Piero Manzoni (1933-1963), a conceptual artist based in Milan, Italy, used his practise to reflect, challenge and critique his cultural environment. Only practising for six years (1957-63), it has been argued that it is hard to place Manzoni in an artistic framework and half a century later, his ideas are still to be fully explored.[1] However, while his reputation has been distorted on the lingering presence of his humour, he was philosophically rich and confident in responding to contemporary concerns.[2] Furthermore, Manzoni’s work can be deconstructed with the historical hindsight of economic, cultural and artistic pressures of Italy in the late 1950s and early 1960s.[3] His innovative practise unravelled ideas on the value of the commodified object, art in the commercial sphere and capitalism’s effect on the body during Italy’s industrial revolution, the ‘Economic Miracle’. Additionally, his work responded to contemporary art transitioning from modernism’s gestural focus to postmodern art concepts through reflecting on avant-garde movements of the early 20th century and reconsidering the role of artist, process, product and audience. Furthermore, this essay attempts to interpret Manzoni’s work and apprehend his short career through honouring context over content through socio-political, economical and artistic interpretations.

    To effectively assess Manzoni’s artistic personality and practise, infamous for extreme ambivalence and difficult interpretation, he must be firstly placed within his social world. Manzoni was an individual influenced by the Milanese political social scene, frequenting bars of left-wing art critics and political artists.[4] His constantly evolving political alignments included an anti-violence opposition to Fascism, not believing in God and being sympathetic, but critical, of Communism’s values.[5] However, politics were not central to his artistic practise as he essentially followed the Milanese trend of political engagement in the social sphere.[6] Furthermore, the absent political references in his art could be a deliberate attempt to undermine the more assertive voices from leftist figures in his circles.[7]  Also, as a member of an elite family and social class, the non-conformist political attitudes of his art reflected an ambivalence intrinsic to his privileged background.[8] Additionally, he was also invested in contemporary philosophical thought which underlined his artistic practice. Training in philosophy with a focus on Kierkegaard’s existentialism theories, he articulated himself extensively in manifestos which explored the concept of art, the role of the artist and his preoccupation with bodily functions.[9] His philosophical sentiments were further expressed through collaboration with a larger circle of Milanese writers, artists and gallerists.[10] This included co-editing the magazine Azimuth with his friend Enrico Castellani which explored radical artistic practice through theoretical musings from local and international artists.[11] Moreover, despite Celent’s argument that Manzoni cannot be analysed socially, culturally or historically, his high level of social, political and philosophical interaction in Milan greatly influenced his artistic temperament and practise.[12]

    As a local to Milan, Manzoni’s artistic career was subject to radical changes affecting Italian culture which produced societal anxieties inseparable from his work. Traditionally an agricultural dominant country with stagnated development, the industrialisation of the late 1950s, christened the ‘Economic Miracle’, forced the Italian people to promptly modernise.[13] Additionally, Northern Italy, Manzoni’s home and the concentrated corner of the ‘Economic Miracle’, underwent mass migration which caused significant cultural turmoil.[14] As an effect of industrialisation, consumer culture rose and the idealisation of tradition declined, altering the Italian way of life.[15] However, the rapid change caused Italian people, including artists, to longingly embrace tradition, folklore and peasantry, leading to common references to the fantasy Medieval Land of Cockaigne.[16] A utopia of abundance and freedom, the Land of Cockaigne was a reversal of industrialised society which honoured the ‘low’ aspects of life (food, drink, defecation, digestion and sexuality); elements nostalgically referenced by Manzoni.[17] Moreover, Manzoni’s Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit) investigated traditions of the past through the simple foolishness of carnival laughter combining “low culture” faecal matter with subservice humour to minimise his industrial fears.[18] However, despite his anxieties, he reaped the rewards of post-war economy in the Danish township of Hering, near Copenhagen, which was experiencing a flourishing textile industry.[19] One manufacturer, Aage Damgaard, provided artist residencies in his clothes factory in return for some works left behind.[20]  Damgaard, excited by Manzoni’s work, invited him to use a large studio, involving him in as another artist in a reciprocal exchange of using industrial advancements for artistic freedom. [21] This exemplifies that Manzoni, in his work and practise, resisted and embraced new economic circumstances. Reflecting, moreover, his cultural and historical position as a commonplace citizen in Italy during a turbulent time, navigating and responding to the effects of cultural change.

