Third Text

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Piero Manzoni

Stella Santacatterina

To cite this article: Stella Santacatterina (1998) Piero Manzoni, Third Text, 13:45, 23-28, DOI:
10.1080/09528829808576762

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Published online: 19 Jun 2008.

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1 Piero Manzoni, 'Prolegomeni
ad una Attività Artística', in
Piero Manzoni, catalogue to
exhibition, Serpentine Gallery
and Electa, Milan, 1998.
Third Text 45, Winter 1989-99 23
Piero Manzoni
Art as Reflection on Art
Stella Santacatterina
In his 'Prolegomeni ad una Attività Artística' (Prolegomen to an Artistic
Activity), Manzoni reiterated an anxiety that his work had not yet reached its
full potential (a project which he had tried to elaborate for some time). He
writes, "The difficulty is to get away from extraneous elements, unnecessary
gestures — elements and gestures that poison the habitual art of our time, and
that are sometimes emphasised to the point where they become an artistic
style." Even in the beginning Manzoni expressed his impatience with any form,
or style, of the past: "Any form is as good as another, but they are all a pain in
the neck." Nevertheless he had an openness to artistic experimentation, playing
across a plurality of artistic languages, without rejecting anything a priori.
During this time, around 1956, Manzoni had already experimented with
and discarded many earlier formal styles of art, such as 'informel', which he
had felt was not sufficiently convincing but convenient as a first step, giving it
nonetheless a precarious meaning. His experience with 'informel', which
consisted of experiments with colour, materials and structure, was a transi-
tional moment, a part of the artist's attempt to put into focus the conceptual
journey which he had already travelled. At the same time, his worry was not so
much a fear of falling into a comfortable mannerism, but rather of reducing his
artistic research to an aesthetic synthesis. Thus, his economy of means and
continual refusal of past and contemporary artistic tendencies should be
understood as an antagonism to dogma, including any such tendency in his
own work, close to the spirit of Duchamp's relation to Cubism — that is,
something to be consumed in three days on the way to something else.
Manzoni's fundamental conviction was that "art is not a matter of hedonism,
but of bringing to light preconscious, universal myths and reducing them to an
image. Art, therefore, is not a descriptive phenomenon, but a founding
scientific praxis".'
Although Manzoni's formal training was in philosophy, he gravitated
 24
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2 Enrico Castellani, Flash Art,
(Italian edition), no 135.
towards art, during the Fifties developing an artistic friendship with Lucio
Fontana, and collaborating with Enrico Castellani with whom he founded a
magazine, Azimuth (1959) of which there were only two issues, and which was
launched simultaneously with their gallery of the same name. Both ventures
were intended to promote a radical artistic practice. Manzoni and Castellani
shared above all an ideological refusal of the 'informel', which by that time had
already been consumed and commodified, and all those movements marked by
gestural, emotional and subjective connotations. They were also very critical of
a kind of epigonal and academic neo-surreal-dadism. In a fairly recent
interview, Castellani explained very dearly the principles of their magazine:
"Beyond any polemic of that contingent reality, one of the main reasons for my
collaboration with Manzoni and the birth of Azimuth and was the complete
acceptance of art history as a totality, not to be annulled, but, on the contrary,
to be consolidated as the foundation for a new, more radical and complex
experience."2 In other words, they believed that the new did not come from
nothing but by the putting into play of artistic experience from history and both
eastern and western cultures.
The magazine was originally to be called 'Pragma' to underline what was at
that time to be given value or dismissed; but it was later changed to 'Azimuth',
the astronomical term referring to the vertical line between earth and the
cosmos, yet without any intended metaphor. The first issue was full of new
directions and rich intuitions, and even if it showed a continuity with the
historical avant-garde, it also surpassed it. The critical choice of this issue,
which has to be attributed largely to Manzoni, showed a fascination with
Duchamp as well as Picabia and Bruno Alfieri, who wrote on the work of art in
terms of duration and not as the site of a psychic event. It also included writing
by the artist Yoshiaki Tono on the "full presence of the void" according to Zen
meditation on the void and absolute immobility, as well as a page of blue by
Yves Klein. The second and final issue (they did not want to become repetitive!)
was published on the occasion of an exhibition in the gallery Azimuth with the
title, 'The New Artistic Conception', and stressed the cultural position outlined
in the first. The participants invited to collaborate in defining this position were
K. Breier, O. Holveck, Y. Klein, H. Mack, A. Mavignier, O. Piene, Manzoni and
Castellani, with theoretical texts by Manzoni, Castellani, Piene and U.
Kultermann. Manzoni's editorial underlined a completely new artistic
conception totally opposed to art as representation and expression, a position
reinforced by Kultermann, who identified Pollock, Rothko and Tobey as the
artists who anticipated this terminal crisis in art. Manzoni also emphasised that
the tachist experience was to be regarded as a structural not visceral element,
as an experience of saturation not of scenic composition. In addition, the
monochrome was adopted to explore the infinite possibility of surface.
These underlined Manzoni's move towards a temporal dimension capable
of advancing the idea of the open work and to demonstrate the spiritual
necessity of art. In 'Libera Dimensione' (The Free Dimension, Azimuth, 1960),
he attacked the "slavery of the subjective vice" while affirming the individ-
uality of thought — the idea of the artist as capable of activating the
fundamental elements of art (colour, monochrome, line, conceptual event)
always projected towards a spatiotemporal totality. For Manzoni the de-
personalisation of the work of art was not an a priori fact; nor was the cancel-
lation of artistic subjectivity a renunciation of individuality, but an event which
occurred when art interacted with the processes of life.
During the complex period of the early '60s, Manzoni was preoccupied with
 25

redefining the role of the artist and the concept of the artistic, speaking of the
dangers of the aestheticisation of the artistic object which removed its essential
experience of experimentation, doubt and freedom. In this moment, more than
ever, Manzoni found his artistic practice rich and productive although risky
from the point of view of his project, which was based in a difficult and
problematic balance: a rigorous, analytic concept where the artistic collapses
into life — close to Oscar Wilde's "life imitates art, not the contrary", or
Artaud's definition where "art becomes the sophisticated medium to
understand and exercise life". Beyond the relationship with matter, the
metalinguistic reflection projected his work in a kind of conceptualism which
later became exemplary for artists in the '60s and '70s, like Guilio Paolini where
the materiality of art is art and the infinite possibility of images — the image is
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always the image of an image; or Pistoletto, who declared "an art which
expresses personal feelings is non-existent". This is close to Manzoni who, in
'Libera Dimensione', says "the problem is not to formulate things, or to
articulate messages (nor to find support in extraneous elements, a pseudo-
scientific complexity, psychoanalytic intimacy, graphic composition,
ethnographic fantasy... since any discipline contains within itself the element of
a solution). Is it not true that expression, fantasy, abstraction are an empty
fiction? There is nothing to say. There is only to be."
This conceptualism was far from the development of Anglo-American
conceptualism. In Manzoni the affirmation 'A Line is A Line' can seem
tautological, but only superficially; in reality it encapsulates a circular logic,
and remains different from the schematic and more rigid tautology of
American conceptualism which tended to re-compose internal discontinuity of
Linea m. 15,78 Setiembre, 1959
Ink on paper in cardboard
cylinder, 31 x 6 cm Merda d'artista no 066,1961
Collection Calmarini, Milan Metal can 4.8 x 6.5 cm
Photo: Thomas and Poul Pedersen Collection François and Danielle Morellet, Cholet
 26

a different theoretically operative moment. On the contrary, Manzoni's gesture

remained a synthesis, also contradictory from his previous gesture, which at
the same time included an analytic attitude capable of generating a metamor-
phosis and openness which left the field of representation to become
experience (Deleuze's "science of the sensible"). Therefore, nothing could be
further from the later experience of American artist Joseph Kosuth's claim that
the idea of art and art were the same thing. With his gesture of placing a line
(which could be as long as 2km) in a sealed box, Manzoni renounced any
plastic effect, the work becoming rather a concrétisation of infinity, and in this
way only susceptible to the conjugation of time.
Manzoni's poetic was very clear: in the face of the limited and miserable
reality of the quotidian, the only thing possible for an artist was to answer to
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this reality with the reality of the work, which had already lost the existential
illusion and utopianism of the historical avant-garde, where art became the
double of the world, or where art could change the image of the world itself.
Rather, Manzoni attempted to construct a paraUel universe, inside which it was
possible to play and remix the cards into new combinations. Manzoni's art
more than any other of its time attempted to show the infinite possibility of the
language of art up to the point at which he made his life itself an extended act,
lucid and total. His philosophical background, and the artistic climate
motivated especially by Fontana, generated an intense experimentation that
tended towards a total art according to a principle that "everything needs to be
sacrificed to the possibility of discovery, this need to assume one's own
gestures. The customary conception of the painting itself must be abandoned;

Magic Base, 1961

80 x 80 x 60 cm
Collection Attilio Codognato, Venice

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3 Piero Manzoni,
'Prolegomeni ad una
Attività Artística', quoted
in Piero Manzoni, op cit.
4 Fagiolo dell'Arco, Rapporto
60, Edizione Bulzoni, 1966,
pp 147-150.
5 Piero Manzoni,
'Prolegomeni ad una
Attività Artística', in Piero
Manzoni, op cit.
27
Sude du monde (The Base of the World), 1961, iron, bronze 82 x 100 x 100 cm
Collection Heming Kunstmuseum, Denmark
Photo: Thomas and Poul Pedersen
the space-surface involves the self-analytic process only as a 'space of
freedom'".3 From this intense production of gestures — like the 'pneumatic'
sculptures, the 'lines', the 'magic bases', the 'signatures' of 'living' sculptures,
the 'eggs with thumbprints', the 'artist's shit' — the artist reversed the
traditional contemplative role of the spectator; the work itself is now
subordinated to the active intervention of the viewer, and the active realisation
of the artistic event. Above all, through the 'magic bases' and 'artist's shit' the
artist was able to announce the continual mutability of art. Manzoni felt himself
attracted to the world of life, but above all, to the world of form: experiment (in
the Pirandellian sense), and the impossible coexistence of these two worlds.
The coagulation of his ideas never produced an 'object', but in fact an idea. The
critic Fagiolo Dell'Arco writes, "Manzoni's image does not allude to a thought,
but substitutes the thought tout court. Whilst critical theory was struggling to
construct a philosophical basis for the image of our time, Manzoni was able
also to give an image to philosophy itself."4 With the 'achromes' Manzoni
renounced any glamorous or provocative gesture, and in this way achieved an
extreme radicality. Manzoni writes, "The image has no value for remembrance,
explanation or expression — the question is rather to found — nor does it need
to be explained as an allegory of a physical process: it has value only because it
is — to be".5 In Sude du monde (The Base of the World), 1961, a homage to
Galileo, Manzoni confirmed that the world which rotates as a kinetic globe can
be stopped for a second by the pedestal of invention. He demonstrated with the
'magic bases' how everything in art is relative, without a fixed principle, and
that artisticity is a convention which can distract us from art itself.
What remains now of Manzoni's artistic heritage is difficult to assess; but
what is clear is that opposed to it is the cynicism and nihilism of much of
 28

6 Jon Thompson, in Piero
Manzoni, op cit, p 4.
7 Piero Manzoni, 'Art is not
true creation' [1957], in
Piero Manzoni, op dt.
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today's art, or the naive notion that art can be a psychologistic mirror of the
world. On the contrary, Manzoni understood art as a parallel constituted
universe, capable of producing alternative meaning and vision. Hence, a more
sympathetic tendency in the spirit of Manzoni would be the search for a new
artistic subjectivity, one which escaped what Jon Thompson describes as a
"self-declamatory picture-making",6 or the model given by the media and the
synthetic and consumerist image of advertising. This art would direct itself
towards a search for an image, complex and enigmatic, capable of delaying the
interest of the gaze, promoting the idea of the work of art not as representation,
or trapped in the box of preconceived aesthetics, but rather an experience that
announces, as Manzoni used to say, "the possibility of a new ethical organism",
able to confirm the unique gesture of the work of art and the objectivity of the

language of art, in a world which, more than ever, has no need of celebratory
representation but of presence.

And neither can stylistic coherence be of any concern to us, because our sole
concern can only be the continuous search, the continuous self-analysis, but which
means alone we may arrive at establishing morphemes 'recognisable' in the sphere
of our civilization.7

Piero Manzoni's recent retrospective took place at the Serpentine Gallery,

London, from 28 February to 26 April, 1998.

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