Piero Manzoni

Manzoni was born in Soncino, in the province of Cremona, on July 13th 1933, of counts Meroni Manzoni di Chiosca and Poggiolo. He studied in Milan at the Leone XIII classical lyceum, then at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera. His early works mostly depicted traditional landscapes and portraits, but in 1955 his paintings became more informal, due to the influence of his new friend Lucio Fontana and the frequentation of the lively artistic milieu of Albisola, in Liguria. The influence of Enrico Baj’s gestural and material language, instead, can be traced in the embryonic images of Catrami and Impronte – imprints of everyday objects that Manzoni exhibits in August 1956 at the Castello Sforzesco of Soncino on the occasion of the IV Market Fair. On December that year he publishes a manifesto: Per la scoperta di una zona di immagini (Looking for a zone of images) in collaboration with Camillo Corvi-Mora, Ettore Sordini, Giuseppe Zecca, in which he affirms that what he is searching in these works is “an alphabet of primal images….justified by themselves only”. This idea is clarified in 1957 in the three following manifestos he writes with Sordini, Angelo Verga, Giuseppe Biasi and Mario Colucci: L’arte non è vera creazione (Art is not real creation) (May 1957), where Manzoni suggests we should get rid of the cultural and emotional background that pollutes present-day art; Per una pittura organica (For an organic painting) (June 1957) in which the artist officially affirms his support to the nuclear movement, further confirmed by the following manifesto Contro lo stile (Against the style) and by his participation to the Nuclear Art 57; by Albisola Marina exhibition at the Galleria San Fedele of Milan (August 1957) aimed at affirming an art that is the “natural and spontaneous continuation of our psycho-biological processes, a ramification of our organic life”.
This reflection provided the basis for the Achrome series which was first executed in the late 1957: white canvases covered in rough gesso or imbued with glue and kaolin in which the creation of the image was dependant upon the very process of solidification of the material. The name, which in French means “colourless” implies a reflection upon or, rather, a response to Yves Klein’s exploration of blue monotones and void whose first solo show was held in Italy in 1957 at the Milan Apollinaire Gallery. Shown at the Pater Gallery in 1958, Manzoni’s Achrome reflected the influence of Alberto Burri and Jean Fautrier’s concept of informal tendencies as well as of Lucio Fontana’s Spatialism. Besides, Manzoni had a strong interest in psychoanalysis, specifically Jungian theories as it is testified by the manifesto entitled Prolegomeni a un’attività artistica ("Introduction to Artistic Activity") which Manzoni published in 1957 in the catalogue for his solo show at the Galleria del Corriere of the Province of Como. Moving far beyond the crisis of post-war existentialism, Manzoni became increasingly removed from the emotional character of art. This is clearly discernable in the rarefied images of his 1959 Achrome in which the texture was composed of machine stitching or in the Linee series (1959-61) which eluded any illusions to painting. In this series, Manzoni used an ink pad to colour paper rolls of various length which were placed in cardboard tubes. The erasure of previous artistic experiences expressed in these works was comparable not only to the contemporary work conducted by Agostino Bonalumi and Enrico Castellani, with whom the artist founded the Azimut Gallery in Milan and the “Azimut” magazine in 1959, but also with kinetic-visual art inspired by the Gestaltpsychologie (psychology of form) of groups such as the Düsseldorf–based Group Zero (Otto Piene, Heinz Mack, Gunter Uecker), with whom Manzoni exhibited at the Rotterdam Kunstkring as well as the Milan-based Group T (Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo, Gabriele De Vecchi, Grazia Varisco), with whom he participated in the Miriorama 1 exhibition at the Pater Gallery in Milan. The idea of “art-surroundings” absorbed from the work of these artists gave rise to the Placentarium prototype (1960): a gigantic plastic body of air which functioned as a pneumatic-pulsating theatre for dances of gas and light. Thus, the common exploration of new expressive methods made available by new technologies gave rise to experimentation with natural and synthetic objects and materials which characterised the Achromes produced between 1960-63. In Inchiesta sulla pittura (Inquiry on painting), written for the Almanacco letterario Bompiani 1960 (published only in 1973 on the cover of L. Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni, Milano), he explains: «An artist can only use materials (thoughts and forms) from his own period”. The advent of new conditions, he affirmed in Libera dimensione (Free dimension), “entails a need for new solutions, new methods, new measures […] Change is not sufficient: the transformation must be complete» (in “Azimuth”, n. 2, January 1960). This led to the formulation of Nuova concezione artistica (A New Artistic Conception) an exhibition and manifesto prepared together with Biasi, Castellani and Mack (April 1960) at the Circolo del Pozzetto di Padova where it was announced that the limited space offered by two dimensions would be abandoned in favour of only one dimension in which light would be the decisive element.