    As a result of rapid industrialisation, Manzoni used his artistic practise to question the commodity’s value. As Italian society began to try consumer goods for the first time in effect of ‘the Economic Miracle’, Manzoni critiqued the rise of mass consumption and the unsubstantiated value ascribed to commodities.[22]  Mocking unsophisticated consumption habits, Manzoni’s work, including Merda d’artista and the hardboiled eggs he fed to his audience, reference how mass-produced commodities perpetrate the myth that anything can be of intrinsic value.  In Merda d’artista, Manzoni comments on how mass production minimises the individuality and uniqueness of objects. The faeces, the artist’s own unique creations, vary between tins but are consistently presented in their mass-produced packaging.[23] Each can, in four languages, has printed the artist’s name, it’s individualised number, “30 grams net”, “made in Italy”, “freshly produced and tinned on May 1961”; all details which make the item unexceptional under the gaze of the object fatigued consumer.[24] The tins assume value only through faith of what is in inside despite being entirely unknown, reflective of how the modern consumer is fooled by the serially produced commodity.[25] Furthermore, when critiquing value during the ‘Economic Miracle’s turbulence, Manzoni reasons that objects are neither permanent or exclusive when industrially manufactured. His thumb printed eggs, in which his audience ate within 70 minutes, highlight the temporary nature of commodities, existing for those in the world and leaving no trace for the next generation.[26] The confused state over new notions of value was a product of Manzoni’s economic environment within a culture coming to terms with the rise of capitalism. Moreover, his works can be categorised as a response to this economic dilemma in both satirical and serious terms. Manzoni’s mockery and questioning of value followed him to his grave, with his French contemporary, Ben Vautier, signing his death certificate to give it intrinsic value as a work of art.[27]

     Manzoni followed a line of inquiry and criticism on the changing economy in Italy, stipulating that through ascribing value to objects, art merely becomes another commodity. It can be argued that Manzoni was influenced by the Marxist theory that the flawed status of the commodity in a capitalist economy results from the separation between the labourers and the goods they produce.[28] Moreover, acknowledging that art existed in an exceedingly commodified economic system, Manzoni was preoccupied with how any object could be transformed into art and commercialised.[29] In post-war capitalism, any aesthetic object could be transformed into a reified commodity, causing art to be increasingly equated with money; a notion that Manzoni recurrently explored, such as valuing Merda d’artista at the price of gold.[30] The scrutiny of the commodification of art was also explored by his contemporary, Arman, who filled a gallery with garbage to condemn the rising consumption culture within art spaces.[31] Moreover, there was anxiety that artistic production was becoming inseparable from the market, entwining art and commodity, with or without artist consent.[32] Nevertheless, Manzoni rebelled against the rising commercialisation of art through insulting both modern buyer and artist. Manzoni produced 90 copies of Merda d’artista each numbered and signed with his name to antagonise multiples appearing in the art market which encouraged the commodification of art.[33] This method also commented that artists could produce copies of literal “crap” whose value was only associated with the brand of the artist’s name on the label.[34] Moreover, Manzoni reproached art becoming a commercial entity, fundamentally anticipating the 1960’s conceptual art movement’s mockery of capitalism’s arrogant marketing.[35]

