Piero Manzoni
"Piero Manzoni" by Joseph R. Wolin, Fall 2009, pp. 134-135
Piero Manzoni, the puckish, baby-faced Italian, has long been beloved by art students everywhere for his Merda d’artista (1961), 90 small cans of what was purportedly his own shit, sold at the time for the price of their weight in gold. (Were the medium in actuality what the artist claimed, the mind boggles at the malodorous mechanics involved: how was it collected and stored? Where was it canned and by whom? How long did it take to fill 90 tins?) Yet despite his status as a bad boy of art history and an icon, along with Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein, of the postwar European avant-garde, Manzoni remains more known than seen in North America, and this exhibition at Gagosian represents the first full-scale retrospective of his work in the western hemisphere.
Manzoni’s career was remarkably short; he died at the age of 30 in 1963. In the brief span of seven years, however, he managed to create copious amounts of stuff—writings and ephemera as well as art objects, performances, films and architectural proposals—much of which was gathered together here, including 16 of the Merda d’artista cans, displayed in a vitrine. Also on view was a broad selection of the artist’s Achromes, a series of monochrome works in various whites and offwhites. These began as plaster reliefs or “paintings” of kaolin-soaked fabric on canvas that resembled the drapery of classical statuary. Later Achromes incorporated a range of then-radical materials: cotton balls and batting, fake fur, Styrofoam and bread rolls. Some of these have since discoloured or disintegrated; others now look quaintly dated, like shag carpeting or sheepskin vests.
The curator, Germano Celant, has lovingly larded the show with works by Manzoni’s contemporaries, providing a visual record of affinities and mutual influences: single-hued canvases by Fontana, Klein, Rauschenberg, Fautrier, Kusama, Stella and Ryman make a persuasive argument for the centrality of the Achromes to the artistic debates of Manzoni’s day. Unfortunately, Celant’s exhaustiveness also accounts for the exhibition’s primary flaw. The sheer amount of material, presented in bulk and with multiple examples of very similar objects, sometimes makes the show seem—especially in the context of Chelsea, one of the world’s foremost mercantile emporiums of art—more like a storeroom of commercial inventory than the museum-type presentation it clearly aspires to be.
For all his notoriety as a provocateur, thanks to works like the Merda d’artista, or his importance as a theory-minded materialist, with the Achromes, Manzoni may have been best as a kind of lyrical conceptualist. Two of his Magic Bases, empty pedestals upon which anyone who stepped would instantly be designated a living sculpture, stand in the exhibition alongside a third, Socle du monde (1961), an iron-and-bronze box with its title inscribed on one side, similar in appearance to Tony Smith’s coeval steel cubes, one of which sits nearby. Placed upside down on the floor or in the field where it originally stood, the pedestal poetically becomes a base for the world, turning the entire earth into a sculpture, specifically one by Manzoni. Now there’s a work that would make any artist proud.
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