from his body, his excrement included, might also be considered art. He made that explicit but a month later in the production of Merda d'artista.

In a similar vein in 1961, Manzoni, as part- conceptualist and part-shaman, built his first Base magica (Magic Base). Whenever a person-the artist included (fig. 7)-stood on the felt outlines of feet on the top of the base, that person was converted into a pedestaled work of art. A new twist on the relationship of portraiture to identity and likeness emerges. In this context and in that of his "self- signing," Manzoni's fingerprints, excrement, breath, and blood are not just body excretions and secretions magically transformed into art, but self-portraits that refer to sub- stances that, often in legal contexts, are used to establish identity. Fusing law and art, they make his signature, a mark used for legal identification and aesthetic authentication (es- pecially since some of Manzoni's art, like that of Duchamp, seems doable by nearly anyone), operate like another body product, one aptly associated with an artist.

Prior to Manzoni's Living Sculptures, Klein had dubbed his 1958 paint-daubed nudes "living brushes." Ben, as Vautier called himself, claims to have inaugurated Sculp- tures vivantes in 1959, but he did not actually appropriate living people as sculptures until 1961. In addition to alluding to the magical or conceptual powers of the artist, these gestures/acts/pieces take elimination of the boundary be- tween art and life to a logical and absurd extreme. Robert Rauschenberg may have tried to work in the gap between art and life; Manzoni, Klein, and Ben tried to close the gap.

ART JOURNAL

71

Page 9: Piero Manzoni 1

72

M.......... ........•'i~iiiiiiiii~iiiiill !,•.......

i ..........................

.... ................... ....

11,~i, .............

.. .. . .......................................... ..... .. i . .. .i:

i• > i• i~ • !•? •••: '•• ..................•iiiii!iiiiiiii~iii~iiiii~ii~ii•!••i!•i•iii~ iiiiiINN E R !,!, Iiiiiiii~iiii• •i i

FIG. 8 Manzoni, Corpo d'aria (Body of Air), no. 44/A, 1959-60, rubber, metal, and wood, 17/% x 163/ x 4%7/ inches. Courtesy Edizioni di Vanni Scheiwiller, Milan.

In another variation on the body in art, Manzoni made forty-five pieces labeled Corpo d'aria (Body ofAir) (fig. 8), the title of which may refer to a key substance that gives life to bodies and puns on the term of an artist's body of work, appropriate to one for whom the body played such an impor- tant role. Done between 1959 and 1960, each consists of a small wooden case housing a wrapping that contains a white balloon, a mouthpiece, a tripod, and a set of instructions. The owner can follow the instructions, blow up the balloon, and place the air-filled results on the stand to make "Air or Pneumatic Sculptures." Like his egg-eating event, which required human ingestion to create a work of art, Body ofAir requires human respiration for its realization. Expanding Duchamp's notion that art derives meaning through com- plicity between piece and spectator (and in an allusion to Du- champ's Paris Air of 1919), Manzoni's work reaches fruition through enlisting the owner/viewer in the art-making pro- cess. By request, the piece could be inflated by Manzoni (or any other artist), and then sealed and mounted on its base, inflating the price by 250 lire a liter and changing its title to Artist's Breath (fig. 9). While the work gives anyone willing to pay the price the opportunity to engage in the artist-god myth, imparting life to art through his or her breath, "real" artists are at the apex of this pantheon, and their specialness amplifies the value of the resulting art. Of course, the breath pieces relate to Merda d'artista as body products, as part of an organic continuum that here involves a cycle and inter- change of inhalation-exhalation, oxygen-carbon dioxide, animal-plant, and animate-inanimate.

Again Klein's work comes to mind, particularly his 1958 exhibition of immaterial pictorial sensibility and his 1957 display of nearly identical works assigned different prices on the basis of how much pictorial sensibility he had imparted to them. In an alchemical vein related to Manzoni's bartering of feces for gold, Klein sold his first Zone de sensibilitd picturale immat&rielle (Zone ofimmaterial pictorial sensibility) in 1959: in exchange for gold, Klein issued re- ceipts for the Zones that relate to Manzoni's "Declarations of Authenticity." The purchaser was required to burn the re- ceipts, otherwise the Zones would be expunged of their sensibility. In return, Klein promised to toss half the gold into an irretrievable place.

