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 finished work of some of the artists associated with Abstract Expressionism, Tachisme, and l'art informel (of which Manzoni'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 Anthropometries in 1960. Under Klein's direction, nude females basted themselves in paint and then rubbed their bodies against canvases, leaving haunting smears and imprints. In 1960, at the Galerie Internationale dart Contemporain in Paris, under the title Anthropometries de l'epoque bleue, Klein and his lady "brushes" publicly performed the procedure to the strains of his appropriately and punningly titled Symphonie montone--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 surrounding action painting was being challenged, deconstructs the myth that in the existentialist translation of aspects of Surrealist automatism into bold, muscular gestures, the artist simultaneously taps more directly into and gives expression 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, commonness, 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 multiples, 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 Manzoni's ninety cans of human waste suggest products of industrial 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 excrement, designed to remain closed, are ultimately conceptual. Paradoxically, Manzoni bridges two potentially polar approaches: 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.

           Left, Rabbit Feces on canvas by Monique Laurent

 

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, Manzoni 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 self-portralts, since changes in likeness occur over time but fingerprints remain constant (although each imprint varies at least slightly). Manzoni again confounds issues of individuality 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)

Oxidation painting Andy Warhol

 

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 investigation 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 importance. In 1958, Klein held an exhibition at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris, titled "La Specialisation de la sensibilite a l'etat matiere premiere en sensibilite picturale stabillsee" '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.

 

 

Continue      Part III 

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