    Manzoni extended his inquisition of the economy through expressing the infinities between art, commodification and the body. The use of the body in 1960s Italian art by Manzoni and his circle has been explained to be a form of expressive culture coming to terms with modern art’s exclusion of the body.[36] However, it can be understood as an attempt to highlight the physical nature of the body’s economic consumption.[37] Moreover, art’s commodity status, initiated through its packaging and marketing strategies, is extended to the body through its consumption.[38] The body’s connection to consuming art as a commodity is implied by the nature of the food tin in Merda d’artista and also exemplified in a similar nature in Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and Jasper John’s Ale Cans in the early 1960s.[39] Going beyond the questionable commercialisation of art, Manzoni announced in 1959 he would begin to use the human body impelled by a curiosity for the interchangeability of art, economy and body.[40] Capitalism’s influence over the body prompted Manzoni to use the body as a the site and subject of art for its ability to speak about biopolitical elements and commercial mediation.[41] For instance, in April 1961, Manzoni signed people’s bodies in Living Sculptures to suggest that the body actively consumes art in a capitalist market.[42] Through issuing participants a “certificate of authenticity” which certified that they were, “an authentic and true work of art”, their individuality was stripped as their body was recognised as a commercial object through becoming commodified according to the value of art.[43] Moreover, the physicality of economic consumption reduces the body to a commercial entity and, as seen in Manzoni’s performance piece, can be further subject to commodification through the power of the increasingly capitalised nature of art.

    Manzoni’s work was subject to the resurgence of theories from early twentieth century avant-garde movements prior to their revival by postmodernist art in the 1960s. Despite theories that Manzoni’s work was an enigmatic last grasp on modernist painting, it is more plausible he drew upon avant-garde theories and ideas.[44] Moreover, rather than sentimentalising modernism, Manzoni used avant-garde and Dada’s theories to attack modern art’s obsolete and futile composition’s expression and unconscious allusions.[45]  It is evident that Manzoni and his contemporaries, such as Ben and Klein, were inspired by avant-garde’s anti-style and anti-thesis of populism through the rejection of stylistic expectations.[46] Just prior to its widespread revival, they used avant-garde to search for ways to demystify the process of making art drawing upon its offensive and insulting rhetoric while disregarding its unserious and deliberately stupid humour.[47] Manzoni, in particular, used avant-garde’s framework of radical strategies rejecting traditional ideas of order, intelligibility and success to pave a new role for the artist’s physical and intellectual gestures.[48] Additionally, Manzoni’s work illustrates Dada’s use of nonconventional techniques and media, similar to Duchamp’s use of a castaway urinal signed and named Fountain, to alter traditional understandings of creativity and human expression.[49] Moreover, believing that he was the heir to the Dada movement, he paralleled Duchamp’s use of the playfully vulgar and anti-aesthetic to make art both abstract and physical.[50] Conclusively, Manzoni’s anti-aesthetic and nonconventional work can be understood as taking part of a radical art movement that began with artists like Duchamp fifty years earlier and continued to be revived and reimagined in art movements of the 1960s.[51]

    Manzoni’s use of the eccentric subject matter of faeces can be contextualised through his response to art movements predating him and his elaboration on preceding ideas to express his creative philosophies. His artistic expressions were deliberated through the infusion of ideas of body functions and art started by Freud, Futurism and Dadaism and combined with the theatrics of avant-garde.[52] For instance, Duchamp’s expression of the affinities between art, money and faecal matter, such as his sadistic and eroticised interpretation of Mona Lisa’s smile as a response to her bowel movements, influenced Manzoni’s idea that art is nothing but performing natural functions, even with the involvement of bodily fluids.[53] Moreover, despite the shock-value and unique attributions of l’Artist d’Merda, his logic drew upon pre-existing artistic axes which he elaborated on according to his own interests.[54] Artists such as Cezanne, Ezra Pound and Duchamp had played with the idea of the relationship between artist and their faeces,[55] with Duchamp saying in 1914, “Art is to art as ‘shitte’ (or the shit) is to shit.”[56] Additionally, Pound commented that because anything associated with an artist can be considered art, an artist’s body waste would soon be served on a silver platter as art. [57] Manzoni deliberately, although somewhat paradoxically, put this idea into practise through asserting that whatever the artist creates is intrinsically valuable, through selling his faeces for the weight of gold.[58] However, he developed the concept through keeping the faeces inside of a sealed tin labelled with his name: keeping the artist’s work invisible while implying its artistic merit and value through symbolic labelling.[59] This exemplifies how his unconventional practises can be understood through elaboration on past ideas, such as avant-garde’s theatrics and Dada’s anti-aesthetics and use of vulgar materials, to create risky and innovative art that would shock audiences in contrast to conventional art practises.[60]

