One wonders why Piero Manzoni, recognized in Europe as an important innovator, forerunner of Arte Povera and conceptualist avant la lettre, has been virtually deprived of public exposure, critical attention and inclusion in museum collections here. Some important European art has been prominently shown, avidly collected and even written about in this country, mainly the work of such defanged avant-gardists as Dubuffet, Burri Soulages, Vasarely, Tapies and Agam. Their work, one suspects, confirms certain American assumptions about postwar European art. But even a cursory reading of our leading art periodicals reveals a curious resistance to crediting Europe with its share of genuinely advanced propositions.

At the time of their deaths, neither Yves Klein nor Lucio Fontana had succeeded in establishing their credibility on this side of the Atlantic. Through the 1960s Joseph Beuys was not awarded the serious attention routinely given to much younger artists in our midst. The European innovator has been variously written off as too ideological, derivative, out of the mainstream, chic, or a reactionary in disguise. The lacerated canvases of Fontana, the saturated monochromes of Klein, the tactile surfaces of Manzoni and repelling substances of Beuys were shrugged off, their manifestos judged pure rhetoric, their stance somewhat embarrassingly uncool. We, after all, had critics’ magazines with formidable powers going to bat for our artists.

This rejection of European art theory and innovation by American artists and critics-often condescending and/or ill-informed-may be related to America's enthusiastic embrace of, but ultimate disenchantment with, Surrealism and with Breton's stewardship of that movement. As William S. Rubin puts it: "Having been to some extent overimpressed by the Surrealists as the embodiment of the great European avant-garde, the Americans now regarded them largely as idols with clay feet." (2) In addition, a proud awareness took hold in the 1950s that New York, not Zurich, could be claimed as the cradle of Dada, and that Duchamp, its greatest genius, properly belonged to the history of this country and not to that of France. (3)

Throughout the 1960s our official art establishment flaunted its delight in American supremacy and scorned or ignored the challenges (few, but real) Europe could muster. Meanwhile, a reaction set in on the level of noninstitutionalized exchanges and largely underground publications. In the late 1960s so-called post-Minimal artists resumed a dialogue with their European colleagues. A shared interest in the gestures and pronouncements of such proto-conceptualists as Fontana and Klein, Manzoni and Beuys, was a natural result of this encounter. They showed themselves less hard nosed and were willing to accept, as Sol LeWitt had voiced it in the first issue of Art-Language, that "conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach."

Manzoni (1933-1963) was twenty-four when he exhibited his first achromes, a generic term for textured reliefs done out of wrinkled cloth which he dipped in a mixture of glue and calcium sulfate. Manzoni never claimed any formal originality for his achromes. They were simply carriers of an idea arrived at by reflecting on the nature of picture-making, and it is in this context that they assume their proper place in postwar Italian avant-garde art. Burri's sutured and Fontana's punctured and incised canvases must have fascinated the younger artist, though their influence was probably more general than specific. His textured paintings immediately preceding the achromes bear imprints of pliers and tweezers, and his use of white linen, cotton balls and chemicals in the achromes forces on the viewer associations of bandaging, sterilization and aesthetics appropriate for one whose art was to involve bodily processes in its theories and products.

In September of 1957, Manzoni, along with some of the more significant younger Italian and French artists, signed a manifesto Against Style. "Every invention becomes convention," the writers warn us, and they go on to demand that the work of art be an active force in the world rather than the harbinger of style. A public declaration doesn't protect work from the evils it wishes to forestall, as the inventions of many signatories proved, but Manzoni "lived" its admonitions to the point of impairing the viability of his achromes. Indeed his biggest and perhaps most important achrome made in situ and in record time for the opening of the tentoonstelling nul at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam was, despite the artist's deed of gift, thrown out with the garbage after the exhibition ended. Manzoni defined his attitude toward achromes more clearly in a statement in Towards an Organic Painting the same year (1957): "The picture is the space in which we are free to reinvent over and over again, the art of the painting as we search continuously for our first images." This idea of picture-making as a series of reinventions recorded, but did not replace or preempt, a search for what Manzoni called his "first images." This idea of picture-making as a series of reinventions recorded, but did not replace or preempt, a search for what Manzoni called his "first images." The achromes (literally "no color") obviously make allusions to a rich metaphorical lode-infancy and tabula rasa on one hand, and the void and death on the other. Such references are made more sharply in Manzoni's later work, often with acrid irony.