There are strong connections between the careers of Manzoni and Klein, although Manzoni appears to trade in the material, the measurable, and the finite, and Klein pursues the immaterial, spiritual, transcendent, and infinite. Man- zoni stands on a base; Klein flies through space. But their sensibilities are not always neatly divided between the finite and infinite, and they share a certain ambitiousness. In 1948, Klein, Arman, and Claude Pascal divided up the world, Klein signing, in his imagination, the back of the blue sky as his work of art. In the post-Sputnik era of 1961, Manzoni (who proposed drawing a "Line" around the earth and producing a series of "Lines" equal in total to its circum- ference) inverted one of his Magic Bases and placed it on the ground, calling it Socle du monde (Base of the World) (fig. 10).

Never to be outdone, Ben made a career of partaking in and parodying the notion of the body and the world as art.

FALL 1993

Page 10: Piero Manzoni 1

FIG. 9 Manzoni making Fiato d'artista (Artist's Breath) in his studio, 1962. In Battino and Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni: Catalogue raisonnd.

St 40

Page 11: Piero Manzoni 1

74

IV i47 :?f4;1

•i.• •:?•?K

FIG. 10 Manzoni, Socle du monde (Base of the 1orld) 1961, iron and bronze, 32% x 39% x 39% inches. Herning Kunstmuseum, Denmark.

Like Manzoni's self-signing as a Living Sculpture and his ascension to art standing atop his Magic Base, Ben made himself available for sale as a "living, moving sculpture" in 1962. In a nod to Manzoni's art of ingestion and excretion, Ben's own eating and vomiting became works in 1964 and 1962 respectively. In 1961, the pope and his actions were Ben's living sculpture, three years after he displayed a box and a ping-pong ball, each titled God. As part of his "total art" concept, the absence of art and that which is not art became his art in 1962 and 1963. Ben became the equivalent of art in 1963. He signed everything as his work of art in 1960 and claimed the destruction of all art in 1964. Death became his art in 1961, and he used that precedent to "sign" as his work Klein's death in 1962 and Manzoni's death on February 6, 1963.26 In this spirit, Ben made Manzoni a part of the birth-death-rebirth cycle and the life-art fusion that so mes-

merized Manzoni. For Manzoni, life was art, and waste, as if risen from the dead, could become art. For Ben, death was also art, and in a reference to the cliche that an artist's output outlives his life, Manzoni is resurrected, his death living on as a work of art.27 Manzoni allegedly proclaimed: "I will die when I am 33 (like Christ). I want to arrange for a commemo- rative postage stamp with my portrait on it. I want to arrange for my body to be closed up in a transparent plastic paral- lelepiped [for display as art]."28 Several years prematurely, Ben imparted to Manzoni the aesthetic immortality he craved and made him the embodiment of the artist-god myth he so often invoked.

Notes This essay is based on a paper of the same title presented at the 1990 College Art Association annual conference in New York City for the session "Scatology and Art," first proposed by Richard Martin and ultimately chaired by Gabriel Weisberg. I want