    However, despite abundant references to avant-garde, Manzoni aimed to differentiate himself from prior movements and create a new way of thinking through open artistic experimentation and a plurality of artistic languages.[61] However, he did not invent his techniques and tactics but obtained them through seeking art of the present with a keen sense of design and an innovative spirit.[62] Between his first group show in 1956 and his death in 1963, his practise coincided with the decline of gestural painting in search for an alternative, as was also attempted by his contemporaries Fontana, Klein, Stella, Ryman, Baj and Scarpitta.[63] For instance, Fontana’s cut and punctures were, simply put, a comment on the gesture and process of making art and the resulting product.[64] Manzoni, also participated in contemporary art theories and practises which challenged the processes of making art characteristic of gesturalism.[65] Arguably, he antagonises gestural painting’s reference to the repressed unconscious in Merda d’artista through suggesting that culture suppresses impulses and psychological penetrations associated with handling faeces.[66] Moreover, contemporary art practises implied that the process of making art was as important as the result, exemplified ironically by Klein’s Anthropometrie being ‘painted’ quickly and ridiculously by nude models covering themselves in paint and rubbing their bodies against canvases.[67] Moreover, Manzoni’s Merda d’artista plays on the rhetoric surrounding the gesture of painting, that art is created through muscular motions and physical urges and that the process of creation is ultimately linked to the product.[68] Seemingly, Manzoni had significant connections to contemporary art movements challenging the practises of gesturalism. However, this is not representative of his complete oeuvre, as he did not identify with the group and was a single author in the art market who challenged traditional boundaries.[69] Nevertheless, despite his singularity, his nonconventional concepts and role as an artist infiltrated art theory and influenced the movements that followed in succeeding decades.[70]

    In the practice of challenging artistic frameworks and engaging with innovative methods, Manzoni contested the traditional role of the artist through articulating his presence in his work.[71] While he drew upon avant-garde’s rejection of preceding artistic practises, like Duchamp’s rebuttal of Cubism, he aimed to not rely on insurrection as a comfortable mannerism and extended his conceptual journey to experimenting with the role of the artist.[72] In considering the modern artist, Manzoni believed they were strained by “extraneous details and useless gestures” and were preoccupied by artistic trends.[73]  Moreover, he believed artists needed to rid their art of hedonism and vagueness to enable authentic direct expression from artist to spectator.[74] Additionally, his revisionist analysis of the artist was interwoven with ideas on the increasing collapse between life and art caused by the commercialisation of the aesthetic object.[75] In understanding the increasing parallels between art and life, Manzoni searched for the possibility, or lack of, artistic subjectivity in producing art.[76] To accomplish this, he attempted to combine the role of the artist in the artistic process and the product, through signing bodies in Living Sculptures and selling parts of himself in Merda d’artista. Moreover, Manzoni used the performance ritual to increase spectacle elements and bring attention to the presence of the artist and their ambition, scope, radicalism, irony and complexity.[77] Moreover, Manzoni was aware of the artist’s presence in the world and attempted to express this complexity through exhibiting himself and others as works of art.[78]