But the achromes, which look rather tame today, still bear evidence of the unorthodoxy of Manzoni's concept. He did not use cloth, cotton, fibers, etc. . . in his paintings; instead, he presented these materials in orderly and suggestive arrangements as his paintings. And indeed they seem more like foils or alibis for what kept him running than the full material realization of his search. The displacement from object to idea and from idea to process implicit in these works draws to them a subsequent history and thus elevates them to the status of "first images" in another way-precedents for much conceptual thinking. Were Manzoni working today, he would hardly have felt the conventional pressures detaining him within the pictorial format-but it could be said that it is this pressure that imparts to these works some of their memorable quality. That ideas can be art and that actions can replace the object is now a matter of casual agreement. When Manzoni abandoned the pictorial format still implicit in the achromes, he had to manufacture most of the documentary evidence in the realms of gesture and event; film and video tape as means of instant recording were unavailable to him. So Manzoni made pictures and objects as a running commentary in the margin of an uncompromising life devoted to the pursuit of spiritual truth. He may have lacked the ability to objectify great aspirations and turn them into "enduring" works of art, but more likely he had a different set of priorities and values. Faced with the prospect of an early demise, he made his own body the vehicle for his art, recklessly-but not morbidly-usurping its dwindling resources.

Most of Manzoni's inventions declared themselves in 1959. It was also a busy year in terms of the "movements" and "groupings" that are a way of life for the European avant-garde. He broke with the Arte Nucleare group and allied himself with Enrico Castellani, with whose purist concerns he identified. A one-man exhibition at the Hague led to contact with the Dutch Nul and the Düsseldorf-based Group Zero. With Castellani and Bonalumi he exhibited in Milan, Rome and Lausanne. With Castellani he founded Azimuth, a short-lived but important avant-garde magazine. His contact with Nul and Zero increased as he showed with members of these groups at the Hessenhuis in Antwerp. During this year he worked intensely. The achromes took on a more severe composition and in the summer, at Albisola, he began to execute the stitched fabric squares that forecast the minimalist sensibility, deriving them perhaps from the compartmentalization of John's alphabet and number paintings. He must have known Johns's white and gray encaustic paintings, shown at the Venice Biennale in 1958 and seen the following year at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan.

In 1959 Manzoni fabricated forty-five corpi d'aria, "pneumatic sculptures," of up to thirty-two inches in diameter which, when filled by the artist himself, were labeled Artist's Breath. (A medium-sized balloon contained seventy-five imperial gallons of air at a gallon price of $1.25.) Artist's Breath was Manzoni's first use of a body product, presented without alteration, certified as authentic, and traded by the volume. Duchamp's Air de Paris had a charming cultural connotation; his Belle Haleine was a pun without much substance. But Manzoni was not kidding and delivered, in effect, the artist's anima or inspiration. It is a natural desire for artists to want their works to outlive them. But Manzoni, by choosing cheap balloons that fell flaccid after a while, made sure that he would outlive his corpi d'aria. But even more important than the pneumatic sculptures were the lines Manzoni produced, ink traces on paper rolls of varying lengths sealed in cardboard tubes. Fontana thought the lines were Manzoni's greatest invention. Yves Klein, whose monochromes Manzoni particularly admired, found the lines even more objectionable than the achromes, which he detested. But the lines were the most effective means Manzoni found to express his concept of the infinite. Not only did he propose to trace a white line circling the globe along Greenwich Meridian, but he made what purported to be a line of infinite length and presented it in the guise of a solid wooden cylinder resembling the cardboard tubes, labeled Line of Infinite Length (1960).

No line goes on forever, each line is as long as its tube will permit, and if we draw a line from where we stand, it can only be as long as the circumference of the globe. Manzoni is not the only artist to have been attracted by the concept of a line. Hundertwasser had his students’ draw one continuous, unbroken line on the four walls, floor and ceiling of a classroom. Walter de Maria drew chalk lines and dug mile-long ditches in the desert. La Monte Young, whose one tone in music equals the concept of drawing a line, wrote a musical one-liner that would have pleased Manzoni: "Draw a straight line and follow it" (Composition 10, 1960). There is no doubt that further examples of the mystique of the line in art can be added, but it is not likely that anybody has handled the concept with Manzoni's menomania.

Manzoni's lines can be described physically (e.g. ink on newspaper print), dimensionally (e.g. 1,000 meters) and dated (e.g. July 24, 1961). But they do not express anything (a concept of distance can be expressed more effectively in other ways), they simply are and this literalism is one of their main strengths. The inventive, which we may associate with life, and the gratuitous, which we can associate with death, are always on a collision course in Manzoni's arsenal of gestures. Appropriately, he walked a thin line between the two. To propose the concept was inventive, to execute it was gratuitous, for the lines are arbitrary in length, measure nothing, and, rolled up in a tube, exist I limbo only. For no good reason at all, they are hidden. This undoubtedly adds to their mystique. The lines are not to be taken out of their containers to be exhibited. We are encouraged to take them on faith as long as the label guarantees the content. From the rattle in Duchamp’s With Hidden Noise, to Sol LeWitt’s cub buried at the Visses in Bergeijk, to Robert Barry’s inert gas released into the Los Angeles atmosphere, conceptual art has relied on our faith in the artist speaking the truth and on the assumption that believing the unseen is somehow a more intense experience. The wooden cylinder, labeled Line of Infinite Length 1960), moves beyond the area of credibility, which it obviously does not have, either for the eye or mind, into that of metaphysical speculation.

In 1960 Manzoni traveled to Herning, Denmark, where he produced the longest line of his career on a 7,200-meter roll of newsprint, sealed in a leaden container. Manzoni meant the Herning line to be the first in a series of extremely long lines. He wrote in Immediate Projects (1962), “I shall leave on example in each of the major cities of the world until the sum of their lengths equals the earth’s circumference . . . From a line drawn around the globe (impractical) and a line of infinite length (impossible) we have now moved to the concept of a collection of lines adding up to a desired length. A total of 5,555 cities would have to be found if all lines were of the length of the one in Herning, and one shudders at the time, energy and funds involved in the completion of this project.

Around 1960 Manzoni’s activities took on a more uncompromising complexion. Myth and a wry process of demythification counter each other n a way that opens up numerous readings, touching on art history, the artist’s powers of transformation, and the equating of price and value in art. Not only the art object but its social fate-its prospective history-are included in a frame of reference clearly outlined by a wit sharpened by somewhat mordant energies. One gets the sense of a quickening tempo, of time paradoxically stretched by crowding more into a shorter duration. Constantly traveling, Manzoni seemed to make up in distance what he lacked in time. During the brief years of his maturity, he cultivated his art interests like a roadshow performer, constantly meeting new people, making new commitments, and anticipating the jet-set mobility of today’s conceptualists.

On July 21, 1960, Manzoni invited friends and supporters in Milan to attend a ritual curiously reminiscent of a Catholic mass. The artist boiled eggs on a range set on a table. Then he marked each egg with this thumbprint. As people filed in they were given eggs to eat. The event lasted for an hour and ten minutes. The quasi-religious aspect of this-preparation, consecration, communion, is hard to avoid.

The construction of the Magic Base extends his parallel. In 1961 Manzoni constructed his first Magic Base in the form of a truncated pyramid bearing footprints to accommodate people who, for as long as they stood there, became “sculptures” by artist’s fiat. Like the priest who effects the transubstantiation of bread and wine, Manzoni isolates a willing subject by placing him a few notches above where he stands every day and declares him a work of art. In both instances we rely on the discretionary powers of the officiator; we accept, on his authority, that a wafer can be a body and a body can be art. Again, Manzoni may not have intended to draw this parallel, but the elements for doing so are all there.

It is only natural that Manzoni, who entered into a union with those who had eaten his art, and who conferred art status on those who stepped up on his pedestal, should seek more effective ways of making art out of his fellow man. The artist’s signature and a certificate of title should make the recipient into a work of art and in 1961, at the Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome, Manzoni started to exercise this privilege on a few chosen friends. With a fine sense of discrimination, the artist did not treat all bodies alike. Some subjects were certified a work of art for life, others could claim art value only for that part of their body to which the artist had affixed his signature; some were declared art under certain circumstances, i.e. only while sleeping, drinking singing etc.: the art status of a few would go into effect only after they had aid the artist an agreed-upon amount. By the end of that year seventy-one living sculptures could be counted, a modest number by the standards of that Christian community to which it seemed to aspire.

In May 1961, Manzoni carried through his most radical and, in many ways, most savage gesture: he produced ninety cans of Artist’s Shit, each with a net weight of thirty grams, which he offered for sale at the then-current price of gold. After the breath and thumbprints, this was the third and most shocking of the artist’s offerings, yet entirely consistent with those that went before. We are reminded that nobody took much notice of Duchamp’s Bottle Rack or Bicycle Wheel until, in the 1917 exhibition of The Independents, his Fountain became the subject of a controversy. History has a curious way of repeating itself; when fellow exhibitors in the 1962 tentoonstelling nul at the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam got wind of Manzoni’s plan to prominently display his recently produced Artist’s Shit, they ganged up to prevent him from doing so. Depressed and angry, Manzoni threatened to withdraw and leave the room empty, with the door nailed shut and bearing a sign reading, “The spirit of the artist resides inside.” What might have been accepted today as a work of a conceptual artist, was then pooh-poohed by his friends as a cop out. So instead, Manzoni proposed-but was never allowed- to release twenty white chickens into the German Group Zero’s pristine kinetic environment. He must have sensed that Zero was going to end up as another “cold art kitchen.”