FALL 1993

Page 12: Piero Manzoni 1

to thank Jennifer Kahane and Julia Shirar for their help in the preparation of the essay. Others who generously provided assistance and information include Pia Candinas, Germano Celant, Manuela Proietti, and Shara Wasserman. I am particularly grateful to Contessa Elena Manzoni and the Archivio Opere Piero Manzoni and to Freddy Battino and Luca Palazzoli for their cooperation in providing material for this article. Translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated. 1. Salvador Dali, preface to Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 13-14. Although Dali has some of his facts wrong- Manzoni was not from Verona, had died five years earlier, and sold only his own excrement-his reference must still be to Manzoni. Interestingly, in a letter to Ben Vautier of 1961, Manzoni wrote: "I would like that all artists sell their fingerprints... or else sell their shit in tins"; reproduced in Freddy Battino and Luca Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni: Catalogue raisonnd (Milan: Edizioni di Vanni Scheiwiller, 1991), 144. 2. Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 69. 3. Maurice Denis, Journal, 3 vols. (Paris: La Colombe, 1957-59), 2:212. 4. See Vanni Scheiwiller, Piero Manzoni, gallery pamphlet (Milan: Gallery Schwarz, 1964), n.p.; quoted in Jean Pierre Criqui, "Piero Manzoni and His Left-Overs," in Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni, exh. cat. (Paris: Muse dArt de la Ville de Paris, 1991), 21. In 1991, Celant, the leading authority on Manzoni, organized a major retrospective of his work in Paris. The catalogue contains several excellent essays, and Criqui's deals substantively with Manzoni's Merda d'artista. 5. Sigmund Freud, "Character and Anal Erotism," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works: 9. 1906-1908, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), 174. 6. Arthur Cravan, "Exhibition at the Independents (1914)," in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1989), 12. 7. Marcel Duchamp, "La Boite de 1914," in Michel Sanouillet with Elmer Peterson, eds., Duchamp du signe (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 37. 8. Nancy Spector, "A Temporary Blindness: Piero Manzoni and America," in Celant, Piero Manzoni, 43, n. 21. Duchamp alluded to money in other works including Tzanck Check (1919), Wanted/S2,000 Reward (1923), and Monte Carlo Bond (1924). Even Fountain includes a sly monetary reference. Denying that the signature R. Mutt on Fountain referred to the German word Armut, meaning poverty, Duchamp explained that the "R." stood for Richard: "That's not a bad name for a 'pissoti're' [sic]. Get it? The opposite of poverty." Richard is a French slang term for "money-bags." See Otto Hahn, "Passport No. G255300," Art and Artists 1, no. 4, (1966): 10. 9. Duchamp created other scatological puns and word plays, including: "Autobio- graphique-Ma m6re adore l'odeur/de ma merde-/ma m6re adore l'odar/de ma merde," which confounds associations among maternal love, bodily fluids, creation, and perhaps art; quoted in Seymour Howard, "Duchamp, Dali, Tzara, and Dadist Coprophilia," in Abstracts and Programs Statements/1990 College Art Association Annual Conference (New York: College Art Association, 1990), 48. Others have been noted in the English-language version of Duchamp du signe (see note 7 above), titled Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du Sel) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), esp. "Rrose S61avy & Co.," 103-20. 10. For a fascinating and exhaustive account of the use of feces and other bodily fluids throughout history in a wide range of areas and cultures, see John G. Bourke, Scatalogic Rites ofAll Nations (Washington, D.C.: W. H. Lowdermilk and Co., 1891). For a reprint, Freud wrote a foreword that addresses the connections between feces and money; see ibid. (New York: American Anthropological Society, 1934), vii-ix. 11. Piero Manzoni, "Prolegomena for an Artistic Activity," written in March 1957 and first published in a pamphlet for his one-man show at the Galleria del Corriere della Provincia in Como in December 1957. See Celant, Piero Manzoni, 67. 12. This photograph does not record the original making of Merda d'artista, which occurred in Milan in May 1961. It was taken in Herning, Denmark, by Ole Bjorndal Bagger at the Angli Shirt Factory, where Manzoni was provided with a studio during an exhibition of his work at the Galerie Kopcke in Herning in October 1961. Examples of Merda d'artista were shown; see Battino and Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni: Catalogue raisonnd, 139. Not long after he produced Merda d'artista in Italy, Manzoni made a trip to Paris. He brought along examples of the piece, according to artist Bernard Aubertin, who recounts Manzoni's probably tongue-in-cheek reference to his working methods: "When I knocked on the door of his [Manzoni's] room, he was coming out of the hotel toilet. . . . He simply said. . . . 'I was in the toilet working, in order to have Artist's Shit to sell. If the possible buyer of one of my cans of shit finds the price too high, I propose selling him my shit at the weight he wants, wrapped in a sheet of toilet paper, after having removed it from the toilet bowl with a small spoon' "; Bernard Aubertin, "Sur Piero Manzoni," Robho 3 (Spring 1968): n.p. In 1962, Manzoni signed a roll of toilet paper as art. 13. Manzoni named Pollock one of the great artists because of"an attitude toward life: the will, the power of the art: the freedom of invention" (Piero Manzoni, "Da Milano," 11 Pensiero Nazionale 21, Rome: November 1, 1959); reproduced in Battino and Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni: Catalogue raisonnd, 55. In Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, a controversial book regarded skeptically by many art historians, the authors link Pollock's idiosyncratic dripping and pouring of paint directly onto canvases placed on the floor to childhood recollections of his father making patterns as he urinated on a rock. Asserting that Pollock associated this act on unconscious levels with male potency and employed the drip technique to compensate for his impotence,