    Manzoni reformed the characterisation of the artist through fixating his own omnipresence in his works.[79] His manifesto, “Some Realisations, Some Experiments, Some Projects” show a preoccupation of entering his work, listing his ideas and projects: putting his thumb-print on a hardboiled egg in which the public had to swallow, signing people with his own hand for exhibition, providing people with a magic base in which he could make them art, tinning his own faeces and also thinking about producing phials of his “artist’s blood.”[80] Moreover, to effectively utilise the presence of the artist’s body in art, he used bodily functions as markers of artistic self-identity in a market where lines between artist, economy and object were merging.[81]  His use of personal substances, such as oxygen, faeces, body imprints and blood, allude to the magical powers of the artist in being able to create the aesthetic object out of their own being, crossing the divide between art and life.[82] Moreover, through this egotistical perspective, he fundamentally credited the artist with a god-like role through giving himself more power as the creator of art than traditionally owed. Manzoni, as well as Ben, relied on the role of the artist’s body giving authentication to their art; throughout their careers, whatever the two artists touched through with their signature or the bodily fluids they produced and exhibited, supported the artist-god myth through the link between art, artist and process.[83] The power of the artist’s genius was also exemplified in Klein’s ‘Le Vide’ exhibition. Klein served blue cocktails to his guests, based on the infamous blue pigment used in his paintings, which infiltrated them with his artistic aesthetic sensibility turning their urine blue for several days.[84]  Additionally, Manzoni’s use of artist omnipresence established his artistic identity in a real-world vernacular context contradicting and diminishing his god-like status, such as his fingerprints on eggs referring to legalistic identifications of self.[85] Moreover, through re-establishing the role of the artist, Manzoni and other artists attempted to question the artist’s status and artistic power as well as their place in the world.

    Through revising the role of the artist as both a performer and spectacle of the artistic process, Manzoni consequently reversed the contemplative role of the spectator to actively intervene in the artistic process.[86] The transaction between viewer and art began with the spiritual involvement of the Abstract Expressionist’s enveloping works and, likewise, Manzoni and his contemporaries, continued this exchange through converting the spectator into a participant through physiological and sacramental levels.[87] This was another measure of accepting, challenging and reinforcing the increasingly invisible divide between life and art through giving the audience an active means of realising the artist’s philosophies.[88] For instance, in July 1960 Manzoni invited the public to, as was outlined on the invitation, “visit and collaborate directly in the consuming of the works of Piero Manzoni” in which Manzoni offered boiled eggs with his thumbprint for the public to eat.[89]  This allowed the public, who would traditionally spectate the product of an artistic process, to engage with art as if it is an activity and that the product is just a remnant of the event, as the egg-shells were following the exhibition.[90] Moreover, Manzoni’s public involvement, such as signing live people in Living Sculptures, was characteristic of how artists were involving their audiences in the moment of art, such as Ben also signing people’s bodies and Klein’s Anthropometrie involvement of orchestra, audience observers and models.[91]  Redefining the observer summarises and exemplifies Manzoni’s attempt to reduce the dichotomy between life and art. Moreover, it illustrates his understanding of the infinite possibilities within the language of art through intense experimentation to change the roles of object, artist and audience.[92]

    Fontana, who enjoyed an artistic friendship with Manzoni, commented that Manzoni’s work would not be fully understood until 100 years had passed.[93] Nevertheless, historical hindsight of social, economic and art conditions can effectively be applied to decode Manzoni’s personality and philosophies evident in his work. Whilst his open-ended art has many possible interpretations, understanding him as a man of his time riddled by the interconnections of life and art supports solving the enigma often associated with his artistic practise. [94] Manzoni, influenced by the Milanese social sphere, became part of the contemporary struggle to contextualise and adapt to the changes of the ‘Economic Miracle’ in effect to the everyday, art and body. Moreover, through referencing historical avant-garde and preceding ideas with his own innovative practise, he was able to move toward the future, experimenting with the role of artist, artistic process and audience. Moreover, under the influence of socio-political, economical and artistic contexts, Manzoni maintained a creative and broad oeuvre that spoke about the effects of commercialisation and artistic agency in times of change when the worlds of everyday life and art were merging.

