Piero Manzoni was an Italian artist who worked in an avant-garde style. For his conceptual ironic and somehow shocking art creations, he used such uncommon materials for an artist, as rabbit fur, phosphorescent paint cobalt chloride, glass fibre, white cotton wool, air and even his own excrements in thins. In some way, Manzoni's artworks were a response to the art of the pioneer of performance Yves Klein.
Background
Piero Manzoni was born on July 13, 1933, in Soncino, Lombardia, Italy to a noble family. Born as Meroni Manzoni di Chiosca e Poggiolo, he was the firstborn of Egisto Manzoni, Count of Chiosca and Poggiolo, and Valeria Meroni.
Piero had two brothers named Giuseppe and Giacomo, and two sisters, Elena and Mariuccia.
Manzoni was raised in Milan, visiting in summer Albisola Capo, a sea resort, where the Manzonis family met the founder of the Spatialism avant-garde movement Lucio Fontana. This meeting awoke the interest in art in young Piero.
Education
Piero Manzoni studied at Leo XIII Institute in Milan. Among his classmates were a future author and experimental poet Nanni Balestrini and future art critic and journalist Vanni Scheiwiller.
Later, Manzoni entered the law faculty of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan.
As to the artistic training, he was an autodidact.
Career
Piero Manzoni created his first paintings among which were oil landscapes (Savona, Albisola Marina, Santa Margherita Ligure) and portraits (self-portrait and of his sister Elena, both destroyed) when he was seventeen.
The debut group exhibition called Fourth Market Fair and Contemporary Art Show where young artist presented his artworks to the public took place in August 1956 at Soncino's Castle. The same year, in November, Manzoni participated at his next collective show at the Galleria San Fedele in Milan. Later, in December, appeared the manifesto of Manzoni's ideas titled “For the discovery of a zone of images” which was created in collaboration with Camillo Corvi-Mora, Ettore Sordini and Giuseppe Zecca.
Three more manifestos reflecting the artist’s views on art, “Art is not true creation”, “Introduction to artistic activity” and “Towards organic painting” came the next year. In October, Manzoni demonstrated his artworks at the Arte Nucleare collective exhibition organized in Galleria San Fedele, Milan and had his first solo show at the Foyer of the Teatro Le Maschere. The same year, after the visit of the Yves Klein's exhibition, Manzoni invented his famous Achromes as a reaction on monochromes by Klein.
In 1958, the artist exhibited his creations along with Lucio Fontana and Enrico Baj at “Fontana, Baj, Manzoni” (Bergamo and Bologna) and at the Galleria Montenapoleone in Milan. Later, in April, he held his second personal show at the Galleria Pater in Milan. The same period, Manzoni got acquainted with Agostino Bonalumi and Enrico Castellani. The collaboration resulted in common exhibitions of three artists at the Galleria Pater in Milan, at the Galleria Prisma (1958-1959) and at the Galleria Appia Antica in Rome (1959).
At the solo show held at the Bar La Parete in Milan in 1959, the artist demonstrated to the public his Achromes named “Colourless surfaces”. The same year, in July, Manzoni was invited at the Zero Group show at Rotterdamsche Kunstkring and in December, he founded with Castellani, in Milan, his Gallery called Azimuth. The artist as well wrote some articles for the Roman periodical “Il Pensiero Nazionale”.
Azimuth Gallery hosted three revolutionary shows by Manzoni where he demonstrated his experiments with objects strange for art. So, the first one, called 12 Lines (December 1959), showed the Lines series. Then came Bodies of Air (May 1960) with 45 balloons on tripods. It was allowed for buyers and for the artist himself to blown up the showpieces, all depended on the price paid. The central subject of the third and the last Azimuth show dubbed Consumption of Art by the Art-Devouring Public (July 1960) became 70 boiled eggs with Manzoni’s thumbprints on their surface. The visitors could eat the eggs.
Despite the shows at the Azimuth Gallery, Piero Manzoni participated at several international presentations, including “Castellani Manzoni. A New Artistic Conception” at the New Vision Centre Gallery in London, “Monochrome Malerai” at Städtisches Museum in Leverkusen and “Contemporary Italian Art” at Illinois Institute of Design in Chicago, all in 1960.
The foremost object of Manzoni’s art became humans. Beginning in 1961, to confirm their status of art pieces, Manzoni left his signature on their body and gave them a special certificate of Living Sculptures. Among the most famous live sculptures were Marcel Broodthaers, Umberto Eco, Emilio Villa and Henk Peters. Besides, Piero created his Magic Bases – platform after standing on which people transformed to the pieces of art, according to the artist.
Another creative project of the year was his Merda d'artista (Artist's shit) – ninety small cans filled, according to the artist, with his excrement. Firstly presented at the Galleria Pescetto in Albisola on August and then acquired by many collections around the world, each tin contained thirty grams of content priced by weight based on the current value of gold, around $1.12 a gram by the time. There were hypothesises that it was simple plaster inside.
The last years of his life, the artist participated at several group exhibitions, including in 1961 the twelfth edition of the Premio Lissone, in 1962, Zero exhibitions (Antwerp and Bern) and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. As to his final projects of this time, Piero Manzoni worked on the phosphorescent window, Placentarium (a habitable Body of Air). He also planned to create white Line as long as the Greenwich meridian.
Views
By his often strange artworks, Piero Manzoni criticized the mass production character of modern art and the temple of consumerism.
Quotations:
"The work of art has its origin in an unconscious impulse that springs from collective substrata of universal values common to all men, from which all men draw their gestures, and from which the artist derives the 'archaic' of organic existence. Every man of his own accord extracts the human element from this base, without realizing it, and in an elementary and immediate way."
"The foundations of the universal value of art are given to us now by psychology. This is the common base that enables us to sink its roots to the origins before man and to discover the primary myths of humanity. The artist must confront these myths and reduce them, by means of amorphous and confused materials, to clear images. Since these are atavistic forces that have their origins in the subconscious, the work of art takes on a magical significance."
"Abstractions and references must be totally avoided. In our freedom of invention we must succeed in constructing a world that can be measured only in its own terms. We absolutely cannot consider the picture as a space onto which to project our mental scenography. It is the area of freedom in which we search for the discovery of our first images. Images which are absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain and express, but only for that which they are to be."
"When I blow up a balloon, I am breathing my soul into an object that becomes eternal."
"I should like all artists to sell their fingerprints, or else stage competitions to see who can draw the longest line or sell their shit in tins. The fingerprint is the only sign of the personality that can be accepted: if collectors want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there's the artist's own shit, that is really his."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"Manzoni understood the creative act as part of the cycle of consumption: as a constant reprocessing, packaging, marketing, consuming, reprocessing, packaging, ad infinitum." Jon Thompson, an artist, curator and academic
"Manzoni's critical and metaphorical reification of the artist's body, its processes and products, pointed the way towards an understanding of the persona of the artist and the product of the artist's body as a consumable object. The 'Merda d'artista' (the artist's shit, dried naturally and canned 'with no added preservatives'), was the perfect metaphor for the bodied and disembodied nature of artistic labour: the work of art as fully incorporated raw material, and its violent expulsion as commodity." Jon Thompson, an artist, curator and academic
