Piero Manzoni
About the Artist
Piero Manzoni (Italy, 1933 – 1963) was best known for his ironic approach to avant-garde art. He is most famous for a series of artworks that call into question the nature of the art object, directly prefiguring Conceptual Art. Manzoni’s work eschews normal artist's materials, instead using everything from rabbit fur to human excrement in order to "tap mythological sources and to realize authentic and universal values". His work is widely seen as a critique of the mass production and consumerism that was changing Italian society (the Italian economic miracle) after World War II.
Merda d'artista N° 083
Maggio 1961
Blechdose, bedrucktes Papier
In May 1961, while he was living in Milan, Piero Manzoni produced ninety cans of Artist's Shit.
Each was numbered on the lid 001 to 090. A label on each can, printed in Italian, English, French and German, identified the contents as '"Artist's Shit", contents 30gr net freshly preserved, produced and tinned in May 1961.' In December 1961 Manzoni wrote in a letter to the artist Ben Vautier: "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." The Merda d'artista, the artist's shit, “dried naturally and canned with no added preservatives” works as 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.
Manzoni understood the creative act as part of the cycle of consumption: as a constant reprocessing, packaging, marketing, consuming, reprocessing, packaging, ad infinitum.