In 1960 Manzoni began travelling to Denmark where he was frequently a guest of artist Arhtur Køpcke, owner of the Køpcke Gallery in Copenhagen and would later be a guest of Aage Damgaard, an industrialist in the textile sector in Herning. Damgaard, lover of the arts and a collector, hosted Manzoni for a month in his Angli Shirt Factory. The works executed by Manzoni in Denmark include Linea 7200 metri (the longest of the series), executed in the Avis Printing House in Herning in July of 1960 (Herning Kunstmuseum). His next step was the total renunciation of pictorial surfaces which were substituted by a purely conceptual process. This process would prevail in his conception of Linea di lunghezza infinita (Infinite length line) (1960): a wooden cylinder containing a virtual line which existed only in fantasy, and consequentially ordained the work’s disappearance. Manzoni himself refers to this disappearance when he speaks of “selling nothing, numbered and signed” in the Manifesto contro niente per l’esposizione internazionale di niente ("Manifesto against Nothing for the International Exhibition of Nothing"), published in Basel in 1960 and co-signed by Bazon Brock, Enrico Castellani, Rolf Fenkart, Carl Laszlo, Heinz Mack e Onorio, Pierre and Herbert Schudt.
Surmounting the physical aspects of works of art increasingly gave way to operations which exclusively involved man’s mental capacities or, to the contrary, the organic functions of the artist’s body with creative methods of a behavioural nature. This tendency initially took form in the Duchamp-esque Corpi d’aria (Bodies of Air) in 1959 and Artist’s Breath (1960) exhibited at the Azimut Gallery in 1961. Both of these works served to inspire two noteworthy performances by Manzoni which took place, respectively, at the Azimut Gallery in 1960 and at the Tartaruga Gallery in Rome in 1961. The former, entitled Consumazione dell’arte, dinamica del pubblico divorare l’arte (the Consumption of Dynamic Art by the Art-devouring Public), Manzoni impressed his fingerprint onto some boiled eggs and gave them to the audience to eat so that the gesture could be consecrated as art; in the latter, he signed his same on models and members of the public thereby transforming them into Sculture viventi (Living Sculptures). In 1960, he created two Basi magiche (Magic Bases - one of which is in Copenhagen), so that any person that stepped onto, or, any object that was placed upon the bases was elevated to the status of an art object for as long as they remained upon the bases. These preliminary actions became full-fledged in 1961 when he put on sale 90 tins of signed Merda d’artista (Artist’s shit) at the then-current price of gold, at the Pescetto Gallery in Albisola Marina and then at the Køpke Gallery in Copenhagen; or in 1961 when he placed an upside down Socle du monde (Base of the World, Herning Kunstmuseum, Denmark), which elects the entire world as a work of art. The conceptual character the performance-like atmosphere of these works influenced his contacts with the Gorgona Group which, at the time, was conducting Fluxus-influenced activities in Zagreb. Manzoni showed his works together with the group in an exhibition entitled Nove tendencije (New Tendencies). His first version of the Tables of Assessment was created for the Gorgona Magazine. These were reproductions of Manzoni’s own works executed between 1958 and 1960 such as the carte geografiche (maps) in which the names of places were cancelled, the alfabeti (alphabets) the Linee (Lines) and his digital and hand prints – which he published in lithographs and gathered into portfolios (Scheiwiller, Milan 1961 and 1962). Manzoni’s 1961 composition of two “afonias” was also created during the period of his relationship with the Gorgona group and was comparable to the silence of John Cage. In a book of 1962, Alcune realizzazioni, alcuni esperimenti, alcuni progetti (Some accomplishments, some experiments, some projects) (edited by S. Dangelo, M comunicazione, Milan 1963), the artist illustrates the architectural interventions he made and the ones that he designed. After mid-November 1962 Manzoni leaves Denmark and travels through Europe, eventually returning to Milan. In Flensburg-Glückburg (Germany) he works with publisher Jes Petersen on an art book imbued with conceptual irony. The book is entitled Piero Manzoni. The life and the Works and consists in 100 blank pages (Petersen Press, Glücksburg - Hamburg - Paris 1962, I edition). In March he participates to the Expositie Nul organized by Henk Peters at the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, and in January 1963 he holds a solo show at the Galerie Smith in Brussels.
He dies in Milan on February 6th 1963.

BOOKSHOP

Piero Manzoni
Germano Celant
Electa - 2007

Pages 395
Price € 42.00