09.06.08

Piero Manzoni


"Critics of modern art will at least applaud the symbolism. The Tate Gallery has paid £22,300 ($61,000) for a work that is, literally, a load of excrement.

The canned faeces of Piero Manzoni, one of Italy's most controversial artists, were bought by the gallery from a sale at Sotheby's."//smh

"Manzoni's Merda d'artista, in its transubstantiation of the dross of defecation into the gold of art, harks back not only to Duchamp's conceptualism but also to his connections with shamanism and alchemy, although Duchamp's ties with these latter ideas have been called into question. The assertion that one's own body waste is art is an extreme example of the notion that anything an artist makes is art."//heyoka

"I also constructed the first " magic base ": as long as any person or any object stayed on this base he, or it, was a work of art."

Piero Manzoni

[Italian Arte Povera Conceptual Artist, 1933-1963]
Piero Manzoni art links
last verified May 28-30, 2008