     

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    Primary Sources

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    Manzoni, Piero. “For the Discovery of a Zone of Images.” In Piero Manzoni: paintings, reliefs and objects, 16-17. London: The Tate Gallery Publications Department, 1974.

    Manzoni, Piero. “Prolegomena for an Artistic Activity.” 1957. In Twentieth-century Italian Art: 1909-69: AHIS40008, Semester 1, 2017 580-581.  Melbourne: University of Melbourne, School of Culture and Communication, 2017.

    Manzoni, Piero. “Some Realisations, Some Experiments, Some Projects.” In Piero Manzoni: paintings, reliefs and objects, 84-85. London: The Tate Gallery Publications Department, 1974.

    Yves Klein. Anthropométrie de l’époque bleue (1960) (An extract from the François Lévy-Kuentz documentary about Yves Klein (2007). YouTube. July 27, 2012. Accessed June 01, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj0BQD1oOG0.

     

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    Celant, Germano. “Piero Manzoni: An Artist of the Present.” In Piero Manzoni: Musee d’Art de la Ville de Paris, 13-20. Milan, Italy: Arnoldo Mondadori Arte, 1991.

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    Celant, Germano. Piero Manzoni: paintings, reliefs and objects. London: The Tate Gallery Publications Department, 1974.

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    Fer, Briony. The infinite line: remaking art after modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

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    Lawrence, James. “Piero Manzoni: New York.” The Burlington Magazine 151, no. 1273 (April 2009): 268-69.

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    Mansoor, Jaleh. “We Want to Organise Disintegration.” October 95 (2001): 28-53.

    Morris, Frances. “Piero Manzoni: London.” The Burlington Magazine 140, no. 1143 (June 1998): 405-06.

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    FOOTNOTES

    [1]Francisco Calbo Serraller, “Dire, essere, vivere,” in Piero Manzoni: Musee d’Art de la Ville de Paris (Milan, Italy:    Arnoldo   Mondadori Arte, 1991): 35.

    Stephen Peterson, “Piero Manzoni: Gagosian,” Art in America 97 (April 2009): 143.

    [2] James Lawrence, “Piero Manzoni: New York,” The Burlington Magazine 151, no. 1273 (April 2009): 268.

    [3] Nancy Spektor, “A Temporary Blindness: Piero Manzoni and America,” in Piero Manzoni: Musee d’Art de la Ville de Paris (Milan, Italy: Arnoldo Mondadori Arte, 1991): 39.

    [4] Jean Pierre Criqui, “Piero Manzoni and His Left Overs,” in Piero Manzoni: Musee d’Art de la Ville de Paris (Milan, Italy: Arnoldo Mondadori Arte, 1991): 25.

    Jacopo Galimberti, “The Intellectual and the Fool: Piero Manzoni between the Milanese Art Scene and the Land of Cockaigne,” Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 1 (2012): 80.

    [5] Galimberti, “The Intellectual and the Fool,” 81.

    [6] Galimberti, “The Intellectual and the Fool,” 81.

    [7] Galimberti, “The Intellectual and the Fool,” 85.

    [8] Galimberti, “The Intellectual and the Fool,” 85.

    [9] Galimberti, “The Intellectual and the Fool,” 81.

    Stella Santacatterina, “Piero Manzoni: Art as Reflection on Art,” Third Text 13, no. 45 (1998): 24.

    Piero Manzoni, “For the Discovery of a Zone of Images,” in Piero Manzoni: paintings, reliefs and objects (London: The Tate Gallery Publications Department, 1974).

    Piero Manzoni, “Some Realisations, Some Experiments, Some Projects,” in Piero Manzoni: paintings, reliefs and objects (London: The Tate Gallery Publications Department, 1974).

    Piero Manzoni, “Prolegomena for an Artistic Activity,” 1957, in Twentieth-century Italian Art: 1909-69: AHIS40008, Semester 1, 2017 (Melbourne: University of Melbourne, School of Culture and Communication, 2017).

    [10] Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni: paintings, reliefs and objects (London: The Tate Gallery Publications Department, 1974), 9.

    [11] Santacatterina, “Piero Manzoni: Art as Reflection on Art,” 24.

    [12] Galimberti, “The Intellectual and the Fool,” 78.

    [13] Paul Ginsborg, “The ‘Economic Miracle’, Rural Exodus and Social Transformation, 1958 –63,” in A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988 (London: Penguin, 1990),  239.

    [14] Galimberti, “The Intellectual and the Fool,” 82.

    [15] Ginsborg, “The ‘Economic Miracle’, Rural Exodus and Social Transformation, 1958 –63,” 248.

    [16] Galimberti, “The Intellectual and the Fool,” 87.

    [17] Galimberti, “The Intellectual and the Fool,” 91.

    [18] Galimberti, “The Intellectual and the Fool,” 93.

    [19] Jens Hendrik Sandberg, “Soren Kierkegaard is my father: his goal was to clarify the concept,” in Piero Manzoni: Musee d’Art de la Ville de Paris (Milan, Italy: Arnoldo Mondadori Arte, 1991), 28.

    [20] Sandberg, “Soren Kierkegaard is my father,” 28.

    [21] Celant, Piero Manzoni: paintings, reliefs and objects, 10.

    Sandberg, “Soren Kierkegaard is my father,” 27.

    [22] “Piero Manzoni 1933-1963,” TATE, accessed June 01, 2017, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/piero-manzoni-1571.

    [23] Gerald Silk, “Myths and Meanings in Manzoni’s Merda d’artista,” Art Journal 52, no. 3 (1993): 65.

    [24] Silk, “Myths and Meanings in Manzoni’s Merda d’artista,” 68.

    [25] Lawrence, “Piero Manzoni: New York,” 269.

    [26] Manzoni, “Some Realisations, Some Experiments, Some Projects,” 84.

    Lawrence, “Piero Manzoni: New York,” 269.

    [27] TATE, “Piero Manzoni 1933-1963.”

    [28] Spektor, “A Temporary Blindness,” 43.

    [29] Spektor, “A Temporary Blindness,”44.

    Jaleh Mansoor, “Material Value,” Artforum International 47, no. 9 (May 2009): 90.

    [30] Spektor, “A Temporary Blindness,”43.

    [31] Silk, “Myths and Meanings in Manzoni’s Merda d’artista,” 69.

    [32] Silk, “Myths and Meanings in Manzoni’s Merda d’artista,” 68.

    Spektor, “A Temporary Blindness,”43.

    [33] Galimberti, “The Intellectual and the Fool,” 85.

    [34] Mansoor, “Material Value,” 89.

    [35] Spektor, “A Temporary Blindness,” 39.

    Mansoor, “Material Value,” 90.

    [36]Jaleh Mansoor, “We Want to Organise Disintegration,” October 95 (2001): 42.

    [37] Frances Morris, “Piero Manzoni: London,” The Burlington Magazine 140, no. 1143 (June 1998): 406.

    [38] Silk, “Myths and Meanings in Manzoni’s Merda d’artista,” 70.

    [39] Silk, “Myths and Meanings in Manzoni’s Merda d’artista,” 70.

    [40] Silk, “Myths and Meanings in Manzoni’s Merda d’artista,” 71.

    [41] Morris, “Piero Manzoni: London,” 406.

    Mansoor, “Material Value,” 90.

    [42] Celant, Piero Manzoni: paintings, reliefs and objects, 11.

    [43] Celant, Piero Manzoni: paintings, reliefs and objects, 11.

    [44] Mansoor, “Material Value,” 89.

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