they report that the artist was obsessed with micturition throughout his life. See Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), 541. 14. If Manzoni parodies the gestural wing of Abstract Expressionism in Bagger's shot of him smirking as he exits the bathroom (see note 12 above), he may elsewhere be addressing the less autographic wing of the movement. In photographs taken by Giovanni Ricci in 1961 (see Battino and Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni: catalogue raisonni, figs. 327, 347), Manzoni reverentially admires his canned creation as if something sublime, adumbrating Hans Namuth's 1964 image of Mark Rothko contemplating his own supposedly sublime art (see Brian O'Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth [New York: Random House], 182-83). 15. There are rumors that cans have been opened to reveal pineapple, not shit. In recent correspondence, Germano Celant assured me that the rumors are false. 16. Wladimiro Greco, "8 Domande al pittore Manzoni," Il Travaso 39, Milan: October 5, 1959; reproduced in Battino and Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni: Catalogue raisonr, 51. 17. Jens Jorgen Thorsen, "Han saelger ideer pa dde," Aktuelt, Copenhagen: June 20, 1960; reproduced in ibid., 92. 18. Manzoni letter to Ben (December 1961); reproduced in ibid., 144. 19. Henry Martin, Arman, or Four and Twenty Blackbirds Baked in a Pie, or Why Settlefor Less When You Can Settle for More (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1973), 56. Prior to their 1961 meeting, Manzoni and Arman, as members of the Gruppo Nucleare, were among the signatories of the 1957 "Manifesto against Style." 20. The relationship between possession and consumption of art and artists, also implying that artists and their output are devoured by their audience, establishes particular affinities with the work of Jasper Johns and Claes Oldenburg. Interestingly, Oldenburg wrote: "I am for an art.., which is eaten, like a piece of pie, or abandoned with great contempt, like a piece of shit"; from the catalogue for the exhibition "Environments, Situations, Space," at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, which opened the same month Manzoni made Merda d'artista, quoted in Barbara Rose, Claes Oldenburg, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 190. Manzoni himself praised an exhibition of "edible art" held in March 1961 at the Studio Gruppo N in Padua. 21. No serious discussion of Manzoni's work is possible without acknowledging Celant, whose many writings remain a brilliant and provocative source. His most comprehensive study of Merda d'artista and anal erotism can be found in Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni: Catologo generale (Milan: Prearo Editore, 1975), 52-55. See also Criqui, "Piero Manzoni and His Left-Overs," 21-26; Giorgio di Genova, "Discorso scatologico sull'arte," Terzo Occhio (May 1978): 1-6; and Spector, "A Temporary Blindness: Piero Manzoni and America," 39-45. 22. Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), esp. part 5, "Studies in Anality," and in particular chap. 13, "The Excremental Vision." 23. Ibid., 191. 24. Piero Manzoni, "For the Discovery of a Zone of Images," (1957?), see Piero Manzoni: Paintings, Reliefs, and Objects, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1974), 16-17. 25. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points ofAgreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), 73. In 1957 Manzoni wrote that "the artist.., discovers new totems and taboos of which his age possesses the seeds, but not the awareness" (my emphasis). See Manzoni, "Prolegomena for an Artistic Activity," 67. 26. In a letter to Ben of December 1961, Manzoni wrote "I am truly enthusiastic about your work," making specific reference to "god in a box" and noting their similar endeavors in making "living sculptures." In an apparent reference to Ben's Mourir est une oeuvre d'art (Death is a work ofart) of 1961, Manzoni mentions his own proposal of enclosing dead people (including himself) in transparent plastic blocks for display as art. 27. Ben chose wisely. Manzoni's role and legacy can be detected in a variety of developments, such as happenings/performance/body, Pop, minimalism, conceptual- ism, deconstruction, appropriation, process, systemic, and earthworks, to mention several. Merda d'artista itself lives on as a fecund and fertile object and concept; artists probably indebted to it include Kiki Smith, John Miller, and Mary Kelly. Kelly paid Manzoni a humorous and fitting homage in a project forArtforum that fantasizes a future excavation of tin-canned art reminiscent of Manzoni's entombed line in a drum, and of course, Merda d'artista; archaeologists attempt an attribution, naming Italian artist Cannzoni as the innovator of this type of art. See Mary Kelly, "Magiciens de la Mer(d): Musde d'art subalterranden," Artforum 29, no. 5 (1991): 89-92. 28. Artist Giovanni Anceschi, a friend of Manzoni, is the source for this remark; see Battino and Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni: Catalogue raisonnu, 161. See also note 26 above.

GERALD SILK, associate professor at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, is a member of the editorial board of Art Journal and has published widely on modern art.

ART JOURNAL

75