The Brooklyn Rail

The current exhibit at the Robert Olnick Pavilion of Magazzino Italian Art, of thirteen works by or about Piero Manzoni (1933–63) amounts to a retrospective covering most aspects of the seminal Italian artist’s output from 1956 until his death at twenty nine.

The exhibit includes six of the combines that Manzoni called “acromi,” the Italian plural for colorless or neutral, and that translators into English have imported wholesale as “achromes”; two posthumously executed rooms, the “Stanza fosforoscente,” or “Phosphorescent room,” and the “Stanza pelosa,” or “Hairy room”; four video shorts, in rotation on a monitor, about Manzoni’s art that were produced by an Italian news movie service, largely as gags, in 1959–1961; and a “magic” base, plinth, or pedestal, that transforms anyone who stands on it into a work of art for as long as he or she stays there.

Accompanying the pieces and documentation are three vitrines packed with essays, magazines, pamphlets, gallery invitations, and Manzoni’s posthumous Life and Work, 60 pages of completely transparent plastic. The only period missing, and missed, is the year during which he made symbolic paintings and drawings—the year before he saw Yves Klein’s 1957 Milan exhibit, for Manzoni an epochal event—of eleven identically sized paintings, all monochromes in Klein’s signature and patented shade of blue.

Except for the magic base and the videos about Manzoni’s line drawings, his hard boiled eggs signed with his inked thumbprint before being broken open and eaten, his living statues signed on the base or on the “statue” herself, and his balloons blown up in the presence of models and presented as sculptural portraits or, later, simply as receptacles of the artist’s breath, all the works in the exhibit are achromes, including the “Phosphorescent room,” its walls and ceiling lit at short intervals, and the “Hairy room,” its walls and ceiling covered with synthetic white fur. As the name says, the leading feature of the works is that color external to the materials themselves is absent, and the actual aging colorlessness of the pieces covers a spectrum from white to tan to moon gray and green. Critics speak of Manzoni’s irony, and deadpan assaults on habits of seeing, buying, and devouring are certainly here, but whether his attitude toward art as he understood it was ironic is at least questionable and more reasonably ascribed to those who insist on it. Like Ad Reinhardt, Manzoni in his writings and reported conversation articulated in certain terms his belief in art as art and nothing but, and sixty years on irony seems as little relevant to his work as it is to the Lascaux cave painters’ livestock, game targets, and dinner.

At Magazzino the materials attached to canvas or board or simply framed are plaster, stitched velvet, plush, kaolin and plaster, polystyrene squares, and a small stretch of kaolin treated canvas pleated horizontally. Among the other materials that Manzoni used in the achromes were gesso, cotton wool, rabbit fur, bread rolls, fiberglass, and polystyrene pellets. The pellets occasioned what may have been his single return to externally applied color: for some works he soaked pellets in anhydrous cobalt chloride, a bluish chemical that turns pink when exposed to moisture. This might have been a nod to Klein, who painted in pink as well as blue.

The most obvious feature of the achromes on the walls of the exhibit and most of the others Manzoni made for six feverish years is that they depend on the backing, usually canvas, that they have in common with paintings since art making moved from walls to easels, and Manzoni was clearly aware of this feature and what it suggests about the works’ relationship to the past. Lucio Fontana had been the first Italian artist to attack canvas, with freezingly elegant slashes, rips in the fabric of what he called “spatial concepts,” and Italian artists including Alberto Burri, Mario Schifano, and Enrico Castellani were subverting canvas surfaces in other ways—as were, elsewhere, Klein, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Antoni Tàpies. Like Marcel Duchamp much earlier and peers Robert Smithson and Donald Judd, Manzoni got rid of the painterly frame of reference altogether in many works, including some seen here.

While the carefully chosen pieces at Magazzino give an excellent overview of Manzoni’s prime art making, the two works for which he is best known are absent. The one you read about in the vitrines and on the timeline above the vitrines, if you haven’t heard of it before, is “Merda d’artista,” or “Artist’s shit,” ninety small labeled and signed cans of which Manzoni produced in 1961 and sold at the same price as the equivalent weight in gold when the price of gold was determined by governments and relatively stable instead of the open market and wildly fluctuating. Not that it matters: current auction prices for these cans have nothing to do with the price of gold. The piece that couldn’t be here is “Socle du monde,” or “Base of the world,” a metal box inscribed with the title, Manzoni’s name, the phrase “Hommage à Galileo,” in French like the title, and installed upside down in a field in Denmark, also in 1961. You can read about this piece at Magazzino too. “Socle du monde” makes even Giacometti’s concern with his figures’ bases seem hesitant, tentative. Think of it! Piero Manzoni turns a box upside down in 1961 and claims it’s the base upon which the entire spinning world, a work of art, rests. We’re sitting, standing, or walking around on it now.