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 "accumulations," which involved "the pseudobiological cycle of production, consumption, and destruction," as he described it. "I have been anguished by the fact that one of its most conspicuous material results is the flooding of our world with junk and recycled odd objects.(19) Affiliated with nouveau realisme, the European movement closest to American Pop art and assemblage, Arman probed the virulent consumption-abandonment-replacement cycle of postwar consumer technological culture that so intrigued his American counterparts. 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 enclosures, 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 Vig. 6). Entitled Consumazione dell'arte dinamica del pubblico divorare l'arte (Consumption of Dynamic Art by the Public Devouringart), 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, converted spectators into participants; then Manzoni and Klein carry these efforts to new heights and depths, simultaneously involving spectators on physiological and sacramental levels. Manzoni, dabbler in blood and also user of bread in his Achrontes, aptly called a 1961 variant of this event "Communion with Art."(20)

Pissed Off
1981

This series of photographs documents Hammons urinating on a steel sculpture by Richard Serra. The sculpture, installed in Lower Manhattan, is re-territorialised by Hammons' action. Hammons is arrested for urinating in public during this performance.

 

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 resembles 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 depictions 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 appearance 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 manipulation 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 Freud, anal erotism moves from feces to money. But, as Brown describes it: "Sublimations are . . . symbols of symbols. 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 become, 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 practices. As I described above, Merda d'artista, by offering an alternate art-making process that circumvents psychic impulses 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 penetrating piece on a par with gestural painting.

     Kiki Smith Peabody

Pissing Thing
1992
Mixed media, water pump

 

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 destructive 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 characteristic of hysteria. Through these dualities, Manzoni suggests 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 Manzoni'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 (see fig. 2) and, in a variation on the checkbook, receipt, or legal contract that mixes art, life, commodity, and money, he issued each with a "Declaration of Authenticity," 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 geographical location, and a date. Consecutively numbered according 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 issued 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 substances 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 (especially 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.

 

These nice older women were asking me how I’d done them and I didn’t have the heart to tell them what they really were because their noses were right up against them. Andy Warhol

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 Sculptures 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 between 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.

In another variation on the body in art, Manzoni made forty-five pieces labeled Corpo d'aria (Body of Air) (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 important role. Done between 1959 aznd 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 of air requires human respiration for its realization. Expanding Duchamp's notion that art derives meaning through complicity between piece and spectator (and in an allusion to Duchamp's Paris Air of 1919), Manzoni's work reaches fruition through enlisting the owner/viewer in the art-making process. 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 interchange of inhalation-exhalation, oxygen-carbon dioxide, animal-plant, and animate-inanimate.

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