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Myths and meanings in Manzoni's 'Merda d'artista.' - Piero Manzani
Art Journal, Fall, 1993 by Gerald Silk
Marcel Duchamp spoke to me, during the course of the Second World War (traveling between Arcachon and Bordeaux), of a new interest in the preparation of shit, of which the small excretions from the navel are the "deluxe" editions. To this I replied that I wished to have genuine shit, from the navel of Raphael. Today a well-known Pop artist of Verona sells artisti' shit (in very sophisticated packaging) as a luxury item!
--Salvador Dali, 1968(1)
In May 1961, the Italian artist Piero Manzoni packed and sealed ninety cylindrical cans, each containing thirty grams of his own excrement (fig. 1). Atop each tin are the words PRODUCED BY, followed by the signature Piero Manzoni, and a stenciled number designating its place in the run. A label affixed to the body of each consists of rows of the artist's first and last names strung together and repeated over and over. This PIEROMANZONIPIEROMANZONI functions as a background on which is printed the words:
Artist's Shit
CONTENTS 30 GRAMS NET
FRESHLY PRESERVED
PRODUCED AND TINNED
IN MAY 1961
On every can, these words appear in four languages-English, Italian, French, and German. Merda d'artista, to be sold by weight based on the current price of gold, was first exhibited in August of that year at the Galleria Pescetto in Albisola, Italy.
Few works of art address the subject of scatology so directly, and Manzoni's Merda d'artista invokes various myths and meanings about art and its production. These myths and meanings will be placed in several contexts, including the role of the avant-garde artist in modernism, Manzoni's preoccupation with the body and its products, and Sigmund Freud's theories of anal erotism.
It would be naive on my part and, I believe, on the part of Manzoni to assume that Merda d'artista was not intended to shock its audience. Merda d'artista thus operates within a strain of modernist avant-garde history defined by art that is innovative and risky. Pressure on the vanguard artist to break new ground not only leads to stunning and provocative results, but also encourages novelty, shock, and extremism. Although this notion has been under attack in recent years, at the time Manzoni made Merda d'artista, he was undoubtedly in the grips of this more conventional interpretation.
Functioning within this avant-garde context, Merda d'artista brings to mind the remark attributed to Marcel Duchamp that "a painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting."(2) For Duchamp, however, art provoked not simply because of its potential offensiveness, but because of its unexpectedness or inappropriateness. Often this is a result of his conceptualism, to which Manzoni's work owes a major debt. That anything the artist calls art is art, that christening rather than crafting makes art, lurks behind Manzoni's decision to offer up his excrement as art. As well, Duchamp's most notorious example of this attitude, his "ready-made" urinal titled Fountain (1917), produced problems not only because it was a common object signed and placed within an art context, but also because of its links to natural bodily functions and waste.
As this issue of Art Journal demonstrates, there is no dearth of examples of stercoraceous subjects in the history of art. But there is a certain modernist pedigree that goes beyond mere defecatory allusions. Maurice Denis provided the surprising example of Paul Cezanne, who when asked by Edouard Manet what he would submit to the Salon of 1870, replied "a pot of shit."(3) Common to nearly all aesthetic correspondences between art and excrement, Cezanne's putative proposal is not simply an act of antagonism and irreverence, but also establishes ties between presumed opposites: the high of art and low of shit. In a related and perhaps equally apocryphal incident, sometime in the 1920s Constantin Brancusi or Maurice Vlaminck is reported to have told Ezra Pound that eventually artists would display "shit on a silver platter,"(4) thus mixing not only the high of art with the low of ordure, but also the exalted and precious material of silver (and its connections to money) and the debased and mundane material of feces. Manzoni's exploitation of such connections and oppositions in his interrelation of gold, feces, and art will be discussed in more detail, but it is at least worth mentioning that such affinities and polarities have been frequently commented on. The most famous example comes from Freud who noted that "the contrast between the most precious substance known to men and the most worthless, which they reject as waste matter . . . has led to this specific identification of gold with faeces."(5)
Such attitudes were not uncommon in Futurism and Dada, and in those thought of as antecedents and followers of these movements. Among the more notorious examples are Alfred Jarry's 1896 play Ubu roi, which flaunts excremental references, and Guillaume Apollinaire's ambiguous 1913 manifesto, "L'Antitradition futuriste," which distinguishes between the progressive and the reactionary, awarding a rose to the former and shit (in the thin disguise of "mer de") to the latter. Several years before Duchamp added a mustache, goatee, and the letters L. H. O. O. Q to a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, simultaneously confusing her sexuality and offering an orgasmic explanation for her supposedly inscrutable grin, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder and leader of Italian Futurism, had already spoofed this symbol of the past scatologically. Known in Italy as La Gioconda, "the Merry" or Smiling One," she was relabeled by Marinetti "La Gioconda purgativa," "The Purgative Smiler," which implies that her pleasure is one of relief at having successfully moved her bowels. In a broader fusion between such functions and art, American Dadaist Arthur Cravan's 1914 statement-Painting is walking, running, drinking, eating, and fulfilling one's natural functions. You can say that I'm disgusting, but that's what it is"--augurs aspects of Manzoni's oeuvre.(6) Examples include Manzoni's Sculture viventi (Living Sculptures), works of art that obviously live, breathe, and perform natural functions (fig. 2), and the actual or planned use in his art of his feces, fingerprints, breath, and blood.