Ironically, Manzoni’s memory was kept alive for years in the work of the Zero and Zero-related artists from Düsseldorf to Milan and from Paris to Buenos Aires. With its suppression of style and handmade quality, the achrome inspired countless white reliefs; it became prototypical for cool art in the 1960s, and obligatory for anybody doing their white-on-white show. Manzoni did, indeed, take good care to “reinvent, over and over again” an achrome which could easily have become his stock-in-trade. The squarely divided stitched surfaces gave way to cotton or synthetic fiber surfaces, sometimes treated with cobaltic chloride, causing them to change hue with atmospheric changes. These chemical agents guaranteed that the work would not remain the same, the inverse of the traditional painter’s concern. In his few remaining years Manzoni used arrays of cotton balls, rabbit skin wool and fluffy artificial fibers to avoid repeating himself. But his real heirs were not those who stuch to a variety of white and silver surfaces. It is the body and concept artists of the late 1960s who seem to have taken Manzoni’s lesson to heart. An autonomy of viewpoint and a sensibility to life that transcends a concern for purity of medium comes through in Manzoni’s idiosyncratic exploits.

There is more than a hint of Dada in Manzoni’s lifestyle and actions. He even reminds us of F.T. Marimetti, the Dada among the Futurists, although such comparisons are tenuous when not substantiated. There is no evidence that Manzoni thought of himself in terms of following a historic path or working within a known esthetic. An almost awkward reserve and a hesitation to please, features one senses in his work as well, set Manzoni apart from the elegant Fontana and the flamboyant Klein. He did not care about appearances, was less assured and seemed painfully clumsy by comparison with the other two. There was no need to rebel against his environment or to draw away from it; at the most he acted as its conscience and sometime gadfly. Manzoni arrived at a time when the public was prepared to accept anything; instead of fighting an uphill battle, he found himself in a quandary as to how he could maintain a level of suspense and wonder. Appearances to the contrary, Manzoni was not a cynic but an exalted believer with a tragic, highly self-destructive bent. He saw no basic conflict-as long as there were buyers-between a quest fro the absolute and an exchange of shit for gold. It was inevitable for Manzoni to push his art to the brink of taboo. A plan, however, to enshrine bodies and sign them was never put into effect. Nor did he, ultimately, package his blood in the manner in which he had made an art commodity of his breath and his feces.

Friends have reminisced how Manzoni always traveled with a small suitcase in which he carried samples of his work: miniature achromes, lines in tubes, balloons to be filled with artist’s breath, certificates of authenticity, thumbprinted eggs and cans of shit. This arsenal of his works and gestures had, of course, a precedent in Marcel Duchamp’s 1938 Boite-en-Valise. Yet, what to Duchamp had been a way of holding on to his past as he was about to leave occupied France was to Manzoni a way of making sure of his future. Duchamp reduced his life’s work to miniatures in a suitcase, as others write their autobiography when life threatens to run away from them. Manzoni packed his ideas in a suitcase and took them on the road to push for their sale or execution, because he knew that he had little time to lose.

Manzoni was more interested in art strategies than in art forms. In the face of death, art for Manzoni became a strategy of survival. Since limits equal death, he had to defeat them. This accounts for his megalomaniacal streak, as well as for his need to push art to its eschatological limits. To put man, the creator, on a sculpture base, is a last resort gesture: he plays Faust instead of the artist’s role of homo faber. But, when he has a sculpture base installed in the city park of Herning, Denmark, and inscribes it “Upside Down,” then we realize that what we have taken to be an act of hubris is, in reality, a gesture of resignation, in the sense that we all carry the world on our back and live with it.

Manzoni’s thumbprinted eggs have perished, the balloons with his breath have shriveled, and the warning on his cans of shit, “without preservatives,” may come back to haunt their collectors. He did not make any serious effort to insure that his art would survive him, the underlying ambition in every creative act. Bent on exhausting art, he must have been oblivious to time as he drove himself to the brink of involuntary suicide. He ran through art the way a gambler runs through money, feverishly depleting his resources. Trying to get to the bottom of his art, he invited an end that surprised nobody. In the early morning of February 6, 1963, Manzoni succumbed, on the doorstep of his studio on the Via Fiori Chiari, to a fatal combination of cirrhosis and exposure to extreme cold.

Abstractionists and conceptualists have claimed Manzoni’s work as a precedent, and these claims are legitimate in view of the achromes and the lines. But even more clearly, Manzoni was a forerunner of body art. His radical gestures have found their most dramatic confirmation in those acts by contemporary artists in which the body becomes the locus and material of creative preoccupations of a diverse range, from Oppenheim to Acconci, from Herman Nitsch to Antoni Miralda. In that sense, one can say that Manzoni’s “body” survives in the art of others in ways he could hardly have anticipated, but which, one suspects, might have pleased and amused him.

-Jan Van